Spice Factory

Saturday night we went to a place called The Spice Factory somewhere in the hip, downtown part of Harbor Town. It was 10 o’clock, and there was no one on the streets. We weren’t sure where to park the car, or if our little Tiny Tin would be there when we got out. It was an adventure. I guess for people who do this kind of thing regularly, this was business as usual, but this was my first time to “catch the music scene,” or whatever the whipper snappers call it. It was a Showcase. (I learned what this meant. It’s not a place where you show off instruments or six different foot pedals for the electric guitarist—when he set them down on the floor in a row, all different colors, red, green, blue, yellow, silver, I asked Robert if he was setting up a tiny train set, you know, some kind of visual to aid the performance. Yes, go ahead and laugh.) Anyway, this Spice Factory was the wide, top floor of an old building, and it was dark in there, and there were a few chairs draped in black right up at the front (No, Robert, I am not going up there right now, just having walked in) with little tea lights lit on little, round, wobbly tables, and a bar at the back with a young woman with big hair, tiny body, and winning smile, dressed all in black (come to think of it, black seemed to be the color of choice), and lots of open floor space between the front and the back. Seemed to me there were crowds missing.

I was there to hear my friend Peter Tigchelaar, who sang at Dale’s Kenya supper, and whom I knew as The Plant Guy. Peter is about my age, I guess, skinny toothpick legs that never stop moving when he plays, John Lenin glasses, and a big mop of grey hair. His band includes the electric guitarist with the toy train, an imperturbable accordionist in a black (I looked this up) pork pie hat, as placid as the stars, and a fiddler, a young woman who sets both fiddle and vocal strings to dancing. Ah. It’s like I’ve never heard music before. Either they are just really good, and I’m hearing them for the first time, or something inside me has made me able to hear good music I just never paid attention to before. Peter was all over, bouncing, leaning over the guitar, stretching to get that chord, but in a “rockers in walkers*” sort of way, comfortable, gentle, natural, just his energy showing through. You could tell he and his band got along, just enjoyed what they were doing, and sang songs about bells, and about Francis St. of Harbor Town, and about his wife, “the mom of my kids,” how she lit him up.

And the lines kept coming through to me, lines that resonated, made sense, unlocked something inside me and made me say, “Yes. Exactly. You nailed it.” Lines like, “When you recover, turn and strengthen your brothers, your sisters and mothers, your one anothers,” and “momentum of grace,” which makes me picture grace as something growing inexorably (I love that word), outward, unstoppably, like wider and wider circles in the stream*. And he sang, “They have come to Throne River for a safe place to mourn.” And he sang a poem by George MacDonald. (George MacDonald! The guy who “baptized the imagination of C.S. Lewis,” and wrote On the Back of the North Wind, and The Princess and the Curdie.” I mean, how cool is that!) “Better to love in loneliness than bask in love all day.”

I asked Peter what he did for a day job. He told me he’s the Plant Guy, walking into businesses all over Harbor Town and beautifying them with plants. He keeps the plants healthy and full of life. “What is the most innovative thing you’ve done on the job?” I ask. “Hmm. I like that question. I guess I’d say I talk to the people where I work. They know me by now. I’ve been the Plant Guy for years.” I like that. A rocker who covers titles like Open* and Up Around the Bend*, and writes songs about billions of bells, and his wife, and grace--a plant guy, who doesn’t just perk up plants in those Harbor Town buildings.

*Bruce Cockburn, the other Canadian singer.

*Waterboys (I looked them up)

*CCR