My Life with the Indigo Girls

After college I moved to Atlanta. My boyfriend lived on Emory Avenue and attended Emory Law School. I had a room in an apartment shared with two women law students on Briarcliff Road. There was no bus between Emory Ave and Briarcliff Road, so when I got off the train at night I’d take a bus to one of the two locations (the buses stopped running at 6) and there I’d be. I was selling/writing classified ads for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and very happy to have a job with a salary, two weeks vacation a year, and health insurance.

Most nights, I’d get off the bus and walk down Emory Ave, past the house rented by Amy Ray, one of the members of the Indigo Girls. Sometimes they would be rehearsing. I didn’t have any money, so I never saw the Indigo Girls (or any other band) in a real venue, but we would go to an Emory dive bar, The Dugout, to hear them. One night I remember particularly a friend was visiting from out of town and we met at the Dugout. A handwritten sign on the door said the Indigo Girls would be playing that night. I was so excited, especially to share them with my friend. It felt like an utter gift. They were in no way a national act at that time, just the best local folk duo in town.

I lived in Atlanta from 1986-1988, and then I went to New York to get my MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. I wasn’t there a month when I heard on the radio—“Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls! It seems they were opening for Neil Young’s tour and hitting the big time.

I also remember a clear, beautiful spring day on campus. I saw a group of students sitting on the lawn singing a capella. Their voices, singing harmony, were beautiful. And I sat down on the grass, pretty far off, to listen to them sing “Closer to Fine” with great gusto. In the verse that begins “I went to see the master of philosophy,” they really tuned in, and nearly yelled the lines: “I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper and I was free!”  It was 1990, and 30 years later I can see them and hear them clearly.

In 2005, I moved to Minnesota for a year as a resident scholar, and teaching at the School of Theology was the liturgical music powerhouse, Don E. Saliers. Everyone was quick to point out he was the father of Emily Saliers, the other half of the Indigo Girls. I enjoyed Don and learned so much from him that year, and also enjoyed the quiet beauty and kindness of his wife, Jane. She reminded me slightly of a woman who lived downstairs from me in that apartment building on Briarcliff Road. The elderly woman played the piano beautifully every day, and since the walls were thin, we got to hear her play. And when she left her house, she was always wearing a dress, with hose and low heels, and always wearing gloves. She was thin and elegant and drove a big car. I was not familiar with the Southern lady before I met her.

I recently interviewed Don by phone about music in the time of quarantine and a book he’d recently published. He told me he was listening to a lot of Indigo Girls music, and that their new album was terrific. So this morning, while making my mother’s apple cake, I asked Alexa to play the Indigo Girls on Spotify.

And all the lyrics and harmonies were right there. I could sing every word of “Closer to Fine.” I thought of that beautiful day at Sarah Lawrence. And then they played the song “Prince of Darkness.” I knew every word and did my own yelling on the lines, “There was a time I asked my father for a dollar and he gave it a ten dollar raise!” And of course, I thought of Emily and her theologian father, because I always think of this lyric when I hear the verse in church that asks, “What father, if his son asks for bread, would give him a stone?” The song begins, “My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark.” 

It went on. A few live Dylan covers. I recognized “Gallileo” before a single word was sung.

And though I knew it, I had not ever really felt “Secure Yourself.” It opens like this: “Secure yourself to heaven, hold on tight, the night has come. Fasten up your earthly burdens, you have just begun.”  And here I am struggling to put together an apple cake and yet also remembering my mother making apple pie and my sister and I sitting at the kitchen table eating the apple peels. Making poetry in my head as I prepare the cake. Here I am with my Stage 4 cancer diagnosis, which is held at bay and I’m doing fine, really, but also every day dying. I am dying. I don’t think about it, and I never cry. I haven’t cried since my diagnosis 4 ½ years ago, though I have tried. Eventually, though, I stopped worrying about it, because really my life is too beautiful and I’m happy. And over and over they sang, “fasten up your earthly burdens, you have just begun.” And that, for me, is the thrill I sometimes feel knowing that there is something beyond, and hard as it is to believe, it will be better. It will be some kind of existence that I will want to be in for eternity. Hard as it is to believe given the beauty of this earth and this life, even in grief and pain and struggle.

The cake takes two hours to bake at a low temperature. It is my absolute favorite cake, partly because you can eat a big hunk of it for breakfast. I don’t know how I came to know that fact, except that at some point my mother must have given me a big hunk for breakfast, like a ten dollar raise.

During that time I listened to the Indigo Girls, and remembered so many good things about my life, as I often do these days. I organized my spice shelf to put in there the new batch of spices I got from Penzey’s yesterday. I made pizza dough that will proof in the fridge for two days. I cleaned a lot of dishes. I reorganized the peppers and tomatoes on the counter though I did not chop them up to freeze them.

I sang along, often at the top of my lungs.