Don't Be Afraid

When I was three, my mother took me to various coffee houses around Atlanta to watch her and her friend Patricia perform. They both played acoustic guitars and sang in excellent harmony. I admired them from the audience, usually posted up at the table of one kind stranger or another. It was odd and thrilling to be in a dark performance space with music.

Soon I knew most of their songs by heart; I had not yet learned to read and my memory was unbelievably uncluttered and accurate. All of the songs were of the gospel and inspirational variety and my mother and Patricia were very convincing in their performance. I remember one in particular entitled, "Rattle Me, Shake Me," a song about a girl who is suspected by various authority figures of being under the influence of one narcotic or another but, in fact, is merely high because 'she got the spirit inside.' Another favorite of mine was "Be Still And Know," a directive from God himself to 'stop runnin' through the streets and alleys of your mind, for all your hurried, worried runnin' only makes you more blind.'

It seems important to note that all of these songs were delivered in a very relaxed manner more Judy Collins than Jerry Falwell. Mom and Patricia were not of the hellfire variety of Christian entertainer that so often seems to get the headlines. They were the evangelical mirror of Joni Mitchell, Linda Rondstadt and Juice Newton. They probably got hit on after the shows. It was the mid-70's. There was a real electricity to the performances, the hormonal angst of twenty and thirty something people of the opposite sex stuffed into a room with no options available besides coffee sipping and bible verse quotation. People yearning to burst out, to get their game on, stuck having to squeeze their ambitions into tiny little messianic packages to be thrown at the wall and hoped for. It was very rock and roll.

After the shows I ran around the adjacent bookstore, or church sanctuary, or whatever institution's activities supported the coffee house. Sometimes I walked on the stage and strummed my mom's guitar while she talked to other adults. She taught me how to pack it up. It was too heavy for me to carry.