Elly

I wanna tell you about my friend Elly. She moved to Laramie when we were 10, and she was the weirdest kid I'd ever met. She had this super long blonde hair that flowed down her back and she was hyper and read during recess. We didn't get along all the time, and I was a little too dark to see it right away but she had a light that seemed like it flowed out of her. Not to mention a killer singing voice.

Last April, just shy of her 24th birthday, Elly was diagnosed with cancer. It was agressive and scary, we didn't think she would lsat the week. But Elly never did back down from a fight. Six months later she was running a 5K and basically giving the middle finger to her doctors. When I saw her over Christmas she was thin, and a little weaker but the light was still there. She still wanted to talk about Supernatural and Leverage. She wanted to know if I'd run into any cool famous people in LA. She wanted to hear what music I was listening to and she was showing off her new leather jacket. We talked and caught up. I listened to her talk about all the traveling she wanted to do and the places she wanted to see. We ate a few Reeses (she always had some with her) and then I hugged her and told her how much I loved her before letting her go get ready for Christmas mass with her family. 

Elly died last night. The details seem to interest everyone else a lot more than they interest me. I care only that I lost a friend. I care that she'll never see 25, or go to Spain or Alaska, that she has all these days that she should have had that got stolen. And I care that I am a better person for having know her. She was a blessing in the purest sense of the word. 

I love you Elly. I will miss you so much. I'm about to put on Pirates of the Carribean and eat a whole bag of Reeses. Cuz I know you would like that. Thank you for every choir concert, every field trip, every lazy day watching tv in my basement. I love you. I love you. 

You're gonna get sick of me ranting about Noah Gundersen

But his album came out on Tuesday and I have been letting it soak into me slowly like healing waters. Oof. Near perfection which I totally saw coming but it still gave me those unexpected moments where the music swells like a tide and I get to let myself wash away for a minute. I am sitting in my dining room right now with the track Boathouse ringing in my ears. The violin is pulling in an almost painful way and Noah is singing a song about a broken man with a broken family and when the chorus kicks in I feel as broken as the man in the song does. 

Noah is playing a sold out show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood this week. I will be there, and I'm dragging my sister Christy along with me. So far I've only managed to talk my best friend into being as obsessed as I am, but by Friday night I know I will have Christy on board. Because she has emotions and the Gundersen family is spectacularly good at manipulating emotions and playing them with the same talent that drives their voices and words. 

Christy brought up an interesting story last night. She pointed out that when we discovered Mumford and Sons it was because a friend of hers made a point to play them for her and she wrote down to look them up. This is significant because when we fell head first into the world of music that the Mumfies opened up we gained some of our favorite artists. Without those boys there would be no Laura Marling when I feel like I need another jaded woman to sympathize with. There would be no Avetts to help me feel grounded, and no Johnny Flynn to make me feel like rereading a Shakespeare play to find all the meanings I missed the first time round. Yes, the odds are that we would have stumbled into this music eventually, but it's so woven into the time in which I discovered it that I can't imagine what those days would look like without those songs. 

These are songs that I freely allow to transport me to different places, or change my mood up or down because they are worthy of that right. They vibrate at the same frequencies as my mind and heart and wholy belong in my world. They have been pulled into my identity like twigs into a birds nest. There is no way to dislodge them without undoing a huge chunk of me. 

So I am grateful that Christy chose to spend that day with her friend. I am grateful that he knew that Christy would enjoy that music. I'm grateful that she was listening and turned around to share that music with me. My world is richer for the music I have in it. 

With that in mind I will continue my one woman quest to push Noah Gundersen, and Justified, and Keats, and anything else I can find beauty and value in. I hope people will do me the same courtesy even when it does feel like a political campaign. Because our lives are improved when we connect to something, and my life in this respect gets a little better every day.