In the fall of 2010, while Hannah was in her 7th month of pregnancy with our first daughter, Nat Baldwin offered me a chance to play a showcase-type concert at the Zebulon club in Brooklyn where he had a short residence. I had played with Nat in Dirty Projectors for about half a year, but we also had some shared experiences prior to that, playing with Viking Moses and Deer Tick. Not only would he be on the bill, but also one of my favorite singers, Diane Cluck.

This was a hugely exciting prospect for me, but there was a small wrinkle. The show was on a weeknight, and I had just begun my first teaching job. These were, in fact, the very first weeks of “my brilliant career.” If I had been working at a public school district, there would be a pool of substitute teachers and a contractually normal way of requesting time off. But I had landed at an orthodox Jewish day school. Days off were discouraged because the Jewish holidays already turned the calendar to Swiss cheese. The staff was small, and we were asked to find our own subsitutes, calling from a list of ladies in the community. The rabbis were not prudish about goyishe matters, but I, as a neophyte, was sheepish about telling them that I needed the day off to rush off to New York City and play strange music in a night club. Neither did I wish for all of the curious little 13 year olds to sniff it out and forever afterward hound me about playing guitar.

Conveniently, I had some friends who needed to go to New York City on that day anyway. I decided that I would teach my normal school day, which ended around 2pm, have my friends pick me up in my old Dodge Shadow, and race off to the city. The drive takes at least 6 or 7 hours, so I figured I could try to sleep in the back of the car, arrive just in time for the concert, play it, then drive a solo all-nighter back to Pittsburgh to teach the next school day.

The plan worked out fine. I played the concert. There were a lot of people there. It was niether my best, nor my worst. I drove back home, high on caffeine, and taught the next school day, exhausted. I don’t really remember the details, but I’m here today, so I must have survived.

The trip did produce one extremely important memory, though.

With the birth of our daughter imminent, Hannah and I had been plowing through 1000s upon 1000s of names. Hannah, especially, had been fascinated with names and anticipating the task her whole life. I had pretty strong feelings about it as well. Reading through books of names, Hannah would keep handwritten lists of her favorites, on which she would solicit my opinion. We used a foetal nickname, Wolf, but by the time I was going off to play my show, we had winnowed the field down to four or five more serious choices. One was Simone (partly out of devotion to Nina Simone). Others included Ada, Bea, Una, Sidera…

On my way to NYC, lying in the back seat, trying to sleep, I had my friends play one of my “desert island discs”, The Tired Sounds by Stars of the Lid. If you’re not privy, the title does kind of give it away. A double CD of slow, round, deep, warm sounds that reliably pushes all of the right physiological buttons if you want to calm down, slow down, nestle down. At this point in my life, I had been therapeutically imbibing The Tired Sounds regularly, even ritualistically, for years. I had a very intimate relationship with it. So much so, indeed, that I could easily put it on as background while trying to snooze through a slightly tense, afternoon car-ride.

holding her real loved her Her name is Sidera 30 minutes crying.

The last of those, Hannah had written on one of her lists, but going back to the books and the internet, we could never find the original source. Perhaps she had made an error reading or writing a name like Sadira, and by lucky accident we had this