Category: Relations

Senseless Acts of Beauty

Version 2

A few days ago someone left a small flat stone painted with a cartoon of a rabbit on the bench by my house. A few days later a similar one appeared on the pavers we’d set for the rubbish dumpster to rest waiting for the trash company to come empty it. This one was a picture of a butterfly.

I don’t know who left them, though judging by the artistic style, they’d been painted by the same person. I didn’t disturb them, and a few days afterwards they disappeared.

I rather like the mystery of this gift. It was unexpected, and therefore all the more welcome. It brought a smile to my face, something in itself welcome in these dark days. I don’t know if the person who left them there took them back, or if someone else walking by on the sidewalk picked them up and took them home. It doesn’t matter which, for if the original artist took them back I’ll assume they left those painted stones for someone else to enjoy. If a passerby took them, it’s obviously because they felt pleasure in seeing them, and wanted to keep that pleasure with them. I’m okay with it either way. The pleasure I received from them is already in my heart.

Most of you who have been reading these blog posts know that I’m a musician in addition to a writer. Maybe it’d be more accurate to say I’m a writer in addition to being a musician.

Whatever.

For some time since the pandemic hit I’ve been sitting outside my home on clear evenings playing music. Sometimes neighbors comment, and so far the comments have all been favorable. Occasionally passersby stop to listen for a while. Once I had a couple of young girls, maybe seven or eight years old stop and listen for several minutes. Keep in mind, I’m playing instrumental stuff, largely Renaissance era English and Irish music. John Dowland, Turloch O’Carolan, and such. Okay, O’Carolan is not technically Renaissance era, but I get away with it when I play the Ohio Renaissance Festival.

Anyway, after a bit one of them approached me an laid a flower on the bench beside me. I had to warn her to stay back, and for a moment I was afraid she was going to try to hug me. Even aside from the pandemic, that wouldn’t be a good idea in our paranoid society, especially since there was no obvious adult attached to her nearby.

I took the flower inside once I’d finished playing for the evening and put it in a vase. A daffodil. I kept it for at least a week, until it had faded and the petals had fallen off. One of my nicest gifts ever for playing music, even though it was a flower she had picked from my own garden.

Random Kindness, and Senseless Acts of Beauty. We need all of those we can get these days.

Check out my YouTube music videos at [email protected]

A Thousand Strangers

My last name is Smith.

Yes, you all know that, but there’s a certain burden that that entails that is sometimes difficult to express. As a dulcimer player, I’m constantly having to explain that I’m not the Steven Smith on http://www.everythingdulcimer.com who has posted hundreds of pieces of dulcimer music. I’ve only posted a few pieces there myself. You can tell us apart because I always use my middle initial, and he just uses his first and last names. I’ve met the other guy and his wife Jean a couple of times now. They’re great folk, and I’m glad to share a name with him. He’s a former national champion on both the mountain and hammered dulcimers, while I’m just a former regional champion on the mountain dulcimer.

There’s an excellent poet and artist in northern Ohio who shares a name with me, and a musician in the Cleveland area with not only my same first and last names, but my same middle initial as well. If you search on iTunes for Steven K. Smith, we both come up. I’ve corresponded with him and I have a couple of his albums. They’re very good.

I share my name with a professional football player, an astronaut, and a police officer in Columbus Ohio who was tragically murdered in the line of duty in the fall of 2016. I dedicated a poetry reading to him after he’d been shot, but before he’d passed.

While I was still a teenager I once had to prove to the local police that I was not the “Steven Smith” who had left a Boy Scout backpack with that name on it in a house that someone had broken into near my home. Seems that another Steven Smith around my age had loaned the backpack to some associates to whom he shouldn’t have.

I’ve heard that “Smith” is the most common surname in the English language. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s beyond question that it’s very common. It doesn’t happen as often now, but when I lived in Columbus, Ohio, about twice a year I’d get a phone call that started, “Are you Steven Smith?” “Yes.” “Are you the Steven Smith that—.”

I was never the right one.

I was very glad for that once.

While still in college at Ohio State. I got one of those calls from a woman who was searching for her son, whom she’d lost track of some seventeen years previously. She thought he’d moved to Columbus and was going down the list in the phone book calling all the Steven Smiths, hoping to reconnect with her son. I apologized for not being the right one, and she said something like, “You know how it is, people move on and you lose track of them…”

I lied through my teeth and said that I understood.

It was winter, mid afternoon. I took my walking stick and went out hiking through the city, not returning until it was dark and my legs and fingers felt numb with cold and fatigue and my belly growled from hunger.

Some fourteen years after that, after I’d become sort of marginally known as a dulcimer player and composer, I wrote a song about that incident. There are some songs you write, and some where you feel as if you’re merely the portal through which the work passes. That was the case for this one. I was in a hotel room coming back from a conference relating to my day-job at the time and the song came out—both the words and music—in the space of a little less than an hour. I’ve done very little tweaking of it afterwards. I like to say the song took me an hour and fourteen years to write. I call it, “For Steven Smith, Wherever He May Be.” Here are the words:

For Steven Smith, Wherever He May Be

© 1994 SKSmith

The telephone rang, I heard a stranger’s voice say,
“Could you help me find my son?
I’ve been calling every Smith in this city of yours,
Could it be that you’re the one?”
“I haven’t heard from him in seventeen years
And lost track of where he’s been.
I think he went to Columbus Ohio,
I want to see his face,
I want to hear his voice,
I want to hold him once again.”

The longing in her voice echoed hundreds of things
That they never said out loud.
Like, “I’m sorry,” “I love you,” “I miss you, my son,
Please let’s not be over-proud.”
“I haven’t heard from him in seventeen years
And lost track of where he’s been.
I think he went to Columbus Ohio,
I want to hear his voice,
I want to see his face,
I want to hold him once again.”

I thought for a moment that I’d say I was he,
And that now her search was through.
But that intended act of kindness would have been a foul lie
And I couldn’t be that cruel.
I share my name with a thousand strangers
Linked by the anvil and the forge.
Touching each other in unintended ways.
Are you out there somewhere,
Lost in this city,
Longing for this mother of yours?

The telephone rang, I heard a stranger’s voice say,
“Could you help me find my son?
I’ve been calling every Smith in this city of yours …
Well, maybe he’ll be the next one.”

I rarely perform this song. I’ve had people leave the room in tears when I sing it, and I often have trouble getting through it myself. I’ve never recorded it.

I hope that woman and her son reconnected in a joyful reunion. I have no way of knowing whether that happened or not, but I have to believe that they did. Of the myriad possibilities that time and space spin around us, I really want to live in the one in which this mother and son reunited.