This morning she was wearing her usual platform high-tops and a pair of black, hip-hugging cargos, but instead of one of her skimpy midriff-baring tops, she’d opted for a baggy sweatshirt, black like her cargos with the words NO FEAR stenciled on the front in bold yellow letters. She dressed like a skateboarder, no question, but the scruffy wardrobe only seemed to accentuate her fine-boned beauty, and it couldn’t hide the regality of the fairy queen she was.

Okay, so she was a seer and not a queen, but that didn’t change a thing except that I have to laugh as I use those words. All my life I’ve avoided the weirder side of life that my brother embraces, this idea that side by side with our world lies a secret, hidden world of fairies and goblins, ghosts, and other improbabilities. But the past two years have changed that. I’ve seen and experienced far too much that can’t be rationally explained away, culminating in my showing up here at the Woodforest Plaza Mall a couple of nights a week to provide music for a fairy court’s revels. I mean, once you’re part of a pickup band made up of little stick people and a troll playing a stand-up bass, it’s pretty much impossible to keep laying the “I don’t believe in this crap” card down on the table.

So now I’m a believer, but I’m not all evangelical about it like my brother Christy, or the Professor and Jilly, wanting everybody else to see what I see. I’ve just adjusted these long-held, if erroneous, beliefs and carry on with my life.

I wish I could say the same about some of the other personality quirks that seem to be hardwired into my psyche. Well, not my feelings about music. I don’t ever want to buy into the idea that recordings are anything more than a snapshot of a moment—especially not now, when they’ve got the software to tweak a bad performance so that every single element of a recording comes out sounding note perfect.

Music needs to live and breathe; it’s only pure when it’s performed live with nothing hidden—neither its virtuosity nor the inevitable mistakes that come when you try to push it into some new, as yet unexplored place. It’s improvisational jazz. It’s the jam, the session. The best music is played on street corners and pubs, in kitchens and on porches, in the backrooms of concert halls and in the corner of a field, behind the stage, at a music festival. It’s played for the joy and the sadness and the connection it makes between listeners and players.