Kenny and I were getting ready to go down to the Walnut Valley Festival - a bluegrass festival in Winfield, Kansas near the southern border. I took my 5 year old daughter to Target where every TV showed those same horrific images over and over again. We waited in line at the gas pump, not knowing if we should even venture 3 hours away when airplanes were falling out of the sky.
Turns out Winfield was the best place we could've gone.
Some performers couldn't make it. Others drove all night from all over the country to get to a place where there was only the music and the stars.
I had my notebook with me and 2 days later I took it out into the night and wrote while I listened. This is what I said:
I am sitting shielded from the stars under a yellow and white canvas tent with a mandolin singing next to me. I am 1000 miles from New York City, from hijackers smuggling knives onto an airplane, from a "state of war." I don't know if there will be a war when the music stops. I don't know if we'll ever be here again. I don't know what kind of world my daughter will know tomorrow.
But tonight I know the quivering voices singing in harmony and the wailing mandolin. I know the music that reaches out and touches my chest like a mother soothing a sick child. "I'm hungry I'm tired I'm thirsty I'm sick." That's what they're singing as a cool breeze breezes through and the crickets and cicadas try to keep up behind them.
I'm hungry I'm tired I'm thirsty I'm sick. That's how I came to Winfield. That's how I walked out of the camper away from the TV, away from Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Special Report, Breaking News, Nightline. I walked away from billowing smoke clouds, crumpled steel - enough to build 6 Eiffel Towers. I walked in the night past cicadas and crickets, through the breeze across the grass in bare feet under the stars to a shelter. I walked like a sick child called home.
I came to the music.
I'm not with a Boeing 767 slamming into the country's largest tower. Twice. I'm with the train in the night and the sighing dobro. I'm with the blonde haired girl singing, "Are you also alone with a memory now that I am gone? Are you missing me?" My soul is soothed as she sings over the train that roars past.
And I don't know what to do with these two worlds.
In one, we are all together, sitting close even though they sing, "Someone has taken you from me." And the music is a thread running through us all, stitching us together tightly.
And in the other, there is no music.
Tomorrow, I'll be back in that world. But tonight (I'm hungry I'm tired I'm thirsty I'm sick) we are together in the breeze, in the music, the train, the crickets, and the stars.