Treasure

I try to pack as lightly as I can when I travel ~ one backpack and a shoulder bag in which to carry a book, a few accessories and my lenses.

I have been attending the North American Folk Alliance conference for the last eleven years now, and while I endeavoured to bring home as many promotional CDs as possible at my first several conferences, I have come to prefer packing fewer and fewer CDs in subsequent years. Now that downloads are considerably more prevalent these days, I could almost get away with returning home with none, but there are a few performers from year to year whose CDs I like to add to my library.

Two artists I was blown away (read: BLOWN AWAY!) by at this year's conference were Shotgun Party (western swing) and Kyrie Kristmanson (eclectic, to say the least), the latter being merely 18! The driving force of Shotgun Party is its lead singer/guitarist/songwriter, Jenny Parrott ~ great voice, great lyrics, charisma, talent, energy, bon vivance.

Perhaps the most fulfilling moment at the event, however, had to do with meeting Irish singer Cynthia Bennett (whose CD is on the top of the stack), who told me a story that still has my heart aflutter.

As a teenager, she had moved from Ireland to Texas and while in Texas fell in love with a boy. As history would have it, however, he was sent to Vietnam. But before he left for his military duty, he broke off his relationship with Cynthia as he didn't want her pining for someone who wasn't apt to return home alive.

After getting married and having a family, Cynthia moved back to Ireland; her boy survived the war and eventually wound up in Japan.

When Cynthia got older, she moved back to Texas to be nearer to her daughter and her granddaughter (I didn't ask how her first marriage ended). At some point, her family found out that the boy she'd loved so long ago had also moved back to texas and was living within sixty miles of Cynthia. They conspired to secretly get the two back together, which they did.

Forty years after they had first broken up, they were married.

But the story doesn't quite end there...

Before the boy had left for Vietnam, she told me, his grandmother had died and had left him her wedding ring, which he put in a safe deposit box at a bank. At the time, he had said that the only person that would wear the ring was Cynthia.

At this point, Cynthia held out her left hand and said to me, "And this is the ring."

[After being out of town for five days, I spent the day editing photos, with the first of the backblips starting [url=http://blipfoto.com/view.php?id=110525&month=2&year=2008]here[/url].]