I know – It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but today I am beginning again, although with a slight difference. While this blog has never been a typical food blog – I always believed I should offer a well written story, and was concerned with many things besides just offering a recipe or restaurant review – it did adhere mostly to food, travel and entertaining.

I certainly haven’t stopped cooking – in fact, I’m probably cooking more than ever – at least at home for myself – but I feel I am compelled now to open things up here.

I have so much more I want to talk about. The blog was originally named PainPerdu Blog meaning “lost bread”. There will still be a theme of loss (for the Perdu) running through it, and I hope will deal in a broader sense with the Pain – the bread. Bread, meaning sustenance and nurturance, as there are many things that sustain us beyond just what we eat. And the pieces I write most definitely will still reflect who I am. So, I hope you will join me on this journey. Thanks.

This piece was written on May 24th – Bob Dylan’s 82nd birthday, and the day Tina Turner died.

What a month it has been – beginning with the death of Harry Belafonte. In my childhood household, like so many others, we heard Day-O, Day-O – the Banana Boat Song – over and over again. We sighed for the Brown Skin Girl, left behind to stay home and mind baby. My uncles sang Scarlet Ribbons to us as lullabies, feeding my nascent love of folk music. We watched the tall, handsome performer march alongside Dr. King on our black and white TV’s.

And then a few days later, Gordon Lightfoot – the clear, light baritone voice I fell in love with as a teenager. In the summers of 1967 and ’68. I would lie in front of the stereo speakers listening to him sing Black Day in July, over and over again – the black days, some of which had erupted just down the hill from my childhood home.

When I got to college, I was fortunate to have a roommate who loved him, too. We listened to him tell the story of his Canada that “existed long before the white man and long before the wheel, the deadly silent silence too silent to be real”.

Between the years of listening to Belafonte and Lightfoot, it was Peter, Paul and Mary, who I sometimes like to joke raised me, as I listened to their voices so often in my formative years. I aspired to speak and sing in the deep rich strong voice of Mary Travers. I grieved for her as if she was a personal friend when she died.

And then I was introduced to Joni Mitchell. I had never heard of her before a group of friends bought her album, Clouds, and gave it to me as a gift on my 17th birthday – only one month before I left for college. I stayed awake late into the night listening to it over and over again – mesmerized by her voice. The Gallery – listening to the various portrayals she sang of – “in ice and green and old blue jeans”, learning “to say I love you right out loud”, and to look at both sides of clouds, life and love.

The music nurtured me, radicalized me, shaped who I became.

Decades after hearing it, I find myself writing down a line of exhortation sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Bernice Reagon, that lived in my memory: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest”.

And how do I even begin to speak about the poetry of Bob Dylan, the bard of our generation, speaking for us all – warning our parents, our teachers, our politicians that there was a battle outside ragin’? Today is Dylan’s birthday – his 82nd. In several past years, I have posted Forever Young to honor him. Today, I realize what has become obvious – we cannot stay forever young – not if we are to live a full life. The hope is that we stay forever vibrant. That we stay healthy as long as possible, that we grow wise, forever awake and curious.

Now, on this day, we also find ourselves mourning Tina Turner.

Ike and Tina lived not far from us in the mid-60’s. We’d occasionally spot her at the Little League games where she came to cheer her step-son, Ike, Jr. He and my brother, Al, were on the same team.

My father loved her – her energy, her passion, and although I never heard him say these words – her raw sexuality on display, I’m sure.

She was to become a role model – a new model of sexuality and independence for women of my generation.

A couple of years ago, I decided to post a favorite black musical artist each day in February as a Black History Month tribute. I have long contended that without black America, there would be no American music.

I began with Jon Batiste, my New Orleans homeboy, and I think how fortunate I was to be born into and nurtured by a community where music was so key to life – the city of Mahalia Jackson and Louis Armstrong. The city where the first opera house on this continent stood. The city where military marching bands accompanied every important moment in its history, and the city – the only city in the South – where enslaved Africans were allowed to form drum circles on Sunday afternoons. The city where my mother went to the nation’s only black Catholic university, on a scholarship to study music, and learned to love the Negro spirituals – as well as operatic arias – she sang and taught to us.

I recall the many, many days I’ve spent sitting in the Jazz Tent at the Jazz Fest there, experiencing what I can only call magical moments. I recall sitting there one year, pondering the irony that I was then making my way through the memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, where the author describes a miserable excuse for a musical concert under the constant and petulant eye of the state police who forbade the performers, as well as the concert-goers, to show any feeling, and considering my good fortune.

On the second day of my month long musical tribute, I posted Donny Hathaway. Al, joined in the process, – “so glad he made it”, he commented, cheering on my selections, sometimes critiquing my list, gently reprimanding me for those I had not yet included. I knew he would be pleased at the selection of Donny.

Al also left us this month. And indeed, my youngest brother lobbied early on that Hathaway’s A Song For You be included in the musical remembrance at Al’s memorial service. I offer this song for you now: