Tag Archives: Jack Beck

Sleeping on Iron(y)ed Sheets

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Anyone who travels for work—book tours, corporate sales, what have you—knows the exhaustion of sleep in strange beds. Each city this book tour has taken us to—New York with its taxi honk operas, Philadelphia and the late night peace protest sing-alongs, Charlotte with that steady humming undercurrent of Big Money—we’ve hunkered into provided beds, covers pulled around our ears, and reached for the dubious slumber of country mice away from home.

So we were delighted when a three-day break let us sleep in our own little beds again. We arrived back at the bookstore, admired Andrew the Shopsitter’s latest innovations (this guy is a gem) and fell into bed.

Then Jack began to cough. And cough and cough and cough, the kind that medical professionals would call “unproductive,” what moms call “dry tickly.”

Or just bloody annoying. The sound of one’s spouse hacking up a lung in small pieces is heartrending, but for someone having her first night in the ol’ home place since Oct. 5th, it’s also bad timing. He tried NyQuil, extra pillows, throat lozenges, as I lay by his side in supportive wife mode, hoping. About 3 in the morning, Jack turned to me. “Go sleep in the living room. Your patient, understanding silence is getting on my nerves.”

The next day Jack announced that after I’d left, he’d stopped coughing.  “Which means the cabin will be okay.” I had a media interview in the early evening, but then we planned to flee to our two-room shack in the woods—so far back that Internet and phone service are not available, and if we hear a motor, it’s coming to us—until time to leave for Asheville Sunday.

The interview ran long because Kim (a writer for the paper in Southern Pines, NC) and I really hit it off, so we got down to the cabin about 9 pm—or, as my friend Heather says, about half an hour past my bedtime. We spooned into slumber beneath the comfy duvet…

…and woke at 1 am to a noise reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project.

“Dafuq?” my husband more or less mumbled, snatching up a nearby hardback and preparing to defend me to the last page. Book in assault position, he traversed the perimeter.

A homegrown girl, I knew. “It’s a mouse.” Locating the noise, I banged on the dresser and began opening drawers to reveal the (now empty) nest. We crawled back into our home turf bed.

The mouse crawled back to hers. And began to install a bowling alley. I got up and banged the dresser. Silence—and then a single acorn came spewing over the top of a drawer, as if fired from a cannon.

I went back to bed. The mouse invited friends over, one of whom played saxophone. There was also a bagpiper, and I think an electric keyboard player. I rose, banged the dresser, and shouted, “Lissen, if you little bastards don’t stop, I’ll call the law, do you hear me? There are noise ordinances! It’s 4 in the morning!”

My husband switched on the bedside lamp and peered at me closely. “What?” I snapped.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” he said, smiling in a don’t-hurt-me way. “Come back to bed, darling. You’ve had a long couple of weeks.”

At 5 am the mouse partiers headed home. We heard their car doors slam, the loud farewells, the final blasts of the party horns and noisemakers.

That afternoon Jack and I carried the drawer with the cozy nest outside, turned the drawer upside down and watched a large, sleepy field mouse surface, blinking in the sun. “Dafuq?” it mumbled, staring bleary-eyed at us before racing into to the woods.

I’m not proud of this, but at that moment, if I’d had a saxophone, I’d have played it in triumph. But Jack and I then carried the sheet nest over to the rock whence the mouse had fled and left it as a peace offering. Sleep and let sleep.

Back to the Future in Greenwich Village

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In a far off galaxy many years ago – – –

I (Jack) was part of the emerging Scottish folk-music scene at around the same time that like-minded young Americans were heading for Greenwich Village to discover much the same buzz and counter-culture. In the early 1960s, subversiveness had a musical soundtrack. My Edinburgh-centered version had little direct musical connection with its American cousin, other than very occasional imported albums and songs heard 2nd or 3rd hand from the likes of Archie Fisher or Josh McCrae, but the undercurrent of questioning authority and plotting the green revolution was similar. In my case there was also a Pete Seeger concert in Edinburgh and a stage shared with Carolyn Hester in Aberdeen.

But I had never been to Greenwich Village – until last Saturday, that is!

Finding ourselves in New York and asked what we’d like to see, Wendy gave me a grin and said, “Greenwich Village.” And so I got my picture taken standing in Bleeker Street, then McDougal Street and finally in Washington Square Park. An old ghost had been laid to rest; a place that had assumed near-mythic proportions in my mind was beneath my feet and in my view. Although the area has no doubt changed a lot—we saw boutique shops and chain stores where some of the old folkie corners had once questioned how we lived our lives—the buildings are mostly unaltered, the cellars still there though fulfilling a different function.

It was a lovely day out for this child of the sixties, to see where the great ‘Folk Scare’ was rooted and the park where the ‘revolution’ was plotted as young musicians who would later become household names gathered to jam.

Finally, the following morning we shared breakfast with our hosts, including Nichole’s father-in-law, Harvey. (Nichole is Wendy’s editor at St. Martin’s Press.) It turned out that he had been to the NYC parties back in those days when Bob Dylan had also attended. Conversation at the table took us both back to respective youth and shared cultural signposts. I was able to reminisce about attending Dylan’s 1966 Edinburgh concert, just 2 days before the famous ‘Judas’ accusation in Manchester.

A very happy and poignant experience for Harvey and Jack, a couple of old folkies tripping down the musical lane of memories!

(The photo on the right is of me at the corner of Bleeker and McDougal Streets, with Wendy’s agent Pamela at left, thoughtfully keeping Wendy from being killed as she steps into the street to photograph me!)