Bacon & Nature
I turned seventy on the first of June, and a couple weeks later I played a summer gig in Pennsylvania with the family band.
It used to be a joke, the family-band thing, back when we’d bring instruments to family gatherings and engage in some not-bad singing. But although we had adequate talent, we didn’t have a name, and you can’t really have a band without a name. Then, during one summer gathering at my Mom’s place in Springdale, Utah, one of my sisters came downstairs belatedly one morning and asked what we were planning to do that day. When Mom answered that after breakfast we were going on a hike, my sister replied, “Ah, my two favorite things: bacon and nature.” We realized, in the mirth of that moment, that our band finally had a name.
Mom passed right before Christmas, this past year, and her eight children agreed that it wasn’t a good time to gather in snowy Pennsylvania, especially after the cemetery told us that they couldn’t possibly dig a hole until it thawed in a few months. So we made plans to assemble in June, there in Downingtown, with cousins I hadn’t seen since we buried my father there twenty-five summers ago.
Mom had wanted music at Dad’s internment, and my father’s Irish half had always thrilled at bagpipes, so she hired a piper. It was hot that day, and when the musician asked if she had a tune in mind, she answered that he could play anything other than “Amazing Grace.” Mom had played the organ in church throughout my childhood, and it’s the only hymn I remember her ever not liking. Of course, when the homemade box containing Dad’s ashes was lowered into the ground, the piper played the one hymn Mom couldn’t stand.
And so it came to pass that, rather than hiring another stranger to play at the graveside, Bacon & Nature would perform. We settled on an old-time tune with Irish roots that dated back to the Civil War, “Coleman’s March.” I practiced the piece for six weeks prior to heading to Pennsylvania, and worked out a flat-picking chorus just in case my sister thought it might work. We ended up with two guitars and a mandolin, several instruments short of our full marching complement, one of the guitars being my old Martin 000-15m, which had been blessed with new strings for the occasion. After the march, a sister passed daisies out to each gathered mourner, and we all blessed the grave by dropping in a petal. After the ashes were interred, we concluded acapella with a hymn that entreats, “All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you.” The harmony was beautiful, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to sing that song again.
My wife and I returned home the following day. While we were away my publisher had sent along the copy edits to my next book, Reading Nature, which is the type of book a Bacon & Nature band member should write. It felt good, once back on our island, to lay the guitar aside, put on my broad-brimmed editing hat, and immerse myself in prose. For an academic, even for an emeritus member of the faculty, this is what summers are meant for.
