Rock Me to Sleep

Certain moments take on a permanence, where you come to remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when information changed you. A year ago on May 1st I was outside in the courtyard at Seattle University Law School, enjoying one of those brilliant Goldilocks days that arrive in the Pacific Northwest every spring, preparing for the class I was going to teach. Except I wasn’t preparing for class, I was flipping through social media (I think it was BlueSky), when I saw someone posted that Jill Sobule had died in a fire. "Remember what Abraham Lincoln said – “don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,'” I thought. (I like to think Jill would have laughed at that one). Until my brother texted me back and confirmed it. Amidst the grief, shock, mystery, disbelief, horror and sadness there was also concern for my brother. It’s far more accurate to say I was a fan of Jill’s rather than a friend, but my brother and Jill go a ways back. She did several benefit performances for his theater company and, moreover, had ample amounts of the same qualities he has: wit, talent, discipline, and humanity. And queerness. Plus she was a wicked good guitar player. Which is why I’m thumbing the chords here to her song “Rock Me to Sleep” - duplicating the part on her album proved too much for me to master (yet) in the limited time I had available to make this recording. As I can be a notorious insomniac, though, her lyrics sit right at home. “The long dark hands of the sycamore tree” could have come right out of John Prine, and her rendering of the wee wee hours reads like personal experience. I guess it’s a good thing she was up all night, for limited time was something she had too. I’m quite confident, though, the quiet vibrations of the night are now rocking and holding her in peaceful rest.