Dispatch No. 18

Death, knives and the music of summer

Aug 28, 2024

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As way of a quick orientation, Dispatches are written between stories. They’re my catch-up posts that often include a few (usually) non-sequitur thoughts, music making the rounds in my head and posts I’ve read here on Substack.

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Non-Sequiturs

Gratitude - A bit ago I posted this note…
The responses of love and kind words are overwhelming. Thank you all.
My grandfather was a great guy; sharp and full of piss & vinegar to the end. We laid him to rest yesterday with a small ceremony and party — both of which he would outwardly grumbled about all the fuss….and secretly loved.
But funerals aren’t for the dead, are they? So, like the Irish (which we aren’t) we raised a few glasses, shed a bucket of tears and told our favorite stories of his 96 years. A few of note:
1. He never finished high school but successfully built multiple businesses while learning construction, drafting and horology along the way.
2. While building their house my Grandmother purchased a Shopsmith for him to use—which he hated. So, he cut every piece of framing in the house with a handsaw.
3. Growing up in the French-speaking village of Lake Linden, Michigan his parents wouldn’t teach the family to speak French…just so they could talk freely and not be understood by the kids.
4. His green thumb was well known in our family. That fella could make anything grow in the heat of the Arizona summer. Just this morning we may have found a stand of marijuana on the side of his house.
  Godspeed. You’ll be missed…
Knives Out - For a short while I dated a woman I met online—you know, through one of those apps. One afternoon we met up for a walk and I asked what she did that morning. Her reply, “I took a class working on my knife skills at the CIA.” I think I paused or my pace stumbled a bit as I took in the words. I mean, she was a bit secretive about what she did for a living. Maybe knife training was just the sort of thing an agent might do. After all, while online dating I had met people who worked in all sorts of fields—an editor for ILM, an executive at Impossible Foods, even a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security. So, maybe a CIA agent wasn’t out of line? I imagined her sparring with an attacker, disarming them with John Wick-style finesse. She certainly seemed the type.
The further we walked, though, I started to wonder if I’d misheard her. It had certainly happened to me before when I followed a colleague through the streets of Taipei looking for a soup shop. When pressed, he told me they made “custom soups, anything you want, ready in a couple of days” For nearly an hour we traversed Taipei’s alleyways, side roads and down a set of rickety stairs to a small doorway where inside stood a man who did indeed make custom things: suits.
I rebooted my ears and did a system check. Was she speaking clearly? Yes. Do I understand her words? Again, yes. Am I going deaf? No. So, I asked, “The CIA?” She responded in the affirmative.
“Do you take classes there a lot?” I asked.
“Sometimes, to sharpen my skills” she answered, “but they’re so expensive.”
We walked and talked for a while but I couldn’t get it out of my head—are agents, ones with combat training, supposed to tell you this kind of thing? I thought about how sometimes people blather nervously on first dates and tell you their entire life story, almost always TMI and in rapid-fire style, but she didn’t do that and this wasn’t a first date.
I decided to broach the topic one last time, “I’d think the CIA wouldn’t make you pay for those classes, like, it would just be part of training or something.”
She stopped, tilted her head to the side, eyebrows widened like looking at a puppy that can’t find its way out of a box and said, “Culinary Institute of America.”
Kick Out The Jams — As it’s almost autumn, fall if you prefer, so I feel I’ve waited long enough to ask this question: where are the summer songs? I don’t mean the lesser ditties we’re so quick to forget, I mean the belt-it-out anthems sung through open car windows, heard across the park, hummed or whistled on the sidewalk and passed from person-to-person like the summer flu. Where are they?
Perhaps it’s the way we now stream music direclty to our ears that eschews a shared experience and made music such a centerpiece of culture. Also, I am willing to admit, my age might keep me looking back more than ahead. I try to keep up new music but, frankly, there’s a metric assload (a British measurement) released on a weekly basis…and it ain’t all good.
What are some of your favorite summer songs — of this or previous years?I’ve dropped a few below