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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching ...

eyes wide (the C chord)

 


V is at that age, that always Spring when every door opens with a gentle pull. I am in the kitchen late on a Saturday night with a guitar out, curious if she will sing along with me. But she does me one better, running to the bedroom and coming back with her ukulele. She wants to know where DO and FA are, fretting various notes and asking me quickly what their names are. I try to catch up with her, show her where to put her thumb, how to push down on the string with the tip of her finger not the side. She does and somehow there is a C chord bouncing around the little room.

Plates are pushed back. I play a two-chord song, C and F but tell her to hang out on the C. I tap my foot, count us in and then I sing with it. As she strums and understands we are playing together her eyes grow wide. I think she does not blink for a full three minutes, coming to this outrageous understanding that she is playing a song with me, right there, with words she knows, a melody she can hum later as she brushes her teeth and heads into sleep. This chord, it will be there tomorrow, waiting for her, and for the rest of her life this C chord will be familiar, engineered right from this moment we shared, beside the messy remnants of dinner, a half glass of wine next to me, and my black guitar with the white pick guard, the trees moving in the wind outside the windows.


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