Rev. Melissa Krabbe

 

Rob Krabbe

 

 

About Being "Krabbe"

There is nothing that can help you to know what a Krabbe is, really, better just meeting one. Melissa Krabbe, Rob Krabbe's wife can attest to that. She has been Krabbe since she married Rob.

Melissa Marzano was engaged to ROb Krabbe, secretly the week after they met. They married 18 months later at Trinty Lutheran Church, in Simi Valley California. That was September 12th, 1981.

My earliest memories are of countless Krabbe's in Illinois. Family parties, Grandma's cooking, and Great Grandma's Arthritis, and unbeieveably . Family singing, guitars playing, Grandma playing her electric guitar.

There are so many memories, someday I shall have to write them down before age takes my memories away.

My earliest memories are of family. Parents, grandparents, great grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, cousins, a lot of them, in the State of Illinois, back in the early 60s.

I remember very large houses, corn fields so high they blocked out the sun, and snow in winter time that got piled up on each corner, by county snow shovels, and tractors; piles as high as the top of the house.

I remember a dinner bell ringing, and my brother and I running from the other side of the neighborhood to make it home in time or we’d get nothing. Of course my mother says that is a false memory, she would never let us go hungry, but the point is, we wore no watches, we got home by sun set, or by the time the dinner bell stopped ringing, on pain of severe punishment.

I remember the smell of bacon fried okra, fried chicken, and the taste of fresh boiled sweet tea, poured over ice, so you get that hot swirly cool mix of tea so sweat it gave us energy until dinner and then some.
I remember family music sessions, and grandma playing her electric guitar and singing folk music. My dad teaching me my first chords, and then me working night and day to pass his guitar skills, and begin writing songs that were at first really bad and corny.

I’m asked a lot about song writing, and creative writing both. It is seemingly easy for me, which is partly due to the fact that I am creative to the point of being some kind of savant; I’m good at a select list of things and most other things I just don’t even try. Also, however, due in the most part to this simple rule: If you want to be a guitar player, play your guitar. I write, constantly, and the first few years wrote nothing but crap. I remember a quote, and I’ll try to get close as I can to the words, Robert Rodriguez, noted film director, film producer, and writer, said this in an interview when asked about film making and what advice he would have for future film makers. He said “I believe every young film maker has 25 really bad films in them. Go out and make those horrible bad films as quickly as you can and move on to the good stuff.” Amen, bought the T-shirt. I wrote so much crap in my youth, and still wrote horrible songs, and just was so passionate, and driven to write that it didn’t matter if anyone would even listen to them, or read my stories, I had to do it anyway to live.

So I wrote, for myself, for therapy, for life. At some point someone said, hey that’s not bad. And the rest is a long, long story of writing more crap, and more crap, and then writing something somsone liked again, and again and again. You get the picture.
A Krabbe? Well simply put I am one. I did the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, and no one could tell me different. The definition of insanity right? Well there you go! Answer to question.

Cheers!

Rob Krabbe