He picked me up at the Cold Spring train station: a tall, lone and gawky, slightly bent, grizzled, yet still unmistakable figure at the other end of the platform shading his blue eyes from the rain. As I raised my hand to identify myself, he began walking towards me. Soon, he was close enough for me to see he was wearing faded Levis that ended just short of his ankles, a ratty pair of sneakers, a wool hat from under which what is left of his gray hair poked out, and a public radio fund drive sweatshirt from 1992.
“Are you Nell?” he asked in the voice that belongs to the body.
“I am,” I said, shaking his hand. “It is so nice to meet you.”
***
Twenty minutes later I was standing in Pete Seeger’s kitchen. We had driven up from the valley to the high hill and home where Pete and his family have lived since 1949 when they built a log cabin from instructions they found in a library book and with wood they chopped in their surrounding seventeen acres of forest.
“Toshi, we’re home,” he said, swinging the front door shut and walking over to the kitchen table where he began clearing away space to sit and talk. Pete’s wife of 66 years was doing the dishes. There was pea soup on the stove and the room smelled of fire and fresh bread. I stood for a moment by the front door, trying to process the moment.
Barack Obama had been elected president a week and a half earlier, and the country was still exhaling after the excitement of the campaign. Just a year ago, it might have been possible to dismiss Pete as a forgotten lefty with socialist sympathies, a singular relic of another time and place who had peaked along with the dewy-eyed folk revival in the early 1960s, and who was living out his final years in the forest, physically and intellectually removed from a world that had moved on without him. But lately it had become clear that Pete is no relic. This 90-year-old man who was straightening the piles of holiday cards in need of stamps and addresses on his kitchen table, who still chops his own wood and owns neither a computer nor a television nor an answering machine, is relevant, contemporary, vital. Essential, even.
Windows that look down on the Hudson River, a bridge across it, and the surrounding Catskill mountains, dominate two sides of the house. The trees were bare and dusk was falling. On the bridge two miles below us, crawling across the deepening blue of the evening sky, I could see the tiny red and white lights of cars. A woodstove in the corner heated the room, a scruffy, elderly tabby slept in a threadbare wingback, the lone rug on the wood floor was so faded that its classic Persian design was barely visible. Everything in the house looked as if it had been bought at Goodwill in the early eighties.
On one wall is a large bulletin board with about fifty snapshots, faded from age and sun exposure, of various children and grandchildren. Toshi is half-Japanese. She and Pete met in 1943 in Greenwich Village and married in 1944, while Pete was on furlough from the army. The three children they had together apparently followed their parents’ progressive example when it came to having children of their own because looking at the faces on the bulletin board, you would never guess the Seegers trace their lineage to the Mayflower: the ethnicities of these children all appear different and impossible to place. On a wall in the far corner hang Pete’s instruments: A couple of mandolins, a guitar, and a number of wooden recorders are arranged in a vague circle about his iconic banjo that has written around its pot, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
Toshi wiped her hands on her pants and approached me. She looked me up and down. As she lifted her hand to shake mine, hers trembled uncontrollably. Even though I am only 5’4”, I towered over her. There was a smudge of flour across the front of her shirt. “Do you want some tea? Do you want something to eat?” Toshi asked me. Then, “Peter,” she said. “Peter! Ask her if she wants some tea or something to eat.” She turned back to me: “He doesn’t think of these things. He needs to be reminded.” Pete didn’t appear to have heard his wife.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said to Toshi. “How are you?”
“Not so good.”
“Do you need any help with anything?”
“No. I need to start learning to do things alone.” It was an ironic comment coming from a woman who raised three children miles up a mountain from the nearest town while her husband was off saving the world. She shuffled back to the stove, calling over her shoulder, “Peter! Go put in your hearing aid.”
“What’s that, Toshi?” he said, looking up.
“Go put in your hearing aid.”
“Oh yes, yes, I forgot that, didn’t I?” He left the piles of paper, striding across the kitchen and disappearing into the cabin’s only other room, their bedroom.
I had come to help Pete complete a new edition of Where Have All the Flowers Gone, his memoir. A former boss of mine had put us in touch. The work was fairly clerical: making sure the index was comprehensive and that the spellings in the text and the index were consistent with one another. Because Pete has not embraced the technology revolution and does not hear well enough to get substantive work accomplished over the telephone, agreeing to work with him meant agreeing to work with him at his kitchen table which, for me—the possible tedium of the task itself notwithstanding—was nothing short of a dream come true. To work on this index meant working for a man whose life had shaped the growing index of my own life, and to be able to include him not just as a something of a hero, but as human being.
We sat down and Toshi placed a bowl of soup and a pot of green tea in front of me. Pete handed me the manuscript and began explaining what needed doing.
“Now, you see here,” he said, pointing with a red pen that was short on ink to an index entry on Beethoven, “we’ve spelled it Ludwig van Beethoven, but somewhere we wrote von Beethoven. I know it’s van and so I’ve caught it and changed it, but that’s the kind of thing you need to be looking for. I want to get this done in the next few weeks. Wouldn’t it be great to have this out by January?” He looked up at me. “Do you think you could do that?”
I nodded. In the car, Pete had explained that his memory is quickly disappearing, and his anxiety at this impending loss was palpable. He repeated at least three times that afternoon that he wanted to complete the project by the New Year. The urgency of finishing his story before it disappeared from his mind entirely was the underlying theme of the day, and each of the fourteen days I ended up spending with him over the next two months, as fall passed into winter. The new edition was being updated to include his life of the past eight years, and it was the memory of this recent past that was leaving him most quickly; he likes to remark that he can remember where he was on a certain day in 1953, but not what he had for breakfast.
In fact, it is all slowly disappearing. One of the most touching moments in the 2008 documentary about Pete, The Power of Song, is of him on stage at Carnegie Hall in the midst of playing “Guantanamera.” As the music continues, he takes a break from singing as he often does to translate the verses. “The words say, ‘With…” he trails off, then smiles vaguely. “Oh, don’t tell me, at age 84 I can’t remember the translation…” The music plays a few more bars before he remembers what the words mean: “I am a truthful man from this land of palm trees. Before dying I share these poems of my soul…”
That afternoon he turned to Chapter One and began listing some of the names that appear within the first few pages which we needed to check were properly indexed: his father, one of the founders of American ethnomusicology, Charles Seeger; his 
mother, the violinist and Juilliard professor, Constance Seeger; his stepmother, the composer, pianist and first woman recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Music, Ruth Crawford Seeger; Leadbelly. According to the index, John and Alan Lomax were mentioned 19 times. Pete knew them through his father and after Pete dropped out of Harvard in 1938, they had paid him fifteen dollars a week to listen to and catalogue some of the hundreds of recordings of American music they were collecting from the back roads of the country for the Library of Congress.
I understood the job, so even as I nodded and underlined the people, places, and events Pete was pointing out, I tried to see in the man sitting beside me the historical figure who hopped trains with Woody Guthrie; who was literally stoned after playing a concert with Paul Robeson; who wrote “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Turn, Turn, Turn”; who taught “We Shall Overcome” to Martin Luther King, Jr.; who changed that lyric from “we will overcome” to “we shall overcome”; the man who refused to plead the Fifth in front of HUAC; the man who has been at the forefront of each new American generation’s social and political causes, from labor rights to civil rights to Vietnam to the environment to the Iraq War; the man whose name has become synonymous for many with the ideals of “justice,” “equality,” “change,” “peace,” and “hope” that have fueled these movements. As I flipped through the pages of the manuscript, I noticed that in the rewritten introduction he signs his name “Old Pete,” not just “Pete,” followed by his customary banjo doodle. I wondered at what point in the past decade he had decided to add the “old” to his signature signature.
