The Ordinary Times

Falls

Here’s “When I’m Gone” from Kind of Like Spitting‘s Phil Ochs covers album Learn: The Songs of Phil Ochs:

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This is a song my parents used to sing. I sometimes cry now when I hear it and think of them, Mom strumming her 40-year-old Yamaha her mom bought her and which my brother now has, dad plucking at the mandolin and singing those high, mountain-style harmonies.

Once, on a family road trip to California, we stopped at a cafe somewhere in southern Oregon. Through some bribery or nepotism with the highway department, the sign at the exit reads, in plain white block capital letters on standard highway-sign green background, “HEAVEN ON EARTH” with the exit arrow pointed right. Maybe they get away with it because the place really lives up to the name. Cinnamon rolls the size of your head, steaks and potatoes, big mounds of greens. It’s the only thing there. It seems to sit on its haunches by the freeway, waiting for something or someone maybe. Watching the cars get sleeker and brighter year by year. Watching the people get more hurried and harried, less curious. Watching more of them drive straight past the green sign and the block letters, unconcerned about missing something the Oregon Department of Transportation deems truly to be Heaven on Earth.

We weren’t there yet, my family. We lived in some bubble of anachronism, a little sphere of public radio, 80s era Bob Dylan, road trips and cassette tapes. We stopped for dinner.

As we were eating, a somewhat beat looking woman, a waitress there, recognized my folks. Apparently they had been in a christian commune together. She was living there now, at Heaven on Earth, having left the commune, drifting on and off drugs for a while, and landed somewhere south of Roseburg and north of Grants Pass on a bend of I-5 as lonely as any place can be on that strange strip of concrete. She lived out back, there was a farm with goats. My brother and I petted the goats. She asked if my folks still played music. They did. She asked them to play some songs there, at Heaven on Earth.

So they did.

And I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here