It was a complete surprise. John worked for weeks late into the night leading up to my birthday to collect, format, and edit the songs we have written over the past forty years. I started penning little tunes about stories from Scripture back when I was in high school, and recorded them in my dorm room on a dinky cassette player the size of a
shoebox. I had not the slightest expectation that anyone besides me and maybe half a dozen five year olds would ever hear them. John was composing piano pieces in music school, and God knew that our trajectories were on a collision course.
We kept composing, and singing. My father arranged to have me take a train to NYC to record at my cousin's studio, who was also named John. The sound board had a gazillion buttons and I filled up precisely three tracks... my voice, my
guitar and the harmony. He seemed disappointed to have his equipment so grossly underused. Not like the week before when Carly Simon was there.
Back in the nineties John took on the Herculean task of getting them on paper, thanks to a nifty program called Finale. This was progress from the hand written and grossly imperfect sheet music I had laboriously churned out up until then. I hand stenciled the notebook covers and we collated a limited edition which we sold
to friends for twenty cents a song.
There were times I longed to have our music hit the publishing world, and made pathetic stabs in that direction. Once I wrote to John Michael Talbot, me and a glut of other wannabes, and another time I hired three musicians to produce a demo tape to send to the makers of Fireproof. I got back a form letter for my thousand bucks enterprise. I even begged my son who worked for Quincy Jones at the time to leave a cd strategically
on his counter.
Those aspirations have long since faded like the brown in John's beard, and I am content simply to sing with a cluster of children now and again. Sometimes I walk into church and hear one of our tunes being played and that feels good, probably like the satisfaction of a bridge engineer who sees a line of cars safely crossing a river.
But whether it is music, or a Tiny House Adventure, or a business refurbishing fixer
uppers, or raising children, working with a lifetime partner is a reward that ripens slowly, like cheese and wine.
It's worth the wait.
