tour blues
This missive comes to you from a nondescript hotel room in North Carolina, where it’s chilly and raining. En route to the hotel, my driver wore no mask (jarring for this NYC girl) so I kept the car window down and arrived windblown and half deaf from the freeway noise.
My room wasn’t ready, so I walked across the parking lot to a sprawling sports bar with flat-screen TVs covering every available inch of wall space and dithered over what to order: wings? A burger? Chips and queso? I opted for the still-artery-clogging-but-slightly-more-virtuous Cobb salad, deviating from the menu with my request for grilled chicken, not fried (sigh).
Thus fortified, I returned to the hotel, where I have since been sequestered, getting some work done, listening to the hiss of passing cars on the wet pavement below and feeling a little blue. Nothing specific, really, just that vague, Edward Hopper-esque melancholy indigenous to, well, rainy nights spent alone in nondescript hotel rooms in strange towns.
I’ve got a blue motel room/with a blue bedspread/I got the blues inside/and outside my head… (Joni Mitchell, Blue Motel Room - Hejira)
I keep replaying a conversation I had, early in the pandemic, with a woman whose husband had had a heart transplant some years prior. She and her family were no strangers to self-isolation; living in fear of exposure to potentially deadly pathogens; and emerging, later, into a world at once strange and the same. “What people don’t realize,” she said, “is that there’s no ticker tape parade when it’s over. And it’s not really ever over. You just gradually get to start doing things again. You slowly get your life back.”
I, like you, I’m sure, would have preferred a dramatic and complete end to this pandemic, a firm demarcation separating the past from the present. Something ticker tape parade-worthy. Instead, we’re fumbling along toward endemicity, doing daily risk/reward analyses and, little by little, doing things again. Case in point: tomorrow I’ll sing some French songs for a gala here, south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the next morning I’ll get up early and fly back to New York City in time to make my church job on Sunday. Living the dream, singing for my supper, now with masks and vaccines.
I wondered many times over the course of the past eighteen months if I’d ever get to wallow in the bittersweetness of tour blues again. And here I am, sipping anemic tea from a paper cup in this highway-adjacent hotel, my emotional thermostat hovering somewhere between loneliness and solitude, boredom and stillness. Joni Mitchell is on repeat. A blue motel room is not a ticker tape parade, but I’ll take it. Gratefully.