The Known Universe

Suffering a bit of blogger’s block, I’m afraid, otherwise I’d tell you about laying down on a flatbed scanner to get an old-lady bone density test to see if last years bone breaking bonanza had anything to do with osteoporosis. (One of a million potential side effects from diabetes.) I haven’t gotten the results yet, but if it turns out that my bones are brittle, I may have to reconsider getting back on the horse. We’ll see. In the meantime, physical therapy has been kicking my ass with one pound weights.

Speaking of diabetes, this Valentine’s Day will be my 30 year anniversary with the disease. Not quite sure how to celebrate. Perhaps with a giant piece of cake.

I also wanted to write about not one, but two accordion players on the subway platforms. The first, a young woman at the Bedford Avenue stop in Brooklyn was playing the song Deborah sang in the demo I posted last week. It was a funny coincidence, but not as much of a coincidence as seeing a second accordion player when I got off the train at Untion Square in Manhattan. The players were both equally talented as far as I could tell, but the skinny guy in Union Square had the woman beat by a mile in terms of showmanship. He was wearing a knight’s helmet made of cardboard and painted silver, with just a small slit for his eyes. He sat in a chair, rocking-out with angular movements, kicking his legs as if he was being mildly shocked now and then while playing the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Truly awesome.

Hm. Maybe I’m beginning coming through my blogger’s block after all. I guess it’s true:

Ain’t nothin’ to it but to do it.

Deborah has quite a number of juicy stories from her illustrious past that she keeps tucked away in her back pocket. Only when the planets are perfectly aligned does she take them out and share them with me. If I get greedy and ask for too many details, or ask her to repeat a particularly interesting part of the story, she clams up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she says.

And it’s not just the scandalous stories she likes to keep hidden. For instance, we’d been living together for three years or more before I found out about a three song demo that she recorded while living in Los Angeles in the mid-nineties.

“Do you have a copy of it somewhere?”

Deborah moved around a lot in her youth, often under less than ideal circumstances, and she hasn’t always been able to hang onto things.

“Somewhere,” she said.

“Let’s find it, I want to hear it.”

“No.”

“Aw, c’mon.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

When I finally convinced her to let me hear it, I immediately asked if I could post a song or two.

“I knew you were going to ask me that,” she said.

A year or two later, and here we are: