This winter when I went up to Minnesota to visit the family I missed something that they all did together after I left. My long lost cousin Mary and her husband came down to the Twin Cities for a show and to meet my siblings and I was gone. They went to see The Bad Plus, a band I wasn’t familiar with but as soon as my brother told me the name I checked them out and was blown away. Totally an aside, but they are now one of my go-to artists. Anyway…so there is a whole backstory I won’t go into here but needless to say I grew up not knowing there was another cousin out there I hadn’t heard of.

Since things have been shut down, Mary has been having online open mic nights on Thursdays and invited me a couple of times to show up but I hadn’t been able to make it work with kids and running and whatever else I’ve been up to so this week was going to be my week. I spent the day with the kids making sure that they had school work done and getting a workout/run down before the 7 o’clock start time. Once I got logged in and everything we traded songs for 90 minutes playing back and forth across the country with family I’d never met. How crazy is that? Not only that but it was the first open mic night that I played, live or otherwise, since I played at the Ginko Coffeehouse on Snelling Avenue in MN. Funny story about that night, we played and this guy offered my friends and I some weed outback, said it would make us play better. We didn’t take him up on it so I guess we’ll never know how things might have panned out.

As Mary was signing, something really struck me. Mary sounded a lot like Gramma Betty did when she would sing, which was pretty much all of the time. I think the song I remember her singing the most was “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” from My Fair Lady. There was something in the timbre of Mary’s voice that threw way back to those times when my brother Nathan and I were living at my grandparents’ house, dreading the move to Texas that awaited us at the end of the school year. She would move around the kitchen, around the house, down the stairs to the freezer or canned food storage under the stairs and we always knew where she was because she was singing wherever she went.

Before I got off the video call last night, I made sure to tell Mary that she reminded me of Gramma Betty. I feel like those connections, the ones that can only be based in DNA, are so fun to discover and can be something to cherish even if they are purely nature over nurture.

I got up this morning hammered by the pollen and weather changes that blew in with the storm last night and took some time getting laundry done and baking more banana bread for the relay tomorrow. Not another 12 hour run tomorrow, just a 50k split between three runners virtually passing off the baton. I worked out and then went for a 2.23 mile run in memory of Ahmaud Arbery who was gunned down while running near his home. I’m not going to go on a rant here, my political and social beliefs should be pretty clear by this point, but the fact that this young man was killed on a run because of the color of his skin is unacceptable. I was talking to a friend who got catcalled on a run, I’ve been catcalled on a run, among other things, but my privilege is that I don’t have to worry about someone singling me out because of my complexion. Do better.