Changes

Changes

 A drop of rain can take a while to soak deep enough into the thirsty ground of summer to touch the lives that can carry it back to where it came from. Words can be a little like that too.

One evening, half a lifetime ago, my friend Buck and I were drinking tequila in the kitchen. He was asking me about a song I was writing, one that was shaping up to be about what horsemen call a soft feel – a strong but invisible two way relationship that can exist between a human and a horse. When I told him I was needing some powerful words for the chorus Buck leveled his eyes at me.

“Ray gave me some words that sure helped me when I needed it the most. Bill Dorrance gave them to him; maybe I can just pass them on to you.”

By Ray he meant Ray Hunt, the man who brought the practice of what has been called natural horsemanship out to the world; Tom Dorrance was the man who showed it to Ray. Buck thought for a minute and then gave me a few one liners that he had been given by those two legends of western horsemanship. I thought about his words for a while, shaped them up a little, and fit them into a place where a song called Changes could be born. That was thirty years ago. Buck went on to become the horse whisperer. I went on to become me. 

Time trotted out and brought me more than my share of the good life. I was working a job that seemed to fit me, riding my horses when I could, and playing my own music for some people who seemed to understand it. Two things I wished for, though, were to be able to play smooth jazz on my fiddle and to be able to dance with my horses the way Buck did with his. One day an invitation to fulfill wish number one came ringing in on the other end of my telephone.

“Let’s just do it, man. Pick your date – middle of June or middle of July.” 

Be careful what you wish for. It was Erik, a young-old friend whose musical head and hands were legally married to each other. For several years we had talked about the possibility of me coming up to Billings to play jazz with him and his trio; now he was telling me it was time to get it done.

“Uh….”, I stammered, ”I don’t know. How about the middle of June?”. 

I wasn’t too sure about the whole deal; after all, getting the chance to fly and being able to fly are two entirely different wings of the same bird. Nonetheless, with the slim confidence given to me by the buffer of time and the blindness of distance I accepted his challenge. 

“Right on dude! See you in a couple months. This is gonna be epic!”, Erik replied. He was pumped. Erik was always pumped. 

He’d said a couple of months. Those words sort of dulled the enormity of what I had just committed myself to – learning to sing and play thirty jazz songs on the fiddle would be no small task. The keys would be mysterious and the arrangements would test my memory. I had no doubt that those songs could live in my heart; I just wasn’t so sure I could get them into my fingers. 

I went to work in the mornings with my fiddle, trying to play the Chet Baker trumpet licks I loved so much. Memorizing his iconic solos proved to be harder than I thought it would be and some of the flat keys he played in were pretty alien to me. Progress was not what you’d want to call expedient. 

When I’d get tired of my fiddle task – and it was real easy to get tired of – I’d take a break and confront wish number two where it waited silently, shouting to me from out in the corral. His name was Doc and he was a beautiful-highly-bred quarter horse colt with limitless potential. I hadn’t started a new horse in over ten years but I was trying my best to get him going, to make my ideas become his ideas. After a while, even though I couldn’t see it at the time, those ideas had become all about me forcing him to accept fear. He learned that lesson well – so well in fact that he turned that same fear back on me. As the weeks rolled by we’d become two scared prizefighters circling each other in the round pen wanting to be friends but not quite knowing how to get it done. 

My failed search for harmony between hands and horse, fiddle and fingers, had begun to rule my life. The worse the results got in either one of my projects, the harder I’d push them. The harder I’d push them, the farther away they’d get. Frustration fiddled while terror rode a dark horse.

One night the answer to both of my troubles came to me on the open wings of sleep when I got a new look at the old words Buck had given to me so long ago.

 

Don’t ask for more than you can get, the way it is today

Fix it up, let it happen, then get out of the way

Don’t try to get down to the good by going to the bad

You’ve got to give something you never gave to get something you never had

 

Funny how it took half a life and a silent room for those words to find me. The first thing I did the next morning was to lighten up my attack on the fiddle. I thought of my song and found a way to ask for my notes rather than order my hands to grab them. Before long it felt like I was a little more out of the way than in the way of what I was trying to do.

When I took a break I headed out to the corral where Doc was standing in the corner watching, waiting. I walked through the gate, eased over towards him and asked him to make some circles until he was ready to join me. When he settled I talked to him for a little while, asked him a few questions with my hands and listened closely to his answers. Our conversation took me back to a place I hadn’t been in for a long time, a place that was at once immeasurably far and impossibly close. It was the place where the changes were. When he told me he was ready I swung up on his back and together we slipped away inside the soft-green hills of summer. 

Sometimes you write the song; sometimes the song comes back and writes you.