meeting your heroes

The first thing I noticed was the money.

He was sitting alone, counting bills. Carefully. The kind of careful that has a system behind it. Denominations sorted, a recount to confirm. He was not looking up.

His father wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in 1940, furious enough about "God Bless America" on the radio that he wrote an answer to it. The ribbon of highway. The endless skyway. The redwood forest, the Gulf Stream waters. This land was made for you and me. If you have followed any thread of American folk music and its politics turned outward, Woody Guthrie is somewhere near the root of it.

The son was at Woodstock. He had his own song, eighteen minutes long, a shaggy story about a Thanksgiving arrest that became an anti-Vietnam artifact on FM radio in 1967. He had inherited the counterculture icon position without appearing to have asked for it.

I wanted to say something. I had no idea what. Something about the music, probably. The usual fan business: the gratitude, the reference to a specific moment in a specific song, the attempt to distinguish yourself from every other person who had said the same thing.

He was still counting.

I said something. The exact words have not stayed with me. Something that announced I was a fan and invited him to do something with that information.

He looked up briefly. The look was not unkind. It wasn't anything. Then he went back to the money.

He finished. He put it away. He did not look up again.

I have thought about this more than it probably deserves. The son of the man who believed this land belonged to everybody, tallying his cut of the take in a room where someone stood there waiting for him to be something. Not rude. Not warm. Not performing either thing. Just attending to the count.

Maybe that is the whole lesson. Not the one about heroes being people ~ everyone knows that one, it closes every essay like this one. The other lesson. The one about how the music and the man are two separate accounts, and the politics in those songs belonged to Woody, and the son had been carrying them around on a stage since 1967, and that day he was counting his money, and the count was off by one, so he started again.