Hard Wired

Walking to the bus stop the other day I found myself whistling/singing David Crosby/Graham Nash’s Wind on the Water. Penned many years ago the song decries humankind’s hunting of whales to the brink of extinction. Why this song over twenty years old is stuck in my head I really can’t say. Couplets about whale meat being used for ephemera such as lipstick and the like really shouldn’t be the default song in my personal RAM. Animal rights activism has not been a hall mark of my life, take kibbee for example.

There are other songs in the rapidly accessed storage portion of my brain. Most of them however are Merle Haggard songs. There is Momma Tried, God’s Own Singer and Sing me Back Home and they crop up all the time. Wind on the Water has an incredible hook. Still there should be for any number of reasons a hundred other songs that should be hard wired into my head.

I mean I get to some extent the why of the Haggard songs being stuck in my head. There are trains, mama, a misspent life and remorse at death woven into each one. About sums up the rural American experience that I wanted to believe was to be my life when I was fourteen or fifteen. Life did not head that way for me. My life is not rural and I am not in jail, mom is dead but my life has not been totally wasted. Still I get the mythology that keeps those songs inside me. What I don’t get is why Wind on the Water is there.

Maybe it was some lass that had it on a LP when I was in those psyche molding years of undergraduate studies and my infatuation with her wove the words and music into my mind. Maybe it is the real lure the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean holds for me that keeps it close. Sunset behind and the moon rising the water is always my image of my chosen home.

I assume other people have hard wired musical memories. I wonder what they are. Here’s another one….

Autumn

 

Autumn is the best time of the year. Today I stopped for a moment and noticed Mid-Michigan is well into fall. With the demands of parenting the time just seems to fly by. As I walk I pray for a few quiet moments of awareness. I look into the blue sky and I know it will not be this way for long. Still and warm the morning snow cannot be far off.
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On the Capitol lawn the maples are gold and red. The red one I looked at was well past prime. About half the leaves had fallen. But there was an organic beauty to appreciate in what I saw. Life and it cycles.

1974-2010, 36 years I have watched this place as it changed from summer to fall and then onto to spring. There is a serene beauty in the maples that I will never comprehend. Maybe it is serenity I will never comprehend.

The sound track for this world is not George Winston, although his Autumn is a great disc to get laid by, or it was when I was in my late 20s. Me I am listening to a deep rhythmic groove called The Ghetto by Donny Hathaway. Deep vocals and kind of a mild afro Cuban feel and I keep stride in the wonder of golden autumn.

Beflore the Light

 

When I am just about to walk in to pick up my morning caffeine this is the view I see. I won’t see it much longer because they are moving my office to a strip mall. Glancing down toward the east it is a typical urban view. Glass, bricks and concrete create a street canyon that leads straight to the river. I have been turning and opening the door at this store for a decade. Soon that repetitive act will end and the canyon will be a memory for me.

The manager of the coffee shop is a close friend. He too will be leaving soon. His wife will be taking employment somewhere else and he will follow. My conversations over the years with both he and his staff have been some of the most fun I have had. In a few weeks the canyon will remain but the world I have known there will be gone. Like a real canyon the place will be empty to me except for the wind blowing ever eastward.

Hope and Weakness

 

My little Portals of Prayer devotional book has prayers printed out for reflection and recitation. Entreaties are set out for each morning and evening of every day in the week. Me, I don’t recite them like the ritualized prayers so enmeshed in the formal liturgy of my church. Lutherans, we bend and kneel on a hard floor reciting “we confess that we have sinned in thought, word and deed... In thy mercy forgive what we have been; help us to amend what we are…” As I mentioned in a prior post the things I read in the morning are the starting point for a meditation.

Today’s prayer opens with the line that the deity knows my every weakness. Continuing on it mentions that because of that weakness the supplicant (i.e., me) will disobey, fail to love, and otherwise be less godly. Today the prayer seems on point. As I am taking my desk today I feel weak, loveless and prone to failure.

Emotionally it has been a rough week. Both children have been buffeted by tribulations at school. My wife’s recovery is slow. My work feels like it is a stone ball, which like Sisyphus, I must push ever upward only to have it roll further back down the hill. When I listen to the news what I hear is all doom and gloom. Even as I type these words I shudder, stretch my shoulders and realize I don’t know if I can even take an appropriate cleansing breath.

The prayer ends with a plea for forgiveness, renewal and strength. Inherent in the closing entreaty is the plea for love and the reassurance of love. When I contemplate love and the love that I know from friends and family things always seem better. Most days I find my way back to the point where balance comes. Let a few hours pass and life will glow again. Weakness is a starting point but the day will lead to something better.

Sometimes the Light Just Plays God

 

Failing to meditate early in the day means I will get lost in the day. By meditation I mean an act that focuses my being not just sitting around in the lotus position internally uttering the unspeakable syllable. Perhaps the better term in lieu of mediation is clearing my mind and contemplating something beyond the mundane minutiae of daily living. When I say lost in the day I mean my focus is drawn in a 100 directions and I don’t seem to accomplish anything. My prioritizations schemes all fail.

For me the act of centering my mind is as natural and necessary as taking a shower to cleanse my body. If I don’t take my shower say because I know I have heavy work to do that will require sweat and or exposure to gunky things (image cleaning a wet basement), my day is thrown off also. Showering just gets me to the starting point of the day. Maybe what I am saying is I like to start the day clean mentally and physically, a tabla rasa as it were.

Meditation can be as simple as walking about and just forcing myself to be in the moment. Look there is a tree. Smell the bakery. See the light glinting oddly off the windows up there. Other times it is reading a religious passage and someone’s commentary on it. Trust me I oft times find the commentary has missed the point or is agenda driven. Still the act of reading a verse and thinking about how it fits into my life in the world I occupy is refreshing and invigorating.

Today’s mediation, “ I must refuse all affirmations of what I do not fully and actually know, experience and believe myself.” It is from Merton of course. It argues for a simplified relationship between oneself and the world. Sounds like a good thing. Whether life in an organized society is possible utilizing this maxim is possible, I do not know.

A Shallow Grave in the Hundred Acre Wood

Secundus and I tagged along with some of his friends to see a play. We say the Abridged Works of William Shakespeare. It was quite humorous and somewhat bawdy. Tit and penis jokes abounded. Methinks such jests are much in accord with the Bard’s original style. Secundus worked his way into the production. At one point he was doing the Macarena at center stage before one of Hamlet’s big soliloquies. Don’t ask. My eyes were filled with tears from laughing so much.

The play, while fun, is not the key thing in this post. The other two parents we joined at the production complimented me on how nice Secundus was. “He always shares,” they said. “He always plays nice,” they said, “ when he plays with younger children.’ “Look how the three boys are just having fun.” Foreshadowing.

In the van on the ride back the three boys that had attended the play were goofing around with the little kids’ books in the back seat. Together they had managed to wiggle into the third row in the back. One book was an apparent Disney Winnie the Pooh knockoff with another child other than Christopher Robin cavorting with Pooh in the illustrations. Secundus took real exception to this. Works like sacrilege and blasphemy floated up toward the front seat. At a point when the parents had stopped talking for half a second we heard this. “Hey on TV these days this imposter would be end up in a shallow grave at the far end of the 100 acre woods. Pooh, Tigger and Eyore would then set out on a trouble laden mission to find the real Christopher Robin.”

Secundus is 12. Dispatching a faux Christopher Robin to a shallow grave while in line with a Showtime storyline seems a tad bit harsh. We will have to talk.

Pulp Fiction Awakens My Foggy Mind

Over the past week I read a book that I had shelved long ago due to lack of interest. In the mid 1980s and early 1990s I would join and quit the Quality Paper Back Book club on a regular basis. I would pay the three dollars for three books plus shipping and handling, buy one more book and my commitment would be terminated by a note saying “no more”. One of the books I picked up was called Glitz.

Glitz was an Elmore Leonard book and Elmore was hot at that time. Having recently seen Get Shorty again I decided maybe I should check out the source material that is something Leonard had written. Put most basically I was in need of mental floss. My mental floss is mindless reading filled with action and unambiguously good and bad characters; maybe some sex or sexual innuendo should be thrown in. Reading mental floss is a great deal like watching a Jason Bourne movie it only takes two or three hours more. Pulp novels move quickly.

Starting back into the book I realized why I had put it down. Set in Puerto Rico the first chapter makes it seem like the novel will be a Caribbean pot boiler. At the time I got the book I had no interest in such a tale. Miami Vice and its progeny had over-saturated the airwaves with tales of South Florida and the islands. This time because of my desire to just cleanse my brain of reality based thoughts I read on. To my surprise the book rapidly shifted to the stretch of the Jersey coast I know best, that is from Somers Point to Atlantic City. As the setting relocate I felt like I was taking a piece of chocolate out a tin on someone’s desk expecting a Milky Way knock off and finding out I was munching on a dark Ghirardelli chocolate with walnuts inside.

Reading about places like the Black Horse Pike and Shore Memorial Hospital made me chuckle. It was an unexpected trip back to the homeland. I could remember Story Book Gardens was on the Black Horse somewhere and Shore Memorial was where you went when you were banged up down at the beach. In the end I think I spent three evenings with the story, two sitting in my backyard hammock this warm October. It was just what I needed.

The fact that the tale was set in the 1980s reminded me of why I write this blog. A Space True and North exists to capture the stories of the places I have been and the things I have seen. Having read Glitz I am reminded more stories need to be told. I am really going to try and keep this blog current at least for the next few months.