Nostalgia and Reading

January 21, 2019 Monday

 

One thing about being an attorney, your work is never really done. Technically I had today off in celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Funny, I am old enough to remember the TV scroll at the bottom of the screen announcing he had been shot in Memphis. I was watching ABC television that night and my parents were out. I remember my father’s comment when I told them about the shooting as they returned home, “The cities are going to burn.”) Despite the holiday I still went to work half a day. From 8 a.m. to noon I reviewed upcoming cases. There was no way I was going to be outside. It was -11 when I went out to the car to come over to my office

The rest of my day was split between watching a Netflix teen sex dramedy called, “Sex Education,” and cleaning/sorting the corners of the house.  “Sex Education” was raunchy, but it had a heart that was in the right place. The gist was that sex complicates the process of growing into an adult. Duh. A great deal of time was spent on the simple in concept, but much more complex in practice, idea/goal of self-acceptance. there was also an ongoing theme of the need to have self-awareness of one’s own motivation. I would give it 7-1/2 stars to the production. It is somewhat higher than I might otherwise give it, but I really liked the performances of the two leads. They were 94% credible.

The rest of the time in the afternoon was spent sorting and packing. I note all sorts of emotions were stirred up by this purge of materials. One of the things I did was to sort out three large boxes of trade paperbacks that could be put up for yard sale. Some were books I can obtain easily and cheaply as a PDF on one of the book sites. Some were tomes that I purchased. with the best intention to read but never got around to. I felt sad that I had not committed to the reading that I should have. Bottom line though is that the books are heavy, and they are not making a move either to a condo or to Portugal. I am shamed, I should have been reading the works of several Nobel laureates but instead I was watching TruBlood.

Harder still was figuring out what pieces of paper to save from the first, second and third grade works of my two sons. A number of collages and mixed material projects have been stuffed into nooks and crannies over the years. In looking at these it surprised me how much more into these kinds of things my older son, the autistic one, was. He had trouble with fine motor skills, but his ideas were complex and colorful. I know these are just paper and not subject to real preservation, but I can remember every time one of these pieces came home.

Time flies by so quickly now. I am moved to very slight tears when I go through this stuff. A lump in my throats creeps up. My wife spent her childhood moving from place to place. Sometimes the moves were sudden and represented violent upheaval in her life. Her feeling on retaining this stuff is much different than mine. My childhood home was the same for 40 years of my life. My VBS (Vacation Bible School) paper mache projects were there in here house until we cleaned it after she died. I have a hard time letting go.

As I am typing today, I have hooked into Apple’s Classic Folk stations. Right now, the song that is playing is Gotta Travel On by the Au Go-Go Singers. “Laid around and played around this old town too long, Gotta travel on winter’s coming on...”. This song triggers such nostalgia in me. My brother Jerry used to sing this every time he left the house to head off to school, to go to the Army, to go to Vietnam, after a Thanksgiving weekend. I can hear his voice clearly, hear his wry chuckle and I can see so clearly that aw-shucks smile and the twinkle in his eye.  Dead a year and a quarter and I miss him so very much.

Last night I decided that I had watched too much trashy TV. I decided I needed to get refocused, re-centered. I picked up a copy of a book by Simon Blackburn. No real surprise there, eh? The volume was called The Big Questions. I downloaded a free sample of the first chapter and my read of it very quickly sold me on the purchase. In talking about the concept of what constitutes our “mind” Blackburn offered this, “The neurophysiologist, however far he probes, will not be able to hold up a fragment of brain and say, “Aha! Here we have a thought about the boulevards of Paris!” For, alas, the brain is gray but in my thoughts the boulevards are brightly colored. The bit of brain is small, but the boulevards are long and wide. The brain is soft tissue, while in my daydream the boulevards are hard pavement, and with traffic on them.” Yeah, I get that.

Tonight, no more than an hour of television.  Seems to me I have some reading to do.