After plagiarizing animal stories in grade school, a teacher told me I must really want to be a writer, but I thought I’d rather be with animals, garden and make music so I got high, played piano and gardened. When botanical promiscuity and otherwise wasn’t enough, I became an inventor, baritone soloist, choir director and overall failure while remaining cute.
Though my resume called me a “multi-disciplined creator” – my parents had other words for it. When reality show judges mocked me on national television, I did what any reasonable person would do: I wrote America’s first reality musical. Then I spent the next decades singing in nursing homes, landscaping and designed a few swimming pools along the way.
My Facebook posts worried friends. While others shared politics and puppy pictures, my essays howled at the moon. Self-deprecation earned likes, and I became a Pavlov’s dog for reader attention. Some suggested I had a memoir in me – so I cobbled essays together.
Somewhere in there I’d also written over a hundred songs. Forty-six of them found their way into Storm Drain Symphony. It took eighteen years, not because I couldn’t finish it, but because I wasn’t ready to be heard.
Dementia patients taught me to sing from the heart; fifteen years of oversharing taught me how to say the unsayable out loud. Storm Drain Symphony is the result. BTW being seventy-one and 2/3rds blind, I’m a fan of audiobooks.
Names have been changed to protect innocence – the quality I cherish most in people. Even the dead deserve stories everyone can live with.
ABOUT JED WOLF
Jed Wolf has shared a 28-year relationship with his husband, Dave — a painter and retired teacher who has become his closest creative collaborator. Dave serves as the first listener and plain-reader feedback channel for Jed’s work, including Storm Drain Symphony, and their partnership blends artistic partnership with the ordinary intimacy of a decades-long marriage.
The two live in Davis Shores, a St. Augustine, Florida neighborhood where Jed is an active presence in community life — involved with Front Porch Fridays and the Davis Shores Centennial Hibiscus Project. At home, their world includes a garden built around a pond ecosystem, with a growing interest in Florida-native plantings, and two cats, Pablo and Wincey.
Music has become a renewed thread in Jed’s life there too: after not singing or playing for three years following Covid, he walked into a rehearsal at Memorial Presbyterian Church, joined other choirs and is a baritone soloist now and then.
Altogether, it’s a life built around creative partnership, neighborhood rootedness, and a return to writing music after twenty years silent.
