The world in 2000.  Few folks had mobile phones.  There were celebrity websites and chatrooms, but no social media and no YouTube.  Mani-pedi wasn’t common parlance.  Artificial nails weren’t common.  Simpler times.  This is the world of Caitlinn Grace Burnett and Ross Larkin Sutherland in Madison County, Montana during the Celtic season of Lughnasadh. 

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:  The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”  Kurt Vonnegut wrote those words in one of his last essays.  Email came today from an old friend and it was rather cryptic but it concerned Kurt Vonnegut.  I’m living out in Montana and most of my news comes by the United Postal Service in the form of the Chicago Tribune.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t know Kurt had died until a week later when my newspapers arrive.  Today was one of those ghastly days at work when a person needs a break and checks their email quickly while the boss is in the bathroom, but my boss doesn’t dally in the bathroom, so I don’t have time to read online news.

“He had gorilla arms.  I first saw him throw pottery cylinders at the county fair in Great Falls.  I was 5 or 6 years old.  His arms were much longer than an average person.  This was before his ‘throwing the clay at the wall to see if it would stick’ phase.  Back then, he was throwing big cylinders and then making sculptures by slicing them up and putting them together again.  Rudy Autio loosened him up stylistically.”  Tall with his hair pulled back, Brian Persha paused briefly and continued his story while standing in the middle of the ice pavilion at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds.  “They were master production potters.  Techniques of throwing, glazing, firing held no challenges for them; Peter Voulkos and Autio were looking for challenges.

My parents didn’t own a TV when I was growing up in Montana; we had a phonograph, which was the center of our family life.  Every summer, we drove East in a tiny VW to visit grandparents and Sam Goody’s record store in Chicago.  Dad would spend hours looking through rows and rows of albums for folk music gems.  When we arrived home, big boxes would arrive in the mail full of Dad’s mining efforts and hours would be spent critically listening.  He was harsh; Bob Dylan’s first album went straight into the comedy section where it still sits on the shelf beside The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart.