Once in a while Lavra will spend the night with a friend, and when she does Amy and I figure we’ve gotten a night of free baby sitting.  I mean Lavra is fourteen now.  I guess I should say that we feel like we’ve gotten a kind of evening off from responsibility.  Or I do.  Lately Amy doesn’t seem to let responsibility go very easily.  Or then again, do I let go myself these days?

Sometimes when we have the evening free like that we’ll stay home, have a romantic evening.  Amy likes to cook up something nice, and she’s so good at it that it amazes me sometimes.  I’m a functional cook, no one would starve or fling it on the floor, but I’m a simple pasta/meatloaf kind of cook.  It’s tasty, or I think it is, but it’s not fancy.  About the only special cooking I really do is a few Ukrainian dishes, like golubtsi, which is stuffed cabbage, or borscht.  But Amy has a talent I can’t even understand in the kitchen, she just knows how to put food together.  Friday night, though, we decided to go out and hear some music, so we ate out.  There’s a place just over in New Jersey, a restaurant called Red, Hot and Blue, where you can hear the blues on weekends and eat barbeque, which I happen to love.  They say the food there is southern style, but I’ve never been down south so I’ll just take their word for it.  It’s a cute place, really nice, a family kind of place, which I prefer.  Where the band plays they have a painting on the wall of two pigs wearing sunglasses and playing guitars, except their guitar strings are neon tubes.  You’d never expect it, though, since it’s part of a Holiday Inn.  We’ve got plenty of grubby bars in Philadelphia, and they’re really popular, but they can do without me.  And I can sure do without them.

So on this Friday we drove over to have barbeque, which Amy actually wouldn’t eat, but they have salads, some things like that on the menu.  Amy is very careful of her health, more than I am.  She goes to the gym at least twice a week, and she even bought a family membership at her club, which you can do there for partners as well as spouses.  Maybe for Lavra it’s a good idea, but it’s troublesome to get her there.  For me, though, I don’t know.  Or I do know, actually, I mostly put Amy off.  I hate exercise, I hate all that intense physical stuff.  I’ll go for a walk around our neighborhood, which is enough I think.  I walk about three times a week, and I’m sure I read somewhere that a doctor said if you walk at a good brisk pace, then you’ll be healthy.  I do walk at a good brisk pace some of the time.  We live in a nice neighborhood for walking, not far off South Street, and there’s some historical places near us.  I also like to kind of stroll along in the evenings and peek in people’s windows, if they’ve left their curtains open, see what they’re doing.

Amy can’t get me to the gym very often, but she does get me to go with her to blues clubs.  She loves that music, and we go listen to the bands.  I like that music, too.  It's usually men, I guess, there don't seem to be as many women playing blues music.  There was a band I’d never heard of at Red, Hot and Blue on Friday, a group called Mojo Jackson and the Blue Wailers.  That was pretty clever, I thought.  I mean that name, the Blue Wailers.  We got to the club about eight, not long before the music started.  A nice young girl came over and waited on us, so I got some of that southern barbeque, but Amy ordered a salad.  Kind of fanatical about her health.

When the girl took our order I said something about what a nice spring day it was and she said, “The kids should be decorating Easter eggs soon.”

Since she sort of gave me that opening, I asked, “Have you ever seen Ukrainian Easter eggs?”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t know they had Easter eggs over there.”  Well, of course she didn’t know.  Why would a young black girl know about pysanky eggs?  But I told her how we make them, explained about drawing on the designs with wax and how we dye them.  I thought the girl seemed interested, but finally Amy said, “You know she’s got tables to wait on but you’re making her stand here.”

“It’s OK,” the girl said.  “I’d love to see some of those eggs.”

“They’re even better than they sound from my description,” I said.  And the girl went to get our beers.  I said to Amy, “Now she wishes she was Ukrainian.”

“She wishes she was home,” Amy said, “instead of at work carrying platters.  She looks like she might be in college.  She could be studying.”

“Studying on a Friday night?  Did you do that?”  I can’t imagine that Amy really studied on a Friday night back in college, but who knows?  She can be kind of intense sometimes.  I only did a year and a half of college, and I didn’t study much at any time of day.  Thinking about my own time in college reminded me of Lavra and her breath-takingly bad school work.  I was sorry I had thought of it.  Sitting there in that restaurant was relaxing and pleasant, there was a kind of smoothness and softness about it, an easy letting go of worries, and then with that memory suddenly there was a hard stone in the middle of all that softness.  Now I had to work a little bit to enjoy myself, to get past thinking about Lavra.  And if you’re working to enjoy yourself, you’re obviously not entirely enjoying yourself.

And that awful moment from yesterday came back, at me like a truck, when Lavra pulled her progress report out of her book bag and handed it to me.  “Speaking of studying, did you see Lavra’s progress report?” I asked Amy.  Can’t that child pass anything?

“Speaking of not studying,” she said.  “I saw it this morning.”

“What are we going to do with her?” I asked, feeling that sort of helpless that I get lately when I think about Lavra and school.

“I think we should tutor her,” she said.  “She’s only a freshman.  I’m sure we can help her with most of her subjects.”  Tutoring, maybe, but Amy always thinks in terms of just working harder.  Or did she think Lavra didn’t understand the material?

“It’s not that she can’t do it,” I said.  “She’s plenty smart enough.”

“I didn’t say she’s not smart.”

“Well, she can do the work.  It’s her motivation that’s a problem.  She just won’t do it.”

“She was working on a history report the other night,” Amy said.  Lord, a history report.  I saw it.

“Yeah,” I said.  “She was drawing a picture of William Penn and the Indians.  It was an art project to her.”

“Some people are kinetic learners like that,” Amy said.  “I was.”

And suddenly I thought where is this going?  why are we discussing this here in this restaurant where we should be enjoying ourselves?  “I guess I don’t want to think about it tonight,” I said.

“Well, you did ask me.”

“Ask you what?”

“If I saw her progress report.”  It’s one of Amy’s irritating habits to throw it back at me that I’m the one who’s guilty of something.

“OK, I started it,” I said.  “But now I want to relax and forget about it.”

While we’d been talking the band had been setting up, one guy on guitar, that was Mojo Jackson, one on bass, and a younger guy on drums.  The band was good, and that lead guy, Mojo, he was really good.  They get some talented musicians at that restaurant.  That kind of music makes you feel kind of happy to hear it.  Amy especially gets into the blues, and it made me feel good to see how much she was enjoying it.

When the band went on break the drummer was walking past our table, coming back from going outside I guess, and when he went by Amy said, “You guys are great.  You really play tight together.”

He stopped and said, “Thanks.”  Then he said, “I think I’ve seen yall before.  Have yall come here before this?”

“Oh, yeah,” Amy said.  “We’ve been here.  I’ve seen you drum more than once.  You must play here pretty often.”

“Once a month he said.”  I was surprised, I figured they must have a more regular engagement.

“How did you become a drummer?” I asked.

“I got tired of beating up on people,” he said and laughed.  “So I started beating up on drums and cymbals.  No, really, I started as a horn player.”

“A horn?”

“Yeah, I used to play saxophone but I switched.  I’m more physical, I need to put out a lot of energy, so I had to change to drums.”

“That’s interesting,” Amy said.

“Artists are full of energy,” he said.  “I got my day job, but expressing yourself, that’s what’s important.”

Artists, I thought, is Lavra an artist?  Busy with important things and no time for school?

Dallas

also

produced

several

fine

women

blues

singers

who

were

counterparts

to

Texas

Alexander:

Hattie

Hudson,

Gertrude

Perkins,

Ida

May

Mack,

and

Bessie

Tucker.

They

sang

forthrightly

about

life

on

the

streets,

rough

men,

fighting,

and

prison

in

such

songs

as

“Black

Hand

Blues,”

“Wrong

Doin’

Daddy,”

“Penitentiary,”

and

“Got

Cut

All

to

Pieces.”
 

from
Nothing But the Blues

by Lawrence Cohn et al.