Last year I wrote that I might wait a few months before listening to John K. Samson’s last two songs in his serial of the cat named Virtute. I finally bought the album containing them, Winter Wheat. I didn’t cry, tho’ I should have. “Virtute at Rest,” ambiguously, maintains the cat’s nagging, I swear you can do it, while the human marks the 21st day at the “17th Street Treatment Centre.”
Like I said, I should have cried because today is my own 81st day drinking nearly nothing, sans treatment, centre or self-help, and I’m not white knuckling. On May 21 I had a pivotal CT scan that, unlike previous borderline liver scans, nudged me to regroup. Like a cocktail, the scan was the sum of its parts: ostensibly requisitioned for a kidney stone but with seven further findings. I’m haunted by what a listener said about Virtute, quoted in my comment: “This song series might have saved my life, more than once, over the last two decades.” It didn’t save mine, because I heard only half its parts until today, but, as the commenter says, it “might have” or, rather for me, “still might.”
Continue reading “81 Days, 81 Years”
