Art, I am touched and humbled.

I did not, till now, realize the extent of what you're up against. After I posted, I combed a few other threads and gradually got an idea that you were facing something pretty serious. In fact I had just revisited this thread to add a caveat that I hoped I was not being naive in my generally upbeat commentary. Instead I found your friendly, considerate reply. Thank you for that courage.

I'll say what I had intended to say...that I was afraid my well-meant jabber was all too easy for someone to say who isn't battling MS or any of the other diseases that attack your very ability to coordinate enough to play. That is way out of my league, and I hope I did not come over as unnecessarily Pollyannaish. Especially in view of what you said about friends thinking you "gave up too easily." Believe me, I was not implying that, though I see I could have been construed to be.

Your story is a real learning experience for me. I admire you more than I can say for your long battle and that unvanquished spirit that comes through so clearly in your posts. I cannot think how I can have not known this through all these years of knowing about you, hearing your music...your fine ear for the right touch in the right place that makes a song come alive.

Your sentence "I thought the music would always be there" is a real heartbreaker. I once wrote an unlucky-in-love song called "I Thought You Would Always Be There," trying somehow to convey that sense of the floor being pulled from beneath you... all of us starting out with that kind of blissful ignorance, thinking that what's here now will always be here, only to find that's not so, that time takes away, eventually, everything. Bitter wisdom of aging, which still takes my breath away in surprise.

What you have said about the instruments goes equally for me. While I've always primarily been a songster, only slightly a picker of instrumentals, the guitar, banjo, mandolin etc have been extensions of my hands in very much the way McLuhan argued. Strung-up fingertips, as it were, for pulling music out of the air. I could no longer imagine life without them (at least until my three-year hiatus/I-hate-us) than I could imagine life with no hands.

I'm right with you, too, in that, though I doted on the idea of singing as a group (Chad Day, Molly Scott and I briefly made a Weavers-style trio, and I did jug band and oldtime country music with Joe Bussard et al in Maryland for a while), I never could really function in a group. Too individualized. Couldn't remember rehearsed moves because I was too used to making it up as I went along, and every performance was different. In a sense I had no learned moves to fall back on because I was always improvisational and could never really be any other way. So music had to be a loose framework.

Art, I am pleased to be in touch with you and only hope you can feel the genuine fellow feeling coming through the awkwardness of words. Be as well as you can, my friend. And may music find a way to stay part of your life and doings in every possible way.

Bob