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Once upon a time there were these two guys, Jeff and Gary, who worked for a safety equipment company run by Gary’s dad, and sometimes after work or at lunch Jeff would break out his guitar and a few songbooks

And they would sing Beatles songs or Tom Petty or Bob Welch or The Who or some of Jeff’s original songs or Jeff’s brother Danny’s stuff (“Cord Whippin Mama” was a real saga)

And then one day in 1983 Jeff suggested that Gary buy a guitar and a little Gorilla amp

And he did and some more songbooks too like Great Songs of the 60s and Jackson Browne and another bigger Beatles book and Bob Dylan

So they played stuff and then Marty K came back to town and he had what he called a Good Smellin Bad Guitar and he joined in

And the fledgling band was christened The Snot Dogs and Marty who couldn’t always be there took to saying “We are The Snot Dogs/The Snot Dogs are we/Sometimes there’s two/And sometimes there’s three”

And fellow GHS alumni Charlie and George got the word from Marty and there started to be get-togethers mostly in Jeff’s living room

And Marty went off to law school and before long fellow law school students Karen, who played fiddle, and Vicki, who played flute, started coming to the sessions

And one fateful night at Jeff’s the heavily pregnant audience member Joni, who was Gary’s wife at the time, let Gary know between songs that she had felt something that may have been a contraction

So Joni and Gary left to give birth to their daughter while the band played on

For many years.

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My friend from midstate California, Bob Kabchef, grows things like pomegranates and walnuts and tomatoes, and every so often he shares his harvests with some of his friends. Yesterday a heavy box packed and shipped by him landed in the “parcel locker” of my apartment complex. I have since divested two pomegranates of their seeds, putting some of them in my morning oatmeal. Here’s a photo of the remaining seeds, with a little pom atop them for contrast and scale:

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My late, much-missed friend Karen Wilkinson often hosted musical evenings for our living-foom band The Snot Dogs. Usually the evening included pizza from locally heroic Spanato’s, plus a salad of Karen’s own making which included pomegranate seeds–the ingredient that made the salad extra-special. So this morning I called fellow band member Martin Klass (about whom more in my blog posts “Foom-Bozzle-Wozzle” et sequelae) and told him I’d gotten some pomegranates; would he like one?

“I would love one,” he said. “You know, because of Miss Karen.”

I knew. So tomorrow I’ll deliver him one. And I’ll also ask our piano player Katie Wood, who loved Karen as well.

Friendship and Love are transmitted many ways, Friends.

How does an Inkster draw Music without relying on easy props like musical instruments or famous musicians? The Inkster simply asks, “What does Music Look like?” and draws what he sees in his mind.

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This page is dedicated to my deceased friend Karen Wilkinson, who vigorously and unforgettably fiddled her way through songs like “Angel from Montgomery” and “Queen of the Roller Derby.” She made a different kind of music for the National Public Defender’s Office, writing policy and defending the downtrodden. She was called “A light in the darkness” by one Guantanamo inmate.

Today is the 61st birthday of the late Karen Wilkinson, whom some of us, Marty K in particular, called “Miss Karen.”

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I miss Miss Karen. When I think of her it is a jumble of good memories. When she played her violin in my workshop as a payment in kind for something I’d done for her, the last song was “Just My Imagination” by the Temptations. When she danced with me on the balcony of Charlie and Susie’s cabin in Colorado, I was so clumsy I murmured “You’re gonna have to lead” in her ear. When her basset hound Oliver got excited, Karen laughed with her tongue between her teeth. She often called him Ollie Baba. When she lived near 7th Street and Orangewood she had an orange tree and a pecan tree in her back yard, and would invite her friends to pick when things were ripe. When she threw a Jamaican-themed party for me for my 46th birthday, she cooked jerk chicken in that back yard.

She has been gone for the better part of two years. Life is not quite the same without her. Sometimes, though, it seems like she is here, watching, smiling–waiting.

A week ago my dear and wonderful friend of more than twenty-four years, Karen Wilkinson, was alive and well. Friday she was stricken and felled by a brain aneurysm. Monday they removed life support and, I infer, harvested what organs of hers they could use.

While she was still not technically dead, I tried feebly to do creative things. Here’s what I did on Sunday the 4th:

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The would-be poem seems finished but is not. After Karen died, I tried again, and wrote what I intend to read at the Caffeine Corridor poetry event tomorrow night:

fiddle away over and out

there was this girl in a jeans skirt in the spring of 1990
librarian glasses and face and demeanor like talia shire in rocky
but with a violin that spoke for her
boldly stepping into the sound of the livingroom band she’d just joined
and the girl and her fiddle turned three needy guitars into contrapuntal gold
at times trumping them with platinum

years later “roller derby queen” by jim croce reached new heights
when during the instrumental the sound crescendoed
and the fiddle did a trick of stringzipping into the stratosphere
followed by a beat of complete and magic silence
followed by the resumption of the raucous rollicking sound

the girl and her fiddle went with her piano-playing pal to jazz camp
and they grinned and grinned on their return

elsewhere in 2007
much of the band went to a cabin near grand lake colorado
played and played and sang and danced and snored and hiked and played and played
the promised moose never showed but the music flowed and made all all right
and the fiddler bent and swayed with that music and folded her excellence into it

her face focused transcendence
her rosined bow a dervish

sometimes she’d take the fiddle away from her chin and sing
because she wanted to hold voice-hands with the rest of us

and through a miracle of wishful thinking and overdub
i hear her voice and fiddle now together