The Usefulness of Wasting Time

"I loaf and invite my soul.
I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass."
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I'm fifty-one years old. At this age, if one has half of a brain, one finally realizes one has lived more life than what remains. It can be a chilling epiphany. But, one moves on with the "third act," as it were, because...what's the alternative?

At this point, with a new aim of creating a second/retirement career as a film and TV composer, I find myself approaching composition and "taking care of business" with a kind of intensity I have never really been known for. (Last year, I wrote sixty-five pieces of music. That's probably as much as I have written since I wrote my first piece when I was ten years old. You can clearly see the inverse proportions...) 

Some guys my age buy souped-up Ford Mustangs and crank up Journey's Greatest Hits, some double-down on their compositional efforts. 

No, I know it's not quite the same, but it is born of the same realization: time is running out. 

It's typical for people my age to look back and be mad about "all the time I wasted." I've felt that way, at times, but, in the end, I have decided I am not angry at Young Chris for "wasting time" because maybe what I was doing was actually useful -- even necessary. Maybe it was kind of an incubation period of the spirit; of the mind; of my creativity. Maybe "the child is the father of the man," after all, and all of that "time-wasting" happened in order to prepare me for the period of creativity and energy I am in now. Children learn from play; maybe young adults learn from loafing. 

I'm not, in any way, advocating peeing away one's time and there are many things I feel are a grand waste. One example is standing in a club with music that is so loud you can't talk to your friends for hours on end. I found that a waste of time when I was twenty, for the record, along with many other things. (And lawn-care. Lawn care is a waste of time, if you ask me.) 

My version of wasting time was sitting in bars with groups of friends, for hours on end, talking about interesting ideas; it was loafing and inviting my soul, Whitman-style, in a hammock in my yard, day after day in the summers; it was watching cartoons; it was watching movies; it was walking and holding hands and talking marathon sessions on the rotary phone with with girlfriends; it was staying up late and then sleeping until two o'clock in the afternoon; I was missing parties in order to read, sometimes three books at once -- especially during grad school.  

It is so easy to look back at all this and lament what I could have gotten done had I just applied myself more. Well, I would have produced more writing and more music; that's for sure. But how good would the work have been? Can a guy who has not "wasted" time with his friends and lovers and with his own thoughts write or compose anything truly moving to others?

Maybe it was all preparation for the real work; work that was, some day, to be based on a matured and experience-based life -- what I'm doing now? Well, you can decide that. But I do think sitting and talking and thinking and loving and dreaming are never a waste of time, so long as they come to action someday. 

These days, though I still like it, I'm not as enamored of sleep as I once was. These days, I compose every day, instead of putting it off for a thousand other things. These days, I schedule my TV watching and only do an hour a day; maybe a movie on the weekends. It's just that it is time to start burning the reserves of action I have in the old tank thanks to my lazy, loafing, fat-backing twenty-year-old self. 

And, you know what I still do? I still "waste" Sunday afternoons sitting on the couch and drinking coffee with my wife and talking. We've been known to sit from ten until three, chewing the proverbial fat. And it's never a waste. (Tons of our conversations have wound up here, in fact.) 

Maybe we humans just know what we need and we instinctually do it. But if we messed up, we messed up. Wiser men than I have pointed out that regret is the true waste of time. So why waste time regretting wasted time when that time wasted is not only not a waste but, just maybe, a necessary part of growing in to someone better? [Yeah, I'd read that again, too. That's some ugly writing, right there.]

Now, go forth and loaf! (And I will go forth and write music, submit music, think of a post for next week, work more on my upcoming literature podcast and on the podcast I have planned for Hats and Rabbits [you heard it here first] and work on the outline for an idea I had for a book [all while raising two boys, training two pups and preparing for a new year of teaching...) 

Or..maybe I'll just loaf today...

The Yellowing Pages

I used to escape from the loud house-full of happy Philadelphia-area Italians into my grandmother's basement. Down I would float down over stairs that were wearied over the years into a flexing, barely perceptible bounce by playing shoes and late-to-work shoes and furniture-moving shoes. Down, I'd go, into the deep smell of earth, books, boxes and gently musty air that floated cool between cinder-block borders broken only by thick block glass squares in rectangular rows that let in just enough light to color the basement into more of a secret world than a scary place.

My retreat spot lay over by the little book case filled with aging paperbacks standing at attention under the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure of each other. I'd sit on the carpet under rafters hung with aged and drying red peppers...but first, to re-inspect the weathered half-barrel that hung on the wall.

It look very much like this more famous book. 

I'd open the clasp on the front and it would swing open to reveal gold-rimmed shot glasses and Scotch glasses and tumblers in neat semicircular rows, each half-sunken into its wooden nest. Just a peep, to see the secrets inside and to hear  the echoes of parties that had been centered around it as my impossibly-young grandparents poured ice-tinkling drinks for guests whom I pictured to be composed of black and white movie flickers; the women trim and jaunty in their wide hats, like Lois Lane from the George Reeves Superman show; the men in double-breasted suits with hats cocked sideways. The laughter muffled itself as I pulled the sides of the barrel to; stopped as I fastened the clasp.

Below crouched the book case, itself, swirled in antique yellow, its outer frame planed into symmetrical undulations, little circles carved into the corners by the cabinetmaker's hand. Sitting Indian-style (it was okay to call it that, then) on the old, green, sculptured carpet, I could see the book I had left from our last trip to visit Grandmom here in Northeast Philly. I'd left a toothpick in it to mark my place. On the cover was a painting of four men in a life raft, sprawled and tumbling, mouths shaped into replica fear as they tumbled amid white-capped oil-painted waves.

I opened it and fell back into its story of four American pilots shot down over the Pacific -- this book written decades before I was born by someone nobody remembers -- whose name might not even have been what was written -- but who managed to crank out solid pulp fiction for a living. The characters wielded names like "Nick Andersen" and "Captain Buck Blake" and they talked about cigarettes and "dames" as they snagged sea turtles and drank their blood or after they'd paddled off a school of tiger sharks. You could almost see the aesthetic way their shirts frayed; how they fiction-burned, instead of suffering under the misery of bubbling skin and cracking lips. They endured heroically in that silver-screen way.

But I don't remember the story -- that one or any of the other dozens I read -- much. What I do remember is how I always noticed the way the pages were framed in yellowing age. I would wonder how many year that took to happen; how old you'd needed to be to own a book that had turned yellow... Then, in the low light, I'd sink back into the adventure, still aware of the darkening edges cupping the words like, hands full of water, on the page.

Now, unlike most grown-ups, each year I suffer that same, sad, downward tug at my heart as the school year stands only a tomorrow away from me. And as I wait, inhaling the coquettish scent of fall that teases the time for school, I then exhale and look at the book I am now re-reading; a book that hand-holds its reader barefoot through the grass of summer into the day before the stiff new shoes of September have to cage the toes: Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. And I feel the hearts of Douglas and Tom Spaulding as their summer of 1928 closes like my Grandmother's old barrel. I feel like a boy each year at this time, filled with the leaden resignation that the freedoms of July and August are soon to be no more.

But as I look at the pages, a book that I bought myself, brand new, I see what I once used to think the province of those born in the black-and-white days: alas, the pages are beginning to yellow. My own pages. And so, the words in my own little boy heart are cupped by the gentle but ever progressing yellow edges of time...

The bookshelf is mine, now, and it stands in my living room, filled with books of poetry. Some day, my sons will find Keats there. Or Sandburg or Heaney. But the men in the life raft have long since gone to dust.

A Hot Thought

It was 94 degrees in these parts on last Friday night, the last time I looked -- which was about 11:30 at night. I had to play three sets on the drums in a club whose air-conditioning was definitely feeling the strain of a long heat wave. Between the struggles of the machine and the door to my right -- that opened and closed repeatedly onto the outdoor deck to let in belches of oven-hot air -- it must have been 85 degrees in the bar.

Needless to say, by the end of the night, I was rather damp with perspiration. (We play three sets of just about non-stop music every night. No time for the weary drummer to rest. No need to give me any sympathy -- the band does not, God bless them.)

After I'd broken down the drums and loaded them into the car -- it was, like, 1:30 am by then; it had maybe dropped to a cozy 88 degrees outside -- I went back in to "dummy check" for stuff left behind and I bumped into one of our regular followers; a really nice guy, a little younger than us with a bald head and a quick smile.

The not-so-old old guys. 

"Man," he said, looking me over. "I think you're sweating a little."

I laughed and he laughed. "You're way too old to be working this hard," he said.

I told him that I had just had a serious conversation, that night, with my fourteen-year-old son about his becoming my "roadie" when he starts driving.

The plan is that, when he gets behind the wheel in a couple of years, I'd pay him part of my nightly salary to set up and break down the drums. It would be a great part-time job for him during high school.

Logic aside, it was another chance for me, philosophically, to wrap my head around this getting-older business; this dance one has to do on the fuzzy floor between accepting age and fighting its detrimental effects. I'm only 48, for the love of Pete. But part of it is about learning to let our loved ones help us as the years pile up There is no shame in letting the vehicles of our virtual immortality (our sons and daughters) prop us up from to time, the way we did as they leared to do....hell...everything.

Machismo wants to brag about having walked uphill (both ways), barefoot and over broken glass to school but the wise man is just proud of having learned once he got there. I plan to play the drums until my arms fall of, but if I can put off that unfortunate day of limb-shedding for many years by harnessing the youthful energy and strength of my boys, why not? Will the audience watch me play a 32nd note fill around the kit and say, with a snort, "Well, yeah, that was fast, and he is, like, 86 years old, but I hear his son sets up the drums for him..."? Of course not.

We all should try to age with grace. We all want to keep our dignity. What we have to convince ourselves of is that our dignity does not suffer when we walk through our elder days under the gentle support of those who love us too much to judge us for -- for lack of a better term -- having to "repay" the gifts of strength and guidance we once gave them.

Anyway, I have to set up my own drums for at least two more years. And, no, Kurt the bass player, I will not use a smaller kit. (Okay -- maybe a little macho conviction is good...)

A Farewell to the Big Bookstore

I have always loved bookstores, especially the little ones that hold hidden discoveries and the bigger independent ones that contain carefully selected stock of the essentials. In the not-so-old days, I even liked the mega stores, for a different reason: You could usually find the book you needed.

I love to find the out-of-the way stores, still, but it has also been a practice of my family to sometimes go to dinner and then to the big bookstore to pick up a new treat, especially as summer kicks in. But it's just not fun, for me, anymore. That makes me pretty sad.

I hear the remaining big bookstores are still doing well and I am glad. I'm also glad the book is faring well against the e-book. I realize, however, that they are doing well because they are stocking what sells: "Teen Paranormal" and various other popular series. As for the rest? Forget it.

If you are a real reader with a literary background, don't consider looking for an out of the way Theodore Dreiser; you'll find only Sister Carrie. Jack London? Forget The Sea Wolf; you'll find only White Fang. I suppose they need to save room for Fifty Shades of Grey and the latest installment of Young, Handsome Vampires on Prom Night. (Okay -- I made that one up.)

My kinda bookstore. 

I'm not trying to be curmudgeonly. I have no problem with light reading or with popular fiction. I just hate to see it push out the wonderland of undiscovered stuff I could once wander through at a Borders or Barnes and Noble. Last trip, I had a heck of a time finding something I wanted to read. I did wind up finding Vonnegut's Mother Night, which was an exceptional book, but this was only after I had slogged my way up to various other dead-ends in pursuit of authors whose work I wanted to explore more deeply. I had "settled" because Vonnegut was in stock in numbers few other top-notch authors are.

I understand that, from a business perspective, bookstores are doing what they need to do to survive and I would rather see them survive than bend to my stuffy will and fold -- I just wish it didn't have to be so.

So, now, it's either trips into the city (and good luck there, too, finding the little shops) or it's onto the web to get what I need. There used to be two little bookstores five minutes from my house. I just miss them and the trips on my bike, on foot or through the heavy summer evening air that made them feel like a cool conclusion to an occasional little quest.

I miss a lot of stuff, but I guess that's getting older.

A Path to Lifelong Happiness?

Olivier and Yorick

On Wednesday, I wrote about the fact that -- to cram things into a nutshell -- I seem to keep wanting to improve myself, musically, even though no one cares or is likely to reward me. Through a gradual series of thoughts since then, I realized that this kind of attitude might just be the secret to lifelong happiness.

Here's how the thoughts went. I saw a picture on Twitter of a French author who tried to kill herself (the tweet said) twice. I turned to my wife and said, as I have before -- which must be very comforting to her -- that I fully understand why people kill themselves. There have been days in especially long strings of mundane days, during which I thought: "This is it? This is my life?" I then imagine a person who feels trapped in these sorts of days; a person who sees no change coming; who has nothing to look forward to. I see, in short, Hamlet:

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

The LAUREL SPRINGS NATIONAL BANK: My Hero

When I am gone, I want to be like an old bank building.

In my area, there are a few old bank buildings, and, true the financial scenario, they have had many different names: TD Bank, Citizen's Bank, Wachovia, Susquehanna, Bill's Bank, Fred's Bank, The First Bank of Louise...you name it.

...etched in stone. 

Each of these banks has had a parade of plastic, internally-lighted signs. Each of them has been emblazoned on the face with a hundred logos and slogans. It seems as if their names change every week as the phony, surreal financial tides of the world and of the country shift.

But a mile or two away from me, there is a bank in a "downtown" area that hearkens back to earlier days. There is a pizza place that looks like it might have been a general store; a building that was obviously once a saloon or hotel is now a hairdresser's. A railroad track that runs through the heart of the downtown area passes a small train station building (which no longer operates, since the trains that come through now are only freight) that Walt Whitman once used to get from Camden, NJ to his summer digs, a short walk away from the station.

A Lifetime in a Week; A Week in a Lifetime

About a month-and-a-half ago, I decided to change things. At the time, I wrote about the Rocky movie series and its impact on me. I also wrote about a desire, as a result, partly, of those films and their message, to finish life strong. And even though I just wrote to question the validity of advertising one's efforts of improvement, I'll let the (extremely uninteresting ) cat out of the bag about my own efforts, if only to point our a metaphoric philosophy that hit me this morning.

After the moment referred to in the first link above (in which Rocky's son expresses his admiration for his father, who proves himself old, yet strong) I decided I needed to do something I have never done outside of my sports days: exercise -- in order to be stronger as I approach 50. There are many other things I should do, but walking every morning, at 5:30 AM, is the start I have made.

I like it, for a few reasons. I am enjoying the solitude of my quiet neighborhood and I do feel much changed, physically, in terms of my diminished aches and pains and my increased energy. The only problem is, musician that I am, I am a creature of the night. Always have been. Left to my own choice, I would be awake until four AM, not waking up at five. I can be quoted as having said, many times, that the only thing I absolutely hate about my life is that I have to get up early.

I despise it. So what do I do? I start getting up an hour earlier than I really have to in order to walk. It's all part of "hitting back" at life, Rocky style.

But this morning, when the alarm rang, it was one of those moments of: "No. It cannot possibly be time to get up...I just closed my eyes to sleep." I felt like a stone. The kind of stone that doesn't feel like anything but weight. (What the hell am I talking about?)

Just this once, I thought. Just this once, I'll skip the walk.

"Remember me...but...forget my fate."

Yesterday, I was driving drowsily home. I turned off of the main road, onto a sort of sub-main road; a busy little side street that runs past some schools and businesses.

The speed limit is 25. No one does that, but no one "flies," either. Between obstructing cars parked on the side, I saw something topple and I tapped my brakes. My brain tried to make sense of it. It had all of the characteristics of a falling tree -- a small one, but rigid and straight, all of the way down. As I got closer, I saw an old man, half in the roadway, his cane pinned under him. He was motionless.

I stopped the car and put on the hazard lights. I crouched next to him.

"Are you okay, sir?"

"I think I hit my head." He was bleeding from the forehead. "I guess I can't even walk anymore."

This was familiar territory for me. My dad went through this kind of thing, both the physical falling and the visible shame of a dwindling list of strength-affirming things he could do on his own. I had picked him up many times, both physically and mentally. (Sometimes I failed to "pick him up" on the mental end.) Not all experiences are good, but, sometimes good comes out of them: I knew what to do.

I helped this old man to sit up and rest for a minute, then I put my hands under his arms and used my legs to help him stand. (It is astounding how heavy a little old man can be.)

Before long, I had him holding onto a street sign for support. I got a rag out of my glove box and gave it to him to hold up to his bleeding head. "Do you have a car?" he asked. "Can you take me home?"

The Shining Sea Bike Trail

I usually try to post at least before five o'clock, but I also try to follow a rule: never let writing get in the way of life.

Today was given over to about a twenty-mile bike ride along the Shining Sea Bike Trail, (named in honor of Katherine Lee Bates [a local native of Falmouth, MA], who wrote "America The Beautiful" - which, if you ask me, should be our national anthem...) in Cape Cod. It is a beautiful stretch of trail through some of the most beautiful parts of Falmouth, MA and to Wood's Hole, home of the distinguished Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute. (For Jaws buffs: the institute that Matt Hooper worked for.)

We saw pretty stuff and I had a lot of time to think.

It was beautiful, but it was a physical challenge for me, a guy who doesn't keep in as good a shape as he should, but who is, by no means, too weak to take up the occasional physical challenge.

As I pedaled along, sometimes huffing with the uphill effort -- especially getting from our house to the trail itself --  I got thinking about the sort of wimpy culture we have created by having warnings from doctors and newscasters about effort and those over the age of, say, eighteen.

Every time is snows, for instance, some news caster tells people over forty not to shovel snow. Because of this, my own mom often says: "You shouldn't be out there shoveling! Let the boys do it."

Weeping Over Indiana Jones: On the Young Hearts of Wannabe Knights

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there is a scene near the end in which, when the whole place is crumbling, the knight who was the guardian of the Holy Grail salutes Indy through the falling debris and dust.

I wept when I saw that scene in the theater in 1989. I like that. I was 21.

I could list a whole bunch of other films, books, poems and works of art that made me get all emotional. (I do that.) To me, it is the highest effect art can have: to move someone to tears, to chills or to laughter. No, I'm not a fan of empty sentimentality; I am a seeker of the sublime. The sublime can only exist when the wind of intellect blows through the aeolian harp of emotion. (I know -- I'm getting all Coleridgean.)

Anyway, if I listed those works that "moved" me, some would be no surprise: "Afternoon of a Faun," by Debussy; The Pines of Rome, by Respighi; Miller's The Crucible and Death of a Salesman; Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Ravel's Mother Goose suite... I could do this all day.

But...Indiana Jones?

The Tasteless Joke of Fate

Once, a young student stifled my instinctual and unshakable belief in the afterlife -- when I had mentioned my inability to grasp the idea of oblivion -- by pointing out the feeling of being under anesthesia; the complete absence of the perception of the passage of time that one experiences before and after an operation. It was an eye-opener, even if I wound up still believing, in the end, after some real intellectual trials.

Now, I'm given very solid reasons to question the idea of the state of existence, itself.

Dementia. Many of our elder parents and grandparents fall victim. They lose themselves. They can't think; they can't express themselves. People we know to have been brilliant, creative and sharp-witted, often take their last bows on life's stage not to applause while juggling knives and playing concertos, but in a state not knowing how to accomplish such simple tasks as buttering their own bread. Sometimes, their personalities change, altogether. A mother we know to have been patient and kind might accuse a son or daughter of vile transgressions; she might throw a sandwich across the room -- a sandwich that was lovingly made. A father who was a guide on every difficult front becomes one who needs guidance, himself -- maybe even to get from the bathroom to a chair.

Kites, Cardigans and Good Ol' F.U.

My great uncle sported a "high-and-tight" haircut and a buttoned-up collar. He was a product of Fork Union Military Academy -- which he always referred to as "good ol' F.U." I think he went to F.U. because he had been more of a behavior issue than because he had been the "military type" as a young man; he had a quick wit and a hearty smile; he was a bit impish. Family legend has it that he was stronger than the average ox, having once lifted a car off of a little girl's leg in the 1950's -- back when squat-lifting a car by its bumper was a pure-metal job three-times more miraculous than it would be today.

As kids, my sister and I would spend Friday nights at the house he shared with my grandmother in South Philadelphia; Mom worked late and Dad, for many years, had a steady gig at the legendary nightclub, Palumbo's, in town. These visits consisted of a meatball-sandwich dinner (on the greatest Italian bread in the history of the world), before my dad left for work, and, then, of all the TV we wanted and all of the M&Ms and ice cream we could cram into our maws. My sister and I would draw (and draw and draw...) and play invented games and watch ridiculous nineteen-eighties shows like the unintentionally surreal Dukes of Hazzard.

A (Not Unpleasant) Puck to the Brow

One of the most overused bits of advice in modern wisdom is: "Live in the moment -- live for now and not yesterday or tomorrow." That's meant to help us keep our heads in the game, as it were; no regrets, no time wasted in attempting to engineer the future in ways in which it was not meant to be engineered. But, in one way, don't you find that we are hard-wired to the now?

In certain situations, this hard-wired nowness becomes really evident.

I often have these...moments, regarding my wife. Yesterday morning, taking advantage of the chance that my Easter break from school gives me to slip back in to my Count Dracula schedule (late nights, not [necessarily] neck-sucking) and to lie late into the morning/afternoon in bed, I had one of those moments. (Don't worry -- this wont get weird, I promise; or, at least not any weirder than it already is.)

I looked over at my wife. She was playing Scrabble on her phone, or something, and I had a thought that occurs to me once in awhile: Who the hell is this woman and when, exactly, did my life get attached to hers? I'm glad it did get attached to hers, don't get me wrong...but wasn't I just playing in a sandbox? Wasn't I just thinking thoughts about me and the man I might become and the life I would have as a grownup? Wasn't that just, like, six minutes ago?