November 30, 2007
AA 383, Dallas to Tucson, 9PM
Dan the Tan Van mileage: 301,254 (R.I.P.)

The Big News

Last year on one of my trips down to Guatemala I met an Australian couple on the shuttle bus to the airport in Guatemala City. They were there doing some aid work with Rotary. We chatted while the shuttle sped up the windy road outside of Antigua and sunk gradually into the city traffic. I found them to be just as friendly as all the Australians I've ever met — that's a cool thing about Aussies. When we got to the airport, the gentleman handed me a tie pin shaped like a kangaroo with an Australian flag and a Rotary symbol on it.

That was a nice thing for him to do (in spite of the fact that I don't find occasion to wear ties much) and so I accepted the kindness gratefully and the pin found its way to the bottom of my backpack as I wound my way through various airports and roads.

It wasn't until several months later that I came back across that pin among a few other neglected things. By then, I had applied for a Rotary World Peace Fellowship and written in the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia as my first choice of universities. Somehow the pin looked quite different to me with the addition of that new context, and it had the air of a good omen.

Whether it was the pin, the recommendation letters I wheedled out of a few friends or just a lapse in judgement on the part of the selection committee, I got a phone call a few weeks ago during which a polite gentleman from the Rotary International office informed me that I have been selected to receive a Fellowship for the class of 2008-2010.

What that means, in case you missed my earlier hopeful missives, is that I'll be attending U.Q. for a year and a half, all expenses paid, to pursue a Masters in Peacemaking. The technical title of the degree is "Advanced Masters in International Relations (Peace and Conflict Resolution)," which is a lot to print on a business card, but sure sounds like something I'd like to spend some time on.

I'm profoundly indebted to Rotary for choosing me as one of sixty Fellows worldwide (many of which Fellows are not fellows).

Since classes start six months later in the southern hemisphere, I won't be heading down for classes until the first of 2009, though I will be making a quick trip in March to play at the Australian National Folk Festival in Canberra. I was prepared to stop performing as early as June '08 if I had been sent to my second choice (Tokyo), but now I find I have a little extra time, so we have booked my final farewell show at the Grey Eagle for November 29, 2008.

After that I'm going to stop performing, at least for a while, and maybe forever. I know myself well enough to suspect that I would have a very hard time playing a little bit of music on the side, so in order to give these studies the attention they merit I'm going to hang up my microphone and be a student. My hope is that I'll be playing more in the living room than I do now, though I'll be playing less on stage. I'm not making any grandiose promises about never picking up a guitar again, though. I'll be keeping up the web site the whole time, too, so keep in touch.

Brisbane is a sizable city, so I imagine we'll be living in an urban style (i.e. no car), and we're both looking forward to that. Severing my emotional ties with Dan the Tan Van would be hard, of course, but alas, I'm having to do that now. After 301,000 miles, my mechanic gave me the bad news a couple of weeks ago that he doesn't recommend my taking Dan out for roadtrips anymore. Apparently the differential's loose, and the mechanic said that though I might get another 100,000 miles in, he could no longer suggest that I head out on the road for long trips. So if you need a 'round-town work van, feel free to ring me. I picked up a new Honda Element to be my road ride.

Of course, the next thing I need to do is name the Element, so feel free to send ideas. It's boxy (making me consider Johann, as in Johann Sebastian Box) and very blue (prompting Deanna to put forward all kinds of bad ideas about various Smurf characters). It also strikes me as male, somehow. If you have ideas, you can contribute your proverbial two cents in the guest book.

photo by Margaret Torrence

Last weekend I did a split-bill show at the Grey Eagle with my long-time friend Christine Kane. We spent the whole night on stage together swapping songs and stories and had a ball. The show sold out, and they turned away lots of folks (sorry!). I did a new poem based on true events that happened in Knoxville, Tennessee last summer at a Klan march, where a corps of clowns (the Coup Clutz Clowns) came to counter-protest in brilliant and creative ways, meeting hatred with humor and winning the day. If you want to hear it, it's exclusively available here, and it's called White Flour.

The Grey Eagle show wasn't the only fun one lately, though — I got to perform with the trio (Mike and River) at the North Carolina Balloon Fest in October, complete with dancing girls in front of the stage:

photo by David Lemond

I also had a great Halloween show in Pensacola, Florida with another wonderful songwriter friend, Beth Wood. They asked us to come in costume, so I pinned sponges all over myself and went as a self-absorbed folksinger.

Recent shows have also taken me up to Wisconsin and Illinois, where I did a keynote for a camp and a show in Chicago. While there, I stopped by Obama Headquarters, where a couple of friends of mine are working full-time for the campaign. Deanna and I are planning to road-trip down to Columbia, SC to see him next Sunday, and I'm looking forward to that. I think he's the one we need.

And now it's time for a little holiday break; I'll spend some time with Deanna and my family, some time working on the house, some time on hot chocolate and fires in the woodstove. I'm on my way to Tucson now to do two shows there this weekend, one with a group that works with troubled teens and one at a Methodist church, and I'll be back in the southwest again in a couple of weeks, too, for a wedding of a friend. On that trip Deanna and I will take a couple of extra days in the desert to be warm in the winter. Life's good.

And I better soak up the break while I've got it. On December 30 I'm playing in Orlando, then a Rotary Orientation weekend in January, then two weeks in Guatemala working with PEG, shows in NC, VA and Ohio. February is Georgia, Mississippi, California, Tennessee, Florida, North Dakota and Minnesota. Yep, that was just February. March: a show in Virginia, then Australia to play the National Folk Festival. It goes on from there, but you get the idea. If you want the details on the upcoming tour dates, click here.

I'll leave you for this time on an inspiring note - I got an email a few months ago from a college student at Sewanee, Eric Keen, saying that he had been thinking about something he heard me say at a concert: that it's worth considering where your own passions and gifts might provide ways to be of service (along the lines of the oft-cited Buechner quote: "The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.")

Eric said that he and his friend Jason had an idea to bike across Canada to raise money for PEG, the Guatemalan School Project that Deanna and I founded three and a half years ago. We've matched them up with a project to raise money for a school in the village of Chacaya on Lake Atitlan, and they are hoping to raise $20,000 by biking all the way across Canada in forty days. The site and the video they put together are beautiful. Check them out here: canadacrossing08.org.

And as the holidays come on, I should mention that we've recently put my children's book, the S.S. Bathtub, my DVD, One Night in North Carolina, and my box set on sale ($15, $15 and $80, respectively). Click here to pick that stuff up.

More importantly, there are downloadable gift cards at the PEG web site if you want to make a donation in someone's honor to schools in Guatemala, including sponsoring Eric and Jason on their ride.

...and now the plane is descending. My ears are getting ready to pop and that little restless shuffle that seems to happen on planes that are about to land is happening now. I'll turn off my computer and save the flight attendant one reprimand. Today is Tucson.

By the way, I took this picture on the little walkway out to the plane:

Caution: some flight attendants are very bad dancers

Once in the old days when my sister Kathy was handling my booking we had a funny conversation about my tour schedule that ended up with the perfectly intelligible question (to us): "How far is Tuesday from Chicago?" And that sort of sums it up.

I hope your holidays will bring rest and space as well as the good kind of chaos and energy. Wishing you peace,

David LaMotte

 

P.S. (A few days later) Barack was great!