Can this newsletter write itself as I cry into my palms? While I’m away, tending to the parts of life that demand faster service, I envision The Good Enough Weekly tapping her toes, checking her watch. I’m late, but not gone.

After eleven years as a freelance writer, I’ve a grim determination, an obsession, really, to not let the realities of capitalism squash any project without an immediate payday. As exciting deadlines mount, it’s still a frequent daydream to slip through time and find a single free day. But, there will never be a better time to write than now. I could enumerate the reasons why right now is so shitty, but you all already know. I know. So I cry, scream in a car alone, or take a long walk leaving friends minutes-long voice memos. And I turn to my angels of writing. Or they find me and I follow them back to the page. This time, it was Patti Smith and then the Indigo Girls who rang the bell loud and long enough to fill me with hope.

I read Bread of Angels by Patti and at times had to put it down I was so moved. Patti has been in my listening life since childhood, most likely because of her collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, my mom’s favorite musician. Bruce and Patti filled my youthful soundtrack, somber and tough and with hearts as big as the moon. “Because the Night” is my earliest favorite of hers, and then my next is her favorite advice from William S. Burroughs: “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.”

What I didn’t know about Patti was that she left public life when she was still rising, to make a private life with her husband. And it was only after the deaths of her husband and her brother, facing economic reality and I think a desire for her artistic community, that she returned to releasing music and performing. My heart broke for her. I wished the life she wanted lasted longer, and, also, am grateful for the art she gave in this second turn of her career.

Yesterday, I went to the mountains. My kids are on spring break and my brother and I took them for a short hike. Watching my young ones explore reminded me of how magical I found rocks and broken glass and tree bark decades ago. Anything could be under rock or behind a tree: A fairy, a bear, a jewel.

Looking at photos from the hike, my mind, with no conscious direction, sang a line from a song I’d forgotten: “I went to the mountains… I drank from the fountains.” I searched briefly and found it was a fragment of “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls. Reading the lyrics, tears again, and I was a child listening to my parents’ CD, new meaning crashing into my adult self.

There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for something definitive
Closer I am to fine
Closer I am to fine

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