Digging While I Still Can

Staring at a blank screen I dig for images to focus on and write about.

• There is my high school heart throb Kathy, not my girlfriend just my heart throb. Kathy was the Kosmic Kid and how we would riff on the meaning of Grateful Dead lyrics. Oh yeah and there was that drunken stupor where while we were riding about with Jim Thomas and Bob Perlmutter searching for a Chanukah bush one mid December. It was the first  she let me touch her nipple.  I know its juvenile but the things that form us happen early on.
• There is an old chrome style diner my girlfriend (now wife of 29 years) and I discovered somewhere in the western mountains of Pennsylvania. It appeared on one of those not stop runs between South Jersey and Michigan to see family in the period when a weekend turnaround was possible.  The apparition that was this greasy spoon had giant model airplanes hanging from the ceiling; imagine eating a plate of eggs, bacon and hash browns served with hot steaming joe under a intricately detailed B-17. You ate this heart stopping plate of breakfast beneath an eight foot wingspan hanging four feet above your head.
• There is a night so clear in Teddy Roosevelt National Park (north-i.e. that is somewhere in North Dakota) where the stars were so brilliant that I felt I could touch the sky. On that night I lay out on the ground staring up for an hour before I crawled into the tent.  Looking far beyond the gravitational bounds of this finite and limited world I knew the immensity of the universe.
• There was that time I ate a pot stuffed brownie, went to a Jefferson Starship concert and woke up 700 miles away the next day. When you are chasing love while really, really high one tends to listen to the voices carried upon the cosmic wind. You follow your heart and do insane things.  I get the lyric from that old Guy Clark song about crying and drinking beer over the stupid stuff because living life means you do a great deal of stupid stuff.
• There was the time the car blew up. An engine needs oil.  If that oil lust is not fed your basic eight cylinders throw a rod. Yeah good ole Thunder Road gave up the ghost in Corvallis, WA and the towing company made us inventory all of that three door Chevrolet’s contents. We listed of course “miscellaneous sex toys” as part of the contents within the old behemoth, much to the amusement of the tow truck owner.
• There was my youngest son ripping an argument apart with ferocity at a debate match. He left his body and just became a logical, intensely focused voice. His shaking passion just irradiated the room around him and charged up his team.  It also pissed off the judge so much that he/she gave him a zero.  Despite the begging and pleading of the other judges the bastard refused to move off that nil point. The boy still won best debater for that day. Bite us judge, just bite us.
• There was the gentle soul who led me home when I wandered lost in the riverside garden captured by a verdant evening and unsure of my next step.
• There was my oldest son playing bass with perfect time and being congratulated by the judge of a regional music competition on his sight reading and skill. No one judged him because he was autistic. They judged him for his fucking talent. Years later I met his student teacher from the time and she told me how the head music teacher pulled her aside and pointed out the two bass players.  He asked her what she noticed.  Her response was that they were perfect time keepers.  It was only then that he told her that they both had Aspergers and that they were about the most passionate bass players he knew.
• There was staring into Victor Hugo’s apartment there in Paris on a three day stay. This was before I had read Les Miserables and viewing that room actually motivated me to wade into the waters of one of my greatest joys ever, reading his masterpiece in translation.
• There was making out with that sandy haired lass in the high sea grass that covered the sand dunes down at the end of the island while talking about the Jefferson Starship. I think there were mosquitoes but with a memory like that, I.e. cheap wine, Mexican pot and passionate kisses who cares about the mosquitoes?
• There was the high school performance of “Anything Goes” where on the last night of performance they put hard liquor in my prop liquor bottle instead of iced tea. This was the joy of being loved as part of a team not put together by arbitrary gym coaches. The energy level was so high I didn’t even notice the burn of that old Schenleys.
• There was calling my gym teacher a cocksucker in 1973, kicking open the gym doors and walking down the hall to the “Office” to await my punishment and then getting none.  Using the word cocksucker even in private cursing in 1973 was still not that far removed in impact from back in the mid-1960s when Lenny Bruce was jailed for saying it on stage.
• There was standing in the rain singing “Ohio” together with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the night that Nixon resigned. How much I thought had changed. How little it had.
• There was the absolute delight that attending the Olympics in Norway brought me. Reindeer is the other white meat, really. And the Swede-Canada gold medal game in hockey, well does it get much better than double overtime and a shoot out?
• There were so many people over the years that offered help, or guidance, or support in little ways. I have to especially note that guy in Oregon who saved me as I was hanging between a rock and a hard spot and then said, “I helped you, now you make sure to help someone else.”
• There was the wild hot steamy sex in the attic of a Cape Cod cottage. 
• There was the loneliness of standing on the shore of the old Outer Banks (the one that existed before the crowded summer metropolis it has now become) and staring at nothing but sand and Atlantic Ocean on a grey evening. I was alone as alone could be. I was empty both physically and spiritually.
• There was the first time I heard Annie Haslam sing “Carpet of the Sun”. The hair stood upon my neck. Her voice was beautiful and stunning. Of course my apartment was scattered with beer bottles everywhere and also sleeping bodies I had to step over as I began the clean up from the first law school party I have ever held.
• There was the notoriety of high school expulsion.
• There was the puking my guts out in a motor hotel somewhere outside of Ann Arbor the night before I got to Michigan State.  As the sun went down that night I was realizing how far away from everyone I ever knew I was going to be.
• There was that person who sent me Snoopy card after Snoopy card as we danced a dance about what we really were.  Were we a we?  Were we just friends? She was a golden beauty in the summer sun of early life.
• There were the long silences in those calls where I got blown off and a relationship crashed and burned.
• There was the joy of being alive after a horrific accident. Two semis hit us and we lived.
• There was the gut wrenching call telling me my nephew was dead after he had left my home just a few hours earlier.
• There was the day the doctor confirmed we were pregnant.
• There was the day of the Aspergers diagnosis.
• There was the quiet of a lake in Northern Ontario on a group camping trip around Lake Huron. We were friends standing about in as dark a night as I can remember listening to loons on a lake drinking good cold beer.
• There was that out of the blue telephone call to my Dad the day before he died. For no reason I got the chance to say something I don’t remember saying before, “I love you Dad.”
• There was the moment we realized that the house was too small with two boys. A crib in the living room and the prospect of having to build a third bedroom was not appealing. There were those moments of staring down teachers both on my own behalf and then later on the behalf of my children.
• There was the joy of rocketing down a mountain on a luge in Norway.
• There was telling my best baristas Darrin and Jason about the filthiest true story I had ever amassed and realizing that friendships were being made. I have boundaries or I would share the rest.
• There was the moment I quit driving altogether.
• There was the first Grateful Dead show I ever attended in July 1975 at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia; and they played Wharf Rat.
• There was that first joint I smoked. Still funny to me how I got high and walked into a closest thinking it was the door out of the house and then I just couldn’t I mean I really couldn’t figure out what the malfunction was.
• There was that night of sex in the showers at the dorm. She was a grand woman of free spirit.
• There was the doctor’s disembodied voice on the telephone saying, “Mr. Todd, I am afraid it is cancer.”
• There was the plaster of Paris two of the guys on the floor at Mayo hall had applied under Doug Mason’s sheets. He was our resident assistant. When he came in drunk and flopped upon his now rock solid bed there was groaning. The mattress did not give him any quarter.
• There was the dinner at Goodrich’s before our wedding; shrimp and clams and picnic benches wrapped up in a wonderful fading night.
• There was the long fast drive to Peoria to say good bye to the good woman that was Lucy, my children’s surrogate grandmother.
• There were the late night calls to hear that there had been accidents and deaths. 
• There was Terry on my roof at 1 a.m. He was asking to come in because he didn’t realize how high the roof was for he was drunk. As good an idea as it seemed at the time to harass me from atop the shingles he now wanted down. But I was not alone. It took some explaining to my partially clothed date that things like this did not happen to me very often. I was lying of course.
• There were endless nights of long, long walks just to clear my head.
• There was winning an election. What a two edged sword that turned out to be.
• There was becoming Lutheran. Still can’t remember how to make the sign of the cross, probably because I keep my spare specs in a case in my purse and I wear my watch on the wrong wrist, when I wear a watch.
• There was the pastor dropping me in the baptismal pool back when I was a Baptist being baptized.
• There was the smoking dope in the church basement. Of course it filled the sanctuary. There was the joy of discovering Toronto for the first time.
• There was the year of loss with my mother, my nephew and my father in law passing all within 8 months.
• There was a sunset somewhere in Montana that seemed to be the best sunset ever. There were nights when I had to stare at a street light so my molecules would not come unstrung and float away into nothingness because we had decided to see if we could smoke a quarter pound of pot. Didn’t get anywhere close.
• There was the joy of love. And I have been loved and I have loved and I still love.
• There was the first real awareness that you don’t get out of this alive.
• There was the first real awareness that life is so much shorter than we ever imagined. There was the reading of the phrase “Be here, be now” in Aldous Huxley’s island and having it sink in and mean something.
• There was wonder of Chris Smither singing “Visions of Johanna” live.

Yeah I have written some of this stuff down already in prior post. Yes I will get around to some of the rest. Of course some of these things will be memorialized by nothing more than the lines in this post.
This is life my friend, sand and impermanence, a Buddhist Mandela just waiting to be shaken. Does it matter? Yes.