Prodigal Song

I got it bad for The Prodigal Son. Some women are attracted to good guys. Some chicks dig bad guys. I love bad-guys-turned-good.

The Prodigal Son by Pierre-Cecile Puvis de Chavannes

Listen, always, with this caveat: words, and their connotations, are relative. The gander ain't always turned on by the same things as the goose.

While many women in my peer-group (middle-age, middle-class, Middle-America-living white women) seem drawn to a spouse with a college degree, a professional job, a big savings account  coupled with little personal baggage, I am not. These are the good guys. The kind of guys you can rely on for material wealth and emotional stability.

These are not my type of guys.

I've always been attracted to the bad-guys-turned-good.

Who are the bad guys?

Some chicks gush over the baddest guys out there. These guys fuck the rules. These guys put the dick in unpredictability. Whether nerdy Sherlocks, jock-boys, or socks-on-cocks rock stars, these guys leave you crying out for more. These guys leave you, never ever bored.

These are not my type of guys.

I love the Prodigal Son. The son who leaves his family home, searching for riches and fame, breaking the hearts of endless bitches, then finally, fed up with the game, returning, begging forgiveness, full of repentance. Hopeful for a welcome arm around the shoulders, an extended hand, a kiss on the knee. It'll all be better now that you're home, son. Let's gather around the fire. Let's feast on the best food in our pantry. Let's drink our best wine. Let's sit together and sing, as a family, the song of the Prodigal Son.

That's my type of guy.

Or chick. I am a bleeding-heart sapiosexual, after all. My sexual desires skew intellect and emotional vulnerability no matter their sexual orientation or gender identity. I happened to marry a man, so often I'm mistaken for a cis-gender heterosexual. It awards me a position to speak freely of things my LGBTQ friends must hold inside. I am lucky for that. I am lucky in many ways. I'm lucky to have Will. I knew I'd married the right guy when Will burst into tears at the end of the movie, "The Fisher King."



The Prodigal Son gives me a major lady boner, for sure. I also gravitate toward prodigal sons and daughters as friends. Anyone who has ever been out into the wilderness and returned, admitted defeat, asked for help, and accepted grace into their heart is my friend.

Here are three such friends, Jay, Nancy, and Jacob Cantrell.

Our dear friends, The Cantrells. From left to right are husband and wife, Jay and Pastor Nancy, and their son JJ. If you're looking for some uplifting gospel music, check out the video I posted above.

Our family has been intertwined with the Cantrells for longer than I’ve been a member of the Carleton Clan. My husband Will has been jamming with JJ since they were about fourteen. Will's mom, Pam Davis Carleton, first met Jay and Nancy Cantrell in the 1990s when, along with her dad and mom, Bill and Sadie Davis, she became a member of HABOT (Heart of America Bluegrass and Old-Time Music,) a Kansas City-based organization of local musicians.

The first time I met Jay and Nancy was in the fall of 2003, if memory serves, when Will introduced us in the campground at the Walnut Valley Festival, in Winfield, KS. They were sitting around a campfire with Will’s mom and dad and a few other musician friends--guitars, mandolins, banjos and other acoustic stringed instruments in hand--going round the circle taking turns leading everyone in song. 

It was amazing. What a way to feel connected to our fellow humans, to gather in a circle and sing together.

I grew up in a much more bourgeois household. We did not go camping. We did not gather in song. My parents were both accountants. The most outdoorsy thing they ever did was go golfing. I was unaccustomed to singing in front of others, other than that time I wore a fancy dress with poofy sleeves and wobbled around in high heels at my sister Jenny’s wedding, or in a "Robbing Hood costume for our sexist sixth grade musical, It Takes a Wizard.

image source (my red arrow directed toward "Robbing Hood")

screenshot source (my highlights emphasizing sexism in yellow)

Singing was more about giving a performance and less about being part of a circle sing-along. 

I never learned how to play an instrument or read music. My mom and my older siblings taught me nursery rhymes, but once I “grew out of it” we stopped singing those songs. Thankfully, my mom was a quirky housewife during my formative years. I grew up listening to her play Queen’s A Night at the Opera on her portable eight-track player while cleaning the house, or the soundtrack to the film The Way We Were, featuring Barbra Streisand, while crafting on the couch. Every now and then she’d even break out Sonny Lester's How to Belly Dance for Your Husband album and practice in the living room. 

Image source

Needless to say, Mom’s eclectic taste in music influenced me greatly.

Mom actually met my dad because of music. Around 1966, when Mom first left her abusive first husband, at just 28-years old with four kids ages 3-8, she was looking for an outlet for her adult social needs. My paternal Aunt Donna, whom Mom knew through her first husband, who she as friends with Donna’s husband at the time, invited Mom to join her woman’s singing group called Sweet Adelines. From there, Aunt Donna and Mom became good friends. A couple years later, when Aunt Donna’s older brother, my dad, Glen Burton asked his sister if she knew of any single ladies he could date—he was going through a divorce from his own first wife—Aunt Donna suggested he call up Beverly, my mom. A year-and-a-half later, they married. A year after that, I was born.

https://sweetadelines.com/

My older siblings were all pop music fans. From the year I was born in 1970 to 1977 when we moved from St. Joe to Kansas City, I don’t think a day passed that I didn’t hear songs by artists such as Jim Croce and Elton John  playing on St. Joe’s Top-49 radio station, KKJO either on my big brothers’ and sisters’ bedroom radios or in my mom’s car. One of my earliest memories is standing in the back seat of Mom’s car (what seatbelts? This was the 70s) belting out my favorite song at the time, Helen Reddy’s “Delta Dawn.” 

My dad was a huge Big Band swing-era music fan. When I was a teen and he was nearing retirement, I’d wake up on Sunday mornings to the sounds of Dad playing his Glenn Miller and Count Basie albums while making biscuits and gravy. As a flexitarian, I’ve always hated biscuits and gravy. Why would you ruin a perfectly good biscuit by ladling greasy ground pig onto something that obviously pairs much better with butter and honey? I used to hate Sunday mornings as a teenager. Bleck. That smell.

But the sound? The rustling pots and pans, the sizzling sausage, the clarinets and sultry singers. I loved that part of Sunday mornings.

We weren't big church goers. We went to Wyatt Park Christian Church for a few years until we moved away when I was six. We joined Park Hill Presbyterian Church when I was twelve, but we moved again that same year and pretty much gave up physically going to church.

Off and on over the years, I've gone to church, all sorts of mostly protestant Christian denominations. Unity. Metropolitan Community Church. Bethel AME. Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist. Grace Covenant Presbyterian. The Foundry. Weston Community Church of the Nazarene.

This final church on the list is the latest one I've attended. I went a few weeks ago with my family--husband Will, daughter Kat, and mother-in-law Pam--right before our local health departments shut down all in-person gatherings of 10 or more people. Since then, I've been attending virtual church in my living room. I have to say, I like it better than church IRL. I don't have to wear a bra. Or pants. And I can watch anytime I feel like it because it's on YouTube.

Here's the latest sermon from Pastor Nancy. View it on your own time.

Here's a clip of The Cantrell's Sing-along on this Easter Sunday. The day of new beginnings.



I've written in the past about our friend JJ. You can read it here, if you like. In that post, I say, "JJ is no longer our friend." That is no longer the truth. Hallelujah, Jesus! Our friendship with JJ has been renewed. We have forgiven, and we have been forgiven.

JJ--like my husband, like myself--sings the prodigal songs. Prodigal songs make the best sing-alongs.

It's not my story to tell, but one of the things I love the most about JJ Cantrell is that he eschews his personal beliefs for the greater good. He might be a nonbeliever, but he's still at his mother and father's side when they call upon him to sing along to the Prodigal Song.

Now What? Rest In Peace, John Prine, Scott Carleton, and Pat Kerner

John Prine image source

“Prine’s stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” --Bob Dylan, NYT obituary

"After graduating from high school, he worked for the Post Office...In and around his hometown, composing songs in his head. 'I always likened the mail route to a library with no books,' he wrote on his website. 'I passed the time each day making up these little ditties.'" --NYT obituary

“I guess what I always found funny was the human condition,” he told the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph in 2013. “There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents.” --NYT obituary

“Sometimes, the best [songs] come together at the exact same time, and it takes about as long to write it as it does to sing it...They come along like a dream or something, and you just got to hurry up and respond to it, because if you mess around, the song is liable to pass you by.”  --NYT obituary

Rest in peace, John Prine.

Rest in peace, Scott Carleton.

Rest in peace, Patrick Kerner. 

I first heard about John Prine when I was my brother Pat’s caregiver. Caregiver's a loaded word. All my brother needed from me in the last few months of his life was to keep him comfy, which is a euphemism for making sure he had enough booze to remain loaded. That, and to keep him company so he wouldn't get too lonely. 

His fiancee, Sharon, had died of alcoholic-induced liver failure just a few weeks before Pat was diagnosed with the exact same thing, at age forty-nine. During the four months I cared for my brother, I turned forty. Too young for such shit. But we were used to it. We both grew up way too quick.

Eventually I could no longer care for him. I had a full-time job. I was the mom to a four-year-old. My husband saw how the emotional toll of caring for my brother was wearing me out. Pat went on hospice and moved in with our older brother, Jay, who cared for Pat until he died peacefully in his sleep on January 14, 2011. I got to help Pat smoke his last cigarette, a Camel unfiltered. 

Camel Unfiltered ad, 1974. Source.

Our last words to each other were this: 

"I love you."

When I was Pat's end-of-life primary caregiver, he'd occasionally ask me to drive him to his doctor’s appointments and pick him up some food, but mostly we just talked. My brother and I had a weird relationship. We were both, in our own way, the black sheep of Mom's flock of five lambs. Mom used to say, "You and Pat were both the best babies and the worst teenagers. Jay, Kitty, and Jenny were more of a handful when they were young, but relatively easy teenagers. But you and Pat were the opposite. So easy when you were young. Then you hit your teen years and watch out!" 

Pat was no saint. He hurt me badly when I was very little. He also, many more times than he ever hurt me, supported me in a way most people don't understand. We related to each other. I could talk to Pat easily about things I couldn't talk about with anyone else in our family without them trying to change the subject to something more pleasant. I don't blame them. It's hard to always wallow in shit.

I never could talk to Pat while he was alive about the horrible secret we kept. After he left this world, it suddenly became easy to talk to him about it. He's apologized. He's repented. I've forgiven him. He still loves me. I still love him.  

But I still don't like to talk about it with the rest of the world. I'll write about it. I'll even sing about it, even though I can't carry a tune. 

My husband Will and me, singing John Prine and Iris DeMint's song, "In Spite of Ourselves" at Pat's wake, July 2011 

That's the thing about art. It helps us express the unspeakable.

Pat was a raging alcoholic. A functional alcoholic, for the most part. He usually had a job and was only homeless a time or two. When he did have a job and a place to live, he often took in friends--he never knew a stranger--hit by hard times, because he'd been there. He understood. I never saw Pat shut the door on anyone asking for help.

Despite his good qualities, Pat was a drunk. He'd be the first to admit it. Sobriety sucks when you've lived a hard life like Pat did. He self-medicated, as many people who have survived trauma do. I'm not going to go into detail here about all the traumatic things Pat and I endured in childhood. I'll just say this. Hurt people hurt people. Our parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents did the best they could under the circumstances. They fucked up a lot. They also, in their own way, loved us a lot. It's hard to understand. All I can do is learn from our foreparents' mistakes, growing myself into the best parent I can be under my own circumstances.

Pat once told me that he probably wouldn't have started drinking as much if pot was legal. He used to smoke--and sell--pot in the late Seventies/early Eighties, as a teenager into his early twenties. Then when he turned twenty-one, he found that it was cheaper, easier, and less criminal to buy booze and get a "real" job as a carpenter. His real jobs often required a drug test, so he had to quit smoking pot, but his bosses didn't care if he drank every evening, from the moment he clocked off til he passed out, and all day on the weekends.

It's the "what ifs" that get me. What if Pat hadn't suffered such early childhood trauma? What if our parents had taken him to the doctor for medication? A therapist to talk about his problems? What if our federal government had never put marijuana in the same category as heroin? What if Pat had survived and moved to Colorado? What if...What if...What iffff...fuck.

I can easily get stuck in the "what ifs." I feel better when I spend more time in the "now whats?"

Now what? We figure out a way to live this life we're given. Art, specifically writing and singing, helps me live my best life.

That's why I'm so sad, so furious, at the news that the world lost one of its best singer-songwriters yesterday. John Prine sang the songs we understood. Pat and Sharon. My husband and me. Even my mother-in-law and father-in-law, Pam and Scott Carleton. It's one of my greatest regrets that I never got a video recording of my in laws singing, "In Spite of Ourselves."  

Just as I learned about the song from my brother, Pat, my in laws learned about the song from me. They took the song and made it their own. They won first prize singing it at some festival I somehow didn't have time to attend. 

Scott and Pam Carleton, together in their home circa 2018.

I should have made the time. My dear father-in-law Scott died last August of lung cancer at the age of sixty-five. Way too young.

And now John Prine, the person who brought this song into our lives, has passed on. Way too young. It infuriates me. Our elders deserve better. John Prine's voice healed so many people, and yet, because of the inaction of too many of our leaders, he took his last breath alone. The lack of support, especially from our federal government, especially from President Trump himself is literally suffocating our national treasures.

I am sad.

I am furious.

I am alive.

Now what?

***

Update 4/9/20

I was wrong, thank God. 

View this post on Instagram

Our beloved John died yesterday evening at Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville TN. We have no words to describe the grief our family is experiencing at this time. John was the love of my life and adored by our sons Jody, Jack and Tommy, daughter in law Fanny, and by our grandchildren. John contracted Covid-19 and in spite of the incredible skill and care of his medical team at Vanderbilt he could not overcome the damage this virus inflicted on his body. I sat with John - who was deeply sedated- in the hours before he passed and will be forever grateful for that opportunity. My dearest wish is that people of all ages take this virus seriously and follow guidelines set by the CDC. We send our condolences and love to the thousands of other American families who are grieving the loss of loved ones at this time - and to so many other families across the world. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the outpouring of love we have received from family, friends, and fans all over the world. John will be so missed but he will continue to comfort us with his words and music and the gifts of kindness, humor and love he left for all of us to share. In lieu of flowers or gifts at this time we would ask that a donation be made to one of the following non profits: thistlefarms.org roomintheinn.org nashvillerescuemission.org

A post shared by Fiona💚 (@fprine) on Apr 8, 2020 at 8:04am PDT

Our dear John Prine did not die alone. I'm still furious he's gone, but it helps me in my grieving to know that at the very least he got to be with his wife at the end. So many other of our brothers and sisters who succumb to the virus die alone. I suspect that privilege protected Mr. Prine. We shouldn't have to be award-winning singer-songwriters to be at an advantage at the end of our lives. Amateur singers and everyday people should not die suffocating in silence. 

I'm grateful to the hospital staff that allowed Prine's wife to sit with him in his final hours. Maybe it wasn't privilege, but the fact that Fiona Prine had already been stricken by the virus, built up antibodies, and probably is now immune to it. I don't know. It's just speculation on my part. Whatever the reason, it's but one small silver lining on a fucking apocalyptic storm cloud.