Last fall, just about a year ago, I fired Regina from her Welcome columnist job. I had what I considered a good reason; she’d neglected to send me her essay for the month and she’d neglected to let me know it wouldn’t be sent. Now, the first offense isn’t really an offense at all. All of our writers have to miss from time to time, but they do agree to a hard and fast rule that when they miss, they let me know, even if it’s just a day or two before. Regina didn’t miss any more than the other writers, but she had the habit of forgetting to let me know, and that was a real problem because I was caught flat-footed when I arose at four a.m. each morning to get the site updated. (I’m in no mood for surprises after dragging myself out of bed each morning and spending three or four hours updating the site.)
So then, we have what I call the three strikes agreement. Miss as many columns as you have to, but miss three times without telling the web master ahead of time and you’re out. Regina was well over the three when I lowered the boom. She was shocked…then angry…then very sad…and then, I guess, more or less just hurt. I told her she could keep writing columns and send them to me and I’d use them to fill in, but she wanted none of that. She wanted her fourth Friday and I wouldn’t give it back to her.
Regina and I, of course, saw one another at the Great 48, nodded hello but didn’t talk. There was a definite chill, no denying that, and I found myself wondering how long it would take to ease back into our twenty-five year friendship. As it turned out, it didn’t take very long. Both creatures of habit, Regina and I found ourselves camping just across the dusty road from one another at Parkfield as we did every year. I couldn’t have been at the fest more than half an hour or so before one of us approached the other. (I will tell you truly, I do not remember which of us did the approaching. Doesn’t really matter.) Naturally enough, the result was a flare of anger, followed by a quick but brief torrent of tears, followed by many bear hugs, followed by a re-set of Fourth Friday Harmony Roads, along with a quite specific game plan for preventing future “surprises”…a game plan, I hasten to add, that worked perfectly for the remainder of Regina Bartlett’s Welcome columnist career.
I didn’t see Regina at Grass Valley, which wasn’t especially surprising given the size of both the venue and the crowd, but by Wednesday afternoon at Plymouth we two settled in to camp chairs underneath the big sycamore tree that we both camped next to for the past ten or so years. As old folks are want to do…and yes, since our meeting in the rickety old garage behind the wood-frame house in Watsonville where we’d met twenty-five years earlier at a Pete and Lora Hicks picking party, Regina and I had become just that—old folks. We talked some about the health issues each of us were wrestling with. I told of my recent shoulder surgery and how it was taking its damned time to heal. She acknowledged her continuing battle with diabetes, which she felt she had under pretty good control. And we talked about the years and years of music we’d shared, the countless festivals and campouts and jams we’d attended and the many close friends we’d had in common. We even talked a bit about things we might have done differently given a second chance. The two hours under the sycamore tree wasn’t so much a philosophical discussion as it was a rambling, matter-of-fact recalling of the different but more or less parallel paths we’d followed through a quarter century of this thing we call bluegrass music.
By the time we finished talking we’d polished off a half a bottle of good Merlot and found ourselves quite able, and even happy, to agree that each of us really couldn’t complain too awfully much if we were to drop dead right there on the spot. That’s how good each of us felt our lives in the music we loved had been. And I’ll tell you this with absolute certainty—Regina was feeling just that way when she slipped under the covers last Wednesday morning.