Deciding recently to try my hand at making my online presence more open ended, organizing a newsletter and going through my long contact list to transform the email addresses into a mass mailing. This results in a few names of people I’ve known who are no more. Dead. Yet here is their telephone number and address. .This often plays out like a confrontation with a person cheating at cards, and that would be me. If I do not delete their contact, I can pretend they are still alive though I know they aren’t. Indeed some get deleted, it’s final, has been final a long time. or I didn’t have a strong connection with them. Others I simply cannot click the trash button. I would be committing murder or at contributing to one. Worse..

I have online voice memos from an earlier app that sent my answering machine messages to my email. Among the many untrashed, were occasional people who are no more..Some messages were ten years old. There’s Eugene the real estate agent, gone in 2019. His message is simply his friendly voice saying he’ll call back in thirty minutes, I don’t recall the details but now there is so much weight behind disposing it. A last footprint of someone I very much enjoyed knowing but it’s just a footprint, bye Eugene.

The flip side, I don’t personally know the Beatles, Keith Jarrett, Joni Mitchell or Otis Spann and yet I’m convinced absolutely that I do and always have. For hundreds of years the teacher would be someone in person but the rules changed. The beauty of technology since the 20th century, the machines that record and the machines that play it back. I absolutely have studied with Randy California, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Dollar Brand.