My friend Rachel recently posted a short essay I wrote over the winter on her blog. The essay is one I wrote when I was grappling with my little boy being not so little any more, yet Rachel writes in parenthesis, “For some reason I am thinking of Ani Defranco out of nowhere.”
Rachel and I met at grad school orientation and instantly became friends. We are both moms; our boys birthdays are only two weeks apart. We bonded first because we were different from the rest. And we became friends because we are very much alike.
But she had no idea how much of an Ani fan I was (am). I had never told her that Ani’s music was the soundtrack to my college years; how her lyrics coursed through me in the late nineties as I waded my way through relationship troubles and my first tastes of feminist criticism.
Today I dug out an old CD to play while I alternated between cleaning and writing. Living in Clip, which is a two-disk set but I can only find disk two.
The fifth song is “Firedoor” and I sing loudly. Halfway through the song, the music softens and she switches into “Amazing Grace” for a bit before going back to singing about catching her lover with someone else.
Someone played a recording of “Amazing Grace” at my father’s funeral. About halfway through the song my sister leaned over and whispered to me, “They should be playing Guns N Roses.” My dad liked loud rock.
Two years later, my sister had a daughter and she named her Patience. Today, she turns ten.