The Boy Who Disappeared Clouds
If I Had a Pair of Wings: Jamaican Doo Wop, Vol. Purchasable with gift card. Where Have We Gone? Fill This Room Fear at 3am Every Drop of the Sea The Boy Who Spoke Clouds debut album was recorded in at a beach house over a four month period without release in mind. All the songs were recorded via the microphone of a Sony handycam video HI8 into a cheap soundcard.
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Everything from flamenco handclaps, percussive chanting, foot stomping and chopsticks hitting guitars were incorporated, sometimes in the hope of mimicking a sound Adam had no means of producing conventionally, and sometimes, trying the ridiculous in an attempt to dispel self conscious methods of music production and simultaneously to push himself out of his regular habits and musical clicks.
These recordings began as explorations outside of my usual musical vernacular. They very quickly became something intensely personal for me. The songs are like little invocations, prayers to not knowing.
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Female voice on 'Ending' by Jenny Jo Oakley. She had met her husband when she arrived at the university to take an instructor position in the history department, her first teaching job.
These were the war years, and as men were in short supply, the department was obliged to make do with whoever was available. She settled into her rented room and the routine of classes and grading papers and loneliness. The war hung over everything, the excitement and dread of what happened in those unimaginable places half a world away, where bombs fell and armies marched and there were so many dead that they too were a kind of army. The war was a constant, solemn reminder of the many things larger and more important than any one person, certainly more important than yourself and your own silly problems.
The history department had her teaching a patchwork of courses: She was on shaky ground with everything but the American, and kept waiting for her students to find her out and denounce her as a fraud. She was only a couple of years older than they were, and conscious of her lack of authority and credentials.
But the students mostly women, a few men either unable to enlist or waiting to be conscripted were too distracted by the hysteria and romance of wartime to pay her much mind. They sat politely enough in class and turned in their blue exam booklets filled with haphazardly written answers. It was her job to hold them accountable and to insist on standards of knowledge and scholarship, but it was difficult to be very severe with them.
The Boy Who Spoke Clouds
History was something that had already happened, and life, their lives, were in the anxious now. Most of the girls had boyfriends in the service, or at least wrote letters to someone away at war. The boyfriends wrote letters back from the places they were not allowed to identify. The girls followed the war in newsreels and radio broadcasts and looked at names on maps and pieced together a good notion of where the boyfriends were.
There was an urgency to it all. Some of these romances ended badly, tragically. The whole country was at war. The war effort involved not just the obvious, the weapons and implements of war, the planes and bombs and tanks and trucks, but the manufacture of canvas for tents and for the webbing that was used for holding canteens, wood pulp for paper, fine optometry lenses for binoculars and scopes, leather for shoes, feed for animals, copper for electrical switches, great quantities of wire, of cable, of cement. All manner of commodities and substances were needed, scrap metal, rubber, aluminum, tin foil, cooking grease, all of it elevated and consecrated by the solemn necessity of war.
Everyone was to do their part. People trained themselves to recognize the shapes of enemy aircraft overhead. They saved up to buy war bonds. The boyfriends came home on leave wearing their uniforms. The girls left school to marry them and wait out the war at one or another army or naval base. Who would care, at such a time, about the Golden Age of Exploration?
And yet history shifted underneath your feet, she knew that. The present was a dizzy perch that every so often began to spin and slide. You held on to your life with both hands, you told yourself to pay attention to this moment, the here and now. But one minute passed into the next, and then the next, and at some point you looked back and everything was over and people called it history.
Anyway, at that moment in the here and now which had in fact long since passed , she needed to slip into the shared bathroom and wash out her underwear in the sink with the bar of yellow soap that was provided. Then carry the bundle, wrapped in a dripping towel, back to her room, where she would hang it over the radiator to stiffen and dry. There were times you wished that history would just go ahead and swallow you down. When her father died it had not been unexpected, exactly—he was by then a very old man—and it had gone quickly.
A collapse at home, a trip to the hospital, his death the following day. Everyone should be so fortunate. The choices presented to you only gave you the illusion that anything made much of a difference. Was it a terrible thing to wish that it could all be over? Like everything else here, the garden had been neglected. Once her parents had reached a certain age, the daughter had made a project of coming over to help with it. But just as she had uselessly nagged and prodded them about keeping the house up, her efforts with the garden had never been enough.
Now she was going to have to hire someone, a landscaper or a maintenance company, to come and weed and cut things back and restore order. The original beds and borders were choked with honeysuckle bushes and all manner of stalky and creeping weeds. You could lie on the grass beneath the arbor and look up at the grape clusters and the blue sky between the sifting leaves and feel as if summer would never end. She and her brother had been greedy and impatient for the grapes to ripen and had always picked some of them too soon, when they were thin and sour.
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When the fruit turned heavy and purple-red, they had raced the birds and wasps to get to it. The grapes were sun-warmed and slightly bruised and she had stained her chin with the sticky juice. She had never tasted any grapes that were as good since. She supposed she could get someone to prop the arbor back up and build new supports, if she decided it was worth it.
The wild roses still bloomed. The lilies and the columbine had disappeared. A hydrangea had found a place it liked and had overgrown the ferns. Two huge weeping cedars stood at the far end of the lot, their shade black and dense. They would have to come down or at least be trimmed. Any grass that remained had turned thin and untidy. The lilacs needed pruning and this was the time to do it, right after they had finished blooming.
It felt good to be outside, doing something vigorous and physical. Encouraged, she kept going, cutting back the nuisance growth, the trees of heaven and honeysuckle bushes that had taken root everywhere. They would have to be entirely dug up, but it was a start. She found a square-bladed spade and turned over the dirt in the place where she remembered her mother planting annuals.
She might get some flats of marigolds or verbena to make the yard look less forlorn.
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl | Book by Jean Thompson | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster
Less like the neighborhood haunted house. The daughter was no longer young herself. A year or two past fifty. Her own children now grown. When your parents died, you lost your childhood, or at least the best witnesses to it. More and more she had difficulty not just remembering herself as a child—that girl with the dark bangs cut straight across her forehead, standing crookedly in all the pictures—but believing that she had been such a child, had not always been a fully formed adult, with opinions and a credit rating and a hundred distracted thoughts.
She swept the walkways and put the garden tools away and went back inside. It was time for the home care aide to leave and there was a space of time before the next one arrived. Assuming that she in fact arrived. Sometimes there were lapses. Once this new aide was here, she could make a trip back to her own house.
Her husband, Gabe, had not been entirely understanding about her extended absence, the disruption of essentials such as meals and clean laundry. The aide who was leaving went through the checklist of what had been done and would need to be done and wished her a good evening. The daughter settled into a chair with a magazine. There was nothing else to do but wait and then wait some more. She kept expecting grief to seize her and make her weep, or some other normal reaction, but so far there was only exhaustion.
The hospice service had a grief counselor who was available to family members after a death.
A small fan blew across the foot of the bed, ruffling the sheets. It was the only noise in the quiet, quiet room. Discoloration was one of the signs that might mean the end was at hand. Her mother had always been one to keep a conversation going. She had a quick mind and a gift for easy speech. Her mother had been silent only when she was unhappy or angry. So that now the silence made her daughter anxious, as if something must be set right. I hope we made you happy.
She was embarrassed to have spoken. Usually she talked about normal, everyday things, like what her children were doing, or she read the less depressing newspaper headlines aloud. The home care aide was half an hour late, but at least she came. The daughter spent some time going over what was needed.
She said she would be back later this evening, after she had fixed dinner for her husband. The aide appeared to simultaneously listen and ignore her. There was always a logical, unimpeachable reason the aide gave as to why her chores were not completed, and the daughter suspected she prowled the house snooping into things when left alone.
I see it all the time. Yes, she was imagining, or projecting, all that. The woman was simply disagreeable. But she was better than nothing, and if you called the agency to complain, that was probably what you would get instead: Anyway, there would be an end to everything soon enough.
The daughter, in a hurry as always these days, drove to her own house. It was a beautiful mild evening, with the trees just now coming into full leaf and the new grass looking cool and shadowy. She took a deep breath to steady herself and fill herself with calm and make way for the tasks that would come next. She was tired of managing, coping, arranging, bearing up well. Maybe that was what real grief did, prostrated you, rendered you incapable of being so idiotically useful.
Just as she reached the intersection of one of the downtown streets, she happened to look to one side and see a man locking the front door of an auto parts shop, closing up for the day.
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A tall man, thin, with iron-gray hair. She only saw him from behind for a moment, she had not seen him for more than twenty-five years, but she had no doubt who it was. She drove on without stopping.