Subject: RE: Obit: Utah Phillips 5/15/35-5/24/08
From:
Fortunato
Date: 28 May 08 - 10:37 AM
Dear Dad, A Note From Utah. Here's one of the last things he
wrote. And I thought it a pretty fitting goodbye that
shows his character and where he was at even near the
end. Matt (my son)
Dear Friends,
Utah here, with a rambling missive pandect and organon
regarding my current reality. At no time should you
suspect me of complaining (kvetching); I am simply
grepsing (Yiddish word for describing the condition of
that reality).
First, medical: My heart, which is enlarged and very
weak, can't pump enough blood to keep my body plunging
forward at its usual 100 percent. It allows me about
25 to 30 percent, which means I don't get around very
much or very easily anymore. I'm sustained (i.e., kept
alive) by a medication called Milrinone, which is
contained in a pump that I carry around with me in a
shoulder bag. The pump, which runs 24 hours a day,
moves the medication through a long tube running into
an implanted Groshong catheter that in turn runs
directly into my heart. I'll be keeping this pump for
the rest of my life. I also take an extraordinary
number of oral medications, of which many are
electrolytes.
My body is weak but my will is strong, and I keep my
disposition as sunny and humorous as I'm able. It's
hard enough being disabled without being cranky as
well. Though I'm eating well, my weight has gone from
175 to 155 pounds. I look like a geriatric Fred
Astaire.
We manage to get out a good bit, visiting the Ananda
(a local spiritual village and retreat center) flower
garden up on the San Juan Ridge and occasionally going
to lunch at various places around town. The bag is
always with me. Believe me, none of this would be
possible without my wife Joanna. She has the deepest,
most loving and caring heart one could ever imagine.
She's taken charge of all my medications and makes
sure that I'm well fed and don't fall into the
slovenly ways of a derelict. She also has enormous
physical beauty—I have never seen a more beautiful
woman in my life. She is endowed with intelligence,
deep insight, compassion, and a capacity for love that
passes all understanding.
Heart disease aside, I find that I have a hernia that
needs to be repaired. Someday I suppose I'll become
like Ernie Bierwagen, the old man who owned the
orchards outside town. He said to me once, "I know
that God wants me to say something, because the only
thing I have left that works is my mouth." But for
now, I'm enjoying my life and can think of no good
reason not to. Joanna and I both know that the
chemical regimen I'm on can't go on indefinitely. We
take things a day at a time, deriving joy and solace
from a solid, loving relationship.
I want to share with you something about where we
live. If you're reading this on the Internet, I've
sent Duncan some photos to show you what it looks
like. Our house is on a country lane right off Red Dog
Road, about a mile from downtown Nevada City. Nevada
City is an old gold-mining town in the Sierra
foothills with a population of about 2,800. The old
buildings are all still here, including the National
Hotel, one of the oldest hotels in the West that's
still doing business. The town is a quirky, mystical
sort of place, populated by poets, writers, artists,
misfits, and just regular folks. When you drive down
Berggren Lane where we live, you come to a brown house
with green trim, lap-strake siding, a steel roof, and
a high green fence around the front. The steel roof is
there because we live in an ancient oak and cedar
grove, which includes in the front yard a couple of
towering poplar trees. Sometimes the wind coming down
from the high Sierra breaks off tree limbs, and if it
weren't for the steel roof, we could well be eating
our salad by the roots.
When we first moved in here, the house was tiny. Using
her remarkable ingenuity and the prodigious skills of
our friend Steven Goodfield, a fine independent
carpenter, Joanna has added a hallway and two rooms
going up the hill, which gives us a bedroom and
bathroom, and me a study. The French doors in our
bedroom open out onto a dappled hillside with
hawthorns, cedars, pines, wild cherries, and oaks. The
lot itself is quite narrow, the result of a bad survey
many years ago. The old part of the house was built in
1912. When we bought it, there was a greenhouse along
the southern wall. It was rotting out, so we replaced
it with a new, insulated and thermo paned greenhouse
so that we could remove the interior wall and make it
almost part of the living room. Our house is a
beautiful, comfortable place to live, absolutely
surrounded by greenery.
Looking out the greenhouse windows now, I can see the
huge poplars in front, already in full leaf. The front
yard is Joanna's flower garden, a great splash of
color amid the green. As I look over my shoulder out
the greenhouse door, which is also the front door to
the house, I can see the hawthorn trees covered with
cascades of white blossoms, as though their limbs were
burdened with new snow. There's a brick patio just
outside the greenhouse with a fireplace and a small
pond crowned with a bronze frog who emits a stream of
water into the pond, which, when the weather is warm,
we can hear from the bedroom when we're going to
sleep.
Opposite the greenhouse is the kitchen, with a
wonderful early 1930s gas range, one of those with a
two-lid firebox on one end. Outside the kitchen window
is a railed porch built by our friend Kuddie, which
overlooks another flower garden and an old apple tree,
still bearing, that was probably planted when the
house was built. The lot itself, narrow though it is,
goes up the hill quite a way, where it levels off
through the cedars and ends at a large open space that
was a vegetable garden when I was still able to do
that sort of thing.
The cedars are gigantic and quite an anomaly, a patch
of forest that was never logged, probably because of
the bad survey. It simply got missed. Walking in it
now is like walking in the quiet of a much larger
forest.
Walking up the hill, you pass three small
outbuildings. One, called Marmlebog Hall (Joanna's
children call her Marmle), is where Kuddie ordered and
maintained the CDs I used to travel with. It also
contains a small labor library. The second building is
a small barn on uneven stilts because of the hill.
It's there for storage. Don't ask me what all is in
it, but I do know it would drive an archaeologist mad.
Among other things, it houses about 15 collapsing
cardboard boxes that contain what academics have
characterized as my personal archives, but are in fact
a jumble of papers and objects, the detritus of over
half a century. The University of California at Davis
once said they wanted to accession my archives. I
said, okay, if you hire somebody to come and plough
through those boxes, because I'm not going to. They
never called back.
The third building up there is an old shed, tiny,
drafty, but a place where I spent many happy hours
making things when I wasn't traveling: wooden swords,
bird feeders, and such. For the past few years the
workshop has been a henhouse with a chicken-wire
enclosure. Nothing fancy: five hens and a large
rooster named Ralph (Rooster-Dooster). Ralph enjoys
the good life. You could poke three holes in Ralph and
go bowling with him. The hens all have names, but I
forget what they are. They give us eggs, which I think
was the idea to begin with.
Last winter a bear broke into the chicken yard and
tore the door off the henhouse. The hens and Ralph
managed to escape by hiding behind an old chest of
drawers. The first hen to reappear showed up in our
dog Bo's mouth; she was uninjured, but that condition
would not have lasted much longer. The others came out
of hiding one at a time. Before our friend Che
Greenwood could come over to fix the door, we feared
the bear would return, plus a great storm was kicking
up. So we set up a round of chicken wire in the
greenhouse, which, as I say, is part of the living
room, and installed the chickens there. Eventually,
the smell was overpowering. How can chickens live with
themselves? It was Friday evening and I'd turned on my
small portable radio, as at this time the power was
out, to listen to a station in Sacramento that
broadcasts opera from 8:00 p.m. till midnight. That
Friday one of the opera excerpts featured was an aria
from Puccini's Tosca sung by Maria Callas. That's when
Ralph decided he liked opera. As she sang, he began to
crow along, so I got Tosca as a duet between Callas
and Ralph. That's when I said, these chickens have got
to go back up the hill. I mean, it was Puccini, for
God's sake.
So. That's domestic life here at our place.
A few words about me and the trade before I wind this
up. When I hit a blacklist in Utah in 1969, I realized
I had to leave Utah if I was going to make a living at
all. I didn't know anything abut this enormous folk
music family spread out all over North America. All I
had was an old VW bus, my guitar, $75, and a head full
of songs, old- and new-made. Fortunately, at the
behest of my old friend Rosalie Sorrels, I landed at
Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York. That seemed
to be ground zero for folk music at the time. Lena
Spencer, as she did with so many, took me in and
taught me the ropes. It took me a solid two years to
realize I was no longer an unemployed organizer, but a
traveling folk singer and storyteller—which, in Utah
at the time, would probably have been regarded as a
criminal activity.
I spent a long time finding my way—couches, floors,
big towns, small towns, marginal pay (folk wages). But
I found that people seemed to like what I was doing.
The folk music family took me in, carried me along,
and taught me the value of song far beyond making a
living. It taught me that I don't need wealth, I don't
need power, and I don't need fame. What I need is
friends, and that's what I found—everywhere—and not
just among those on the stage, but among those in
front of the stage as well.
Now I can no longer travel and perform; overnight our
income vanished. But all of those I had sung for, sung
with, or boarded with, hearing about my condition,
stepped in and rescued us. I can't tell you how
grateful I am to be part of this great caring
community that, for the most part, functions close to
the ground at a sub-media level, a community that has
always cared for its own. We will be forever grateful
for your help during this hard time.
The future? I don't know. But I have songs in a folder
I've never paid attention to, and songs inside me
waiting for me to bring them out. Through all of it,
up and down, it's the song. It's always been the song.
Love and solidarity,
Utah
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