"The Span of Life"

The Span of Life

"The old dog barks backward without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup."

-- Robert Frost

I couldn't resist -- the actor's
name is Gaten Matarazzo;
right time period and all. 

That's one of my favorite poems of all time. If I am, daily, a drag-racing car, that poem is the parachute deploying at the end of my rubber-burning run. Each time I see it, pseudo-paradoxically, my world slows down so that I can take in exactly how fast things pass.

Many, many summers ago, I was racing my orange, banana-seated bike around the newly-constructed bank that was built next door to my house in the middle-class town of Voorhees, New Jersey. The bank was equipped with two excellent features for kids: One was the big, windowless brick wall in the back that was perfect for practicing tennis or for a Wiffleball backstop. The other, of which I was taking advantage on this day, was the ebony-smooth, newly-asphalted space around the building which allowed impossible speeds that felt like pure floating.

Banks simply were not open for business on Sundays, then, so my parents had no problem with my hanging out there, especially because they could call me home for dinner from an upstairs window.

So, this particular Sunday, I was by myself, just "practicing" for the big races of the future. But having gotten bored, I started pulling stunts; practicing "wheelies" and generally zig-zagging and unsafe speeds in every direction with the kind of physical lunacy only kids can muster.

You'd think I would have noticed the big, white, concrete divider that jutted out next to the last parking spot, but...somehow it slipped my mind. I crashed hard into it, flew over the handlebars and slammed down with my arm stiff, which severely hyper-extended my right elbow. I left the bike behind, cradling my arm, and I walked back to the house in tears.

My parents expected a sprain, but our family doctor directed us to the hospital. It was pretty bad. The X-ray showed that a piece of bone in the elbow had cracked and detached. I honestly don't remember what they did -- whether they took out the fragment or not -- but I was casted with an old plaster-type tubular letter L and admitted to the hospital for a night of observation.

I was terrified, of course, of spending the night away from home in the hospital, even though -- maybe because -- I was surrounded by other unfortunate adventurers of my general age. My parents were going to go home and get me a few things and they asked me if I wanted anything in particular. What I really wanted was Snoopy -- a stuffed Peanuts character that I slept with every night. (He was an odd creature, stuffed with something relatively hard [sawdust?] and he had no tensile strength in his neck, so the head flopped over sideways. His ears were of black, floppy plastic. But I loved him.) As I say, I wanted Snoopy, but was afraid to look like a "sissy" to use the un-P.C. parlance of the day. As luck would have it, the kid in the bed next to me was provided, in that very opportune moment, with a blue, stuffed duck by his dad. I would have my companion that night. Shame averted.

It was a long night -- fortunately broken up by a Phillies game on TV in which Mike Schmidt hit two homers -- that lead into a long morning that lead into a barely edible lunch of peanut butter and jelly, after which my parents came to collect me. All-in-all, Snoopy and I made it through okay.

I wore the cast for quite awhile -- so long that my arm showed visible atrophy when it came off -- and, then, we followed-up with my pediatrician. I can still see his face, half-and-ruefully smiling, when my parents asked about possible long-term effects:

"You'll be fine, young man. You shouldn't have any problems unless you become a pitcher [I did] or if you get into anything that requires a lot of repetitive motion in your right arm [I became a drummer]. All that aside, though, you probably won't feel the effects until you are in your forties or fifties. You might have issues then."

Fifties? That was forever in the future. We all left feeling pretty good about the prognosis. There was a chasm of decades before us all before we needed to worry. We stopped at McDonald's on the way home for a merry feast and I spent the rest of the day watching cartoons, my mind free and clear...

Just now, I picked up a mug of tea and lifted it to my lips. My elbow was shot through with a recently familiar ache; it is a tooth-achey feeling that has been bothering me for the last four or five months. It's not getting any better. (I turned fifty last January.)

The span of life, indeed.

The setting of the story has changed. One of the characters is gone. But I can still smell the hospital room and and feel the firm pillow of Snoopy's sawdust body on my cheek. I can still hear the whisper of Harry Kalas's voice on the low volume TV as Schmidt's bat swept in a perfect arc: "The one's outta heeeeeere...."

Abortion: A Reasoning Suite

I.

I think abortion is bad. And so do you.

Right?

Like, it's an eventuality no one wants to reach. No one wants an abortion. No one enjoys an abortion. No one finds an abortion a to be desirable experience.

What would we think of someone who says having abortions makes her feel good? -- lunatic? -- psycho? -- masochist?

So, all sane people think an abortion is a bad thing. They may not think it is ethically wrong to do, given particular circumstances, but they would all agree that it is a bad thing that is best avoided.

II. 

Getting pregnant at the wrong time makes women (or couples) either consider having or have abortions (which are bad).

No one wants to get pregnant at the wrong time, so, if they do, one of four things has happened:

1. They were irresponsible and had unprotected sex because it felt good at the time and they were not considering the consequences.

2. They were completely ignorant and did not know about birth control and/or abstinence.

3. They intentionally got pregnant at the wrong time, either for the attention or to garner some weird kind of credibility; to have a juicy, past ordeal to brag about. (Either a baby or an abortion will do the trick.)

4. Intended birth control failed, either by intrinsic flaw or as a result of misuse.

(Use of the pronoun "they" is meant to encompass the couple, and, so, not just pile responsibility on the woman.)

Can you think of any other reason? Anything else that comes to me is sort of a sub-heading of these.

III. 

People in categories 1 and 3, above, are fully responsible for their unwanted pregnancy.

People in categories 2 and 4 are, arguably, not as responsible for the pregnancy.

IV. 

The ethics of an abortion in either of the groupings above are on sort of a sliding scale; better or worse by degrees. The end-result, though, is the same, if there is an abortion: a person either ceases to or fails to exist.

V. 

The person who either fails or ceases to exist would have been the consequence of having gotten pregnant at the wrong time. Abortion, then, is an attempt to erase the consequences of either human irresponsibility, human ignorance, human ego, human carelessness or of really bad luck.

In any case, the end result is an abortion, which I think is bad.

And so do you.

Can you offer any revision to this? Is this reasoning sound? Can we perfect it?

Remembering Epiphanies

It's amazing how impotent philosophical epiphanies can be. Like, they are not enough. They are the moments when we decide to plant the tree. They are the energy behind digging the hole and dropping in the seed and covering it up. Plants, however, need to be watered, or they die.

I'm talking about issues as straight-forward as weight-loss: "Today I am going to begin exercising and eating properly because I don't want to die..." But I am also talking about deeper ideas. Those ideas that we know are a key to our personal happiness; a realization that we need to have in order to make sense out of existence. For instance, in 2011, I wrote a song called "Kaleidoscope." This is the chorus:

Could it be the soul is a kaleidoscope,
Changing shape and shifting colors --
Lit by different kinds of light
From one day to another?

In subsequent verses, "day" turns into "year" and then into "...one decade to another..." You get the picture.

It's based on the realization that we humans tend to look for that thing that fulfills us in life, as if is (or will be) one constant thing. As if even if it were a few things, that those few things would please us equally at all stages of life. It seemed to me, when this occurred to me, that the soul (human spirit; mid -- however you want to say it) must be too complex to respond to the same thing forever and (especially) at all times. Sure, there must be truths to what pleases us, but, even if we are deeply pleased by, say, swimming, swimming might not always please us -- not forever and not every day.

Seems like a solid idea. But the key is to remember it and to call it to memory at the right times; or before it is too late. (One must water the tree.) If one finds himself doing the same thing that used to give him joy, will he do it for months or a year or for a decade in dissatisfaction before it occurs to him that the kaleidoscope that is his soul might have shifted? That he needs to seek a different light? Will he make adjustments before he concludes that life, itself, is unfulfilling?

The epiphany is one thing, but one must remind himself to act when it proves true. That's harder.

(Here is "Kaleidoscope," if you care for a listen.)

Blood, Mud and the Convergence of Fifties

Last week was the first week since 2010 in which I have not posted a single piece. The reasons for this are many, including a major storm that knocked out our home's power for five full days. Other factors range from a serious health scare to a band gig, outside, in a near-tornado while water ran under and around all of our electronic equipment. (Idyllic setting, though, on the banks of the Chesapeake, if we could see it through the deluge.)

The beautiful house at which we played in Maryland. 

Of course, everything is "worth it" if there are lessons to be learned; and, there are lessons to be learned from everything, so I suppose that means everything is "worth it." So, let's do this in order of lessons learned:

I. Weather is not kidding around. Take it seriously. 

Around six PM on Tuesday, last, my wife and I got tornado warnings on our phones. The message was: Take cover now. I was packed and ready to go to band practice, so I texted the guys (censored, in order to keep this blog family-friendly:

Me: Serious tornado warning. Take cover now. We worrying about this? 

Tony: Yeah, right. 

Two minutes later, after texts that some of the guys are on their way to practice already:

Jeff (on the road): Stay home. I'm stuck. No power anywhere. Stay home, I'm not f-ing around. 

Various other texts from everyone, then Jeff, again:

Jeff: I'm in a tornado.

Tony: It's here. 

Then the lights went out. For five days. Live power lines were everywhere in my neighborhood. We were some of the last people in our area to get power. The sound of the generators at our house and those of our neighbors nearly drove me to the brink.

This little guy came out of nowhere to lift our spirits
and he lifted mine as only a dog can do. 

II. Don't skip your blood pressure medicine. 

Before the storm, I'd started a curriculum workshop in various locations around South Jersey. I had re-ordered my meds on Sunday, but through Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, with all of the craziness, I had forgotten to pick the prescription up. No pun intended: there was a perfect storm of the blood that followed. Four days of conference breakfasts and lunches (all salty stuff; sandwiches, chips, etc.) after a month of bad meal choices, even on family time ("School's out! Let's celebrate!") added to the stress of the major storm all ran down to a moment, on Friday, when my son looked at me and said: "Dad --  you have blood in your eye." 

I looked. I did. I thought it was a broken blood vessel from a sneeze or something. I told him not to worry -- I was fine, but he texted my wife on the sly and told her. (She was at a friend's house working because we had no power. She's a former cardiac nurse.) 

Karen texted me back and suggested I go to the local pharmacy and have my pressure taken. She knew I had forgotten to renew my meds. I went. It was 150/100. (Normal is 120/70.) For the rest of the day, after taking the meds, it continued to drop, but I had to go play with the band at an outdoor party -- party number one for the weekend...in the heat, under the sun of an uncovered stage that leaned severely to the left, which wrought havoc on the spines of everyone in the band. ("We have to make a note about this for future contracts," Jeff, the keyboard player, said.) 

III. There is a difference between being tired because of stuff on the outside and being messed up on the inside.

We played the first set. We came off. Jeff, the band's singer, approached me.

"You know I love you, right?" he said. "You know I am honest with you, right?"

"Yep," I said.

"That was," he went on, "The worst set you ever played since being in this band. Are you okay?"

I got a little defensive, but I knew he was right. I wasn't alright and I knew it. My concentration was all over the place, worried as I was, and I was feeling horrible. I did recover for the next two sets, but it took all I had. Breaking down the stuff that night, we had to use brute force instead of wheels because of the mud. As we were carrying stuff to the car, all I could keep thinking was: This is bad. I shouldn't really be doing this... It wasn't the usual post-gig exhaustion. Sometimes muscle fatigue can seep right into your soul.

IV. Joy sometimes overcomes mud. 

On Saturday morning, the band had to travel to Maryland from New jersey to play at a really nice house on the Chesapeake for a fiftieth birthday. This was supposed to be fun. Big payday; hotel rooms; the wives were even coming, some along for fun, one celebrating her fiftieth birthday and my wife and I celebrating our anniversary.

With the power out at home, my wife, Karen, had to stay home with the generator we'd bought to keep our food edible. Happy anniversary. So, okay, circumstances...

The rain poured most of the way down to Maryland, and when we got to the house, to set up, tornado warnings started rolling in. The rain came down harder; lightning flashed which made us stay far away from metal tent poles, which really didn't matter because we were walking in puddles running from those very poles. As the rain intensified, water started pouring in around the electronic equipment. Tarps came out and Tony started digging trenches to divert the water away from the band and down to the Chesapeake.

A muddy-feet-pic, shared by someone in the audience.

By the end of setup we were wet, tired and covered with mud. After a quick trip to the hotel to change and after a quick dinner, we went back to play. And play we did.

By the time we started, the grass had turned to mud and people danced barefoot in the muck, covered to their knees. But everyone had come for a party, some from very far away, and nothing would stop them from throwing their own mini Woodstock. (Kurt, the bass player, called it Bryan-stock, in honor of the gentleman whose birthday it was.) It was a great gig and the band played its collective butt off.

The musical night ended on a hilarious note, as a possibly-tipsy, rather attractive and completely muddy woman asked one of the wives where they were going after the party. When she was told, "Back to the hotel with the band," not knowing the ladies were the band's wives, she jested: "Oh -- is that an option?"

Not a very good picture, but it shows
the trampled, muddy "dance floor." 

V. There really is a difference between being tired because of the outside and being messed up on the inside.

Soggy, exhausted details, aside, the band broke down the equipment, trying to avoid the muck and mud, only to find out the the key to the truck that was pulling the trailer for our equipment, had gone missing. The meant another hard walk, carrying even the things that have wheels, over a swampy mess. From the end of the gig, at 11:30 until around 1:30 AM, we had to carry things to the singer's van and transport them to the trailer, which was about an eighth of a mile up the gravel road, and load things, one van load at a time, by the glow of an iPhone light.

As we moved things from van to trailer, I realized I was dog tired, as they say, but that it was a healthy kind of tired; not the insidious tired I had felt the night before.

"Well," I said to Jeff, as we unloaded the last of the stuff, "Look at the bright side. We're actually getting back to the hotel earlier than we'd get home after a normal gig." (We usually play until 1:30 or 2AM.) 

He had to agree. Later, Jeff said, "We must be crazy working this hard to play music."

I thought about that. We're not crazy. We're musicians. It's what we do.

I thought of my dad, who has been gone for going on two years. He was a lead trumpet player, the lead guitarist of his day; the hero of the band. At one point, he put down his horn, stepping aside, thinking he no longer had the stuff to sit in the center chair. After that , the decline began, slowly but surely, over a few decades. He'd put down who he was because keeping it going would have been a tremendous amount of work and he felt he didn't have it in him. An understandable choice, but one that, I think, eventually did him in.

It's not crazy. If there's a fire in your heart, you have to tend it. A lot of guys don't get the chance to make music, or they let it take a total back seat to everything. Sometimes doing what is inside you is worth a little tornado/electrocution risk. Sometimes it's worth the mud. It's good for a bunch of guys in and approaching their fifties to put aside talk of Metamucil, back pain and plantar fasciitis and rock out, tornadoes and blood pressure be damned. 

Oh, for the record, after we finished our ridiculous piecemeal load out to the distant trailer, the key was found, right where it was supposed to be, in Tony's backpack.

"In a few years, "Jeff said, "This will be that 'Hey -- you remember that Maryland gig?' story."

Indeed it will be. Or it already is. 

"In" and "Of"

I'm going to speak for you if you don't mind.

You have friends or family or a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a dog or...someone else you need to keep close to; someone else you need to care for; someone else you need to help to be happy; someone else you need to debate about life and laugh about life with. Every waking hour of your day is not enough to do enough to keep the dynamics between you and them strong; to maintain a connection that nourishes your collective souls, hearts and minds.

You live in a house or an apartment -- a world of your own, built by you and maintained by you. You need to clean the carpets and wipe the counters and replace the light bulbs, but you also need to perpetuate an atmosphere of positivity, partnership and love between those walls...the walls that you have to paint once in awhile. Castle or prison -- it's up to you. It's all up to you. So much is just up to you...

You have an auto-pilot muscle running your body, and that muscle is getting older, as are all of the other ones from toes to forehead.  You need to eat well, which requires shopping, planning and thinking. Then, cooking. You need to move so that when you are seventy, you won't be the tin man needing the oil can. After a certain age, gravity starts pulling you toward the grave and the fight is on. And time is needed. And time is running out. Time extended needs time spent.

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.

Why TV Makes Me Think About Dying

I'm not afraid to talk about death. In fact, I have never been afraid of death, itself -- at least not up to the point of having a family. Because of them, I now have a healthy dose of fear. I don't want to leave them without a dad and husband.

Still, I love being alive. And I love feeling, thinking and doing -- I love exploring the beauty in the world and I love experiencing the great creations and deeds of the exceptional people who live and who have lived. There is much to love about the world. And I really think there is more good than bad out there.

You know how I know TV is bad, though? When I am watching (as I was last night) and I think to myself: When it is time to die, I won't miss this place much. It will be kind of a relief. This is not to be confused with a wish for death; it is just an resignation that it will, in some ways, be a relief. That's nothing new. But it is a disproportionate reaction to a misrepresentation of reality.

Television, to me, is like the magnifying glass in the sun, held over the top of my head. It is not a true representation of the world, but a focusing of all that is bad in it.

The Arteeste (A Parable)

As he sat in his modest home, the artist lifted a chipped coffee cup to his lips, sipped, and looked out the window as the late morning sun brought steam out of the road.

The audience, the night before, had been a good one. They had cheered. They had danced. He had had his hand clasped, enthusiastically. Various people had expressed their wish that they, themselves, had "stuck with" this instrument or that one. It always struck him as a kind of passive/aggressive thing when they praised his playing and then stated their own wishes to have continued on a musical journey, but, praise is praise, he supposed.

He was a writer, as well, this artist. And he could draw fair bit. All of his life, people had called him "talented." They had worn his acquaintance like a bit of a cultural badge. This, by no means, secured him invitations to the best parties, however.

A scholarly mutt of my acquaintance.

Girls liked it too, his artistic...ness. He wasn't the kind to crank out love poems or songs for his own carnal gain, but they (these young ladies) were often intrigued by his obsession with creativity; by his fanciful nature; by his unaffected artiness; that is, until they found someone easier to get a handle on. Someone more grounded.  Someone with more potential. Someone with a nice car. (Except one.)

The Critique

We all know life is weird. We all tend to figure that out on our own, after a while. There are only so many weirdnesses that can occur before we realize that it's not just a random series of events, but an indication that  somewhere up in the offices of heaven, there must be an Administrator of Weirdness, who sits at a computer and checks to see if each of us has gotten his daily dose of weirdness. If not, maybe his hits us with a crazy dream at night, just to make up for it. But there will be weirdness -- make no mistake.

The other night, when my band had finished playing, I was in the process of breaking down my drum kit (a process that always makes me wonder why I didn't choose the piccolo) and I heard a conversation off to my right. Two youngish guys were sitting there, ignoring the bartender's yelps about it being time to leave, and one guy was saying, "... classic rock, some modern rock and dance stuff. Yeah, they were actually pretty good."

Buddy Rich, who grew up to
be more not-crap than just about
every drummer, ever. . 

He was obviously talking about our band. And it just made me laugh a little about the absurdity of human endeavor.

"They were actually pretty good."

So that's it. Some random guy in a bar has spoken his opinion: we were actually (this was a surprise, apparently -- maybe because when we took the stage we looked like we would be horrible) pretty good. Not great; not excellent; not really good -- just pretty good. One man's observation.

Fat Man on a Ladder

If I weighed five-hundred pounds, that wouldn’t preclude me from giving decent weight-loss advice. If I knew everything about balancing intakes of good foods; if I knew the ideal caloric intake per day; if I recognized the need for exercise, I would still be the giver of good advice for passing this stuff along. My fatness would not affect the actual quality of my advice in the least.

Alas, knowing and doing are distinctly different things; yet, how many people have said that they have a hard time taking the advice of their overweight doctor who smokes Camels? Illogical, but understandable.

Yes, knowing and doing are two different things.

So what if there were a guy who faithfully writes a blog that posits fairly consistent ideas -- things like independence of thought; things like realizing the need to separate the self from community; things like simplifying a life full of extraneous things and appreciating the truly meaningful moments around us -- and what if that guy were to suddenly find himself in a position to have a good grab at the things he always writes about…but he doesn’t do it.

Why doesn't he do it? Perhaps the reasons look like pride and fear; like choosing comfort over opportunity. Maybe it’s a sense of fatherly responsibility -- maybe obligation to someone he loves more than the things he loves.

Terry Pratchett's Cohen the Barbarian and You

Every day of my life is kind of a pursuit of a wish: the wish that my students will grab some of the wisdom that the great minds of literature have set down for them. The juicy apples just dangle there above them, but I can't do the picking and hand them out. It only works if the kids climb the ladder themselves. I can hold the ladder so it doesn't fall, but ... well, you get the tired metaphor.

In high school, I saw myself in Hamlet. I looked at him and I saw a guy who thinks too much,  but, more importantly, I saw that the definition of thinking too much includes thinking one's way straight through the time when one should have acted. That revelation made a big difference in my life. Many have survived various act fives as a result.

Moments of Light for the Blind?

The day my wife, Karen, and I were married, everyone asked: "Do you feel different?" No, I didn't. She and I were married the day we fell in love, I always felt. My love for her, before and after the wedding day, until this day -- and, I'm sure, beyond it -- feels more profound than it did when we were all duded up and sweating under too much cloth in front of too many people who we wouldn't have invited if we had really had a choice. (By the way -- I'm not talking about the spiritual union; I'm talking about the trappings of the celebration and ceremony. The spiritual side has an importance beyond mere ceremony.)

My high school graduation? Didn't care in the least.

College gradation? Didn't go. Grad school? Got the diploma in the mail.

I was told by many wise people that I would regret not having attended these graduations. So far . . . um . . . nope.

Everyone, including me, always talks about living in the now. Maybe I do it too well -- that is, if having no real feeling of connection to ceremony is a fault. But it means little to me, especially ceremony that marks transitions. I simply tend not to care.

I can't make these occasions, with their canned speeches and their nearly scripted reactions and their homogenizing atmospheres, feel special.

Bradley Smiles

TIP: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Tip Blinkton here with another exciting of episode of WHO HAS IT THE WORST? -- the show where you, at home, decide which of our panelists has it the worst of all. The prize? Understanding of the human condition.

Let's meet our first panelist. Johnny?

Well, Tip, Ellen is a 65-year-old housewife with three grown kids. She's from Idaho. She's a retired dental hygienist and her interests are soap operas and shows about soap operas. Ellen! [Audience joins in] WHAT'S-YOUR-PROBLEM?

The Worldwide Soliloquy

I believe this will happen. I really do.

Some day, everyone in the world, at the exact same time, is going to stop what they are doing and they are going to slap their own foreheads and speak the same soliloquy, in unison, from one end of the Earth to the other. This will be it:

Remember Me?

(I was listening to the rain today and thinking of people in my past -- those I loved, lived with, studied with, made music with and passed by among late night shadows -- and this came out:)

Remember me? How did I come through your life?

Was I a volcano, a crater or an iceberg upon the planet surface of your brain?

Do you remember me in a chilled, leafy wind,
     sitting on a crumbling city wall, in a city smelling of city rain,
     looking like I was in need of a shave and some poetic truth?

Do you remember me singing and playing in an empty auditorium
     as you watched through the double-door windows -- or standing in the firelight
     in winter woods?

Or was I a cheek-kiss at a party or a handshake, stepping down from the stage?

Was I sweating on a field, running hard next to you among young men seeking
     glory?

Or was I your boyfriend's roomate?

"Rain," by Childe Hassam

Marathon (A Parable)

There once was a man who had dreams of running. As a boy, he would run, of course. Boys must. But as things became more complicated, he ran less and less. Running was often not allowed. Running was sometimes considered cowardly. One couldn't run and do homework. One couldn't run and write out the bills. One couldn't run while changing babies' diapers. Sometimes, as a father, he ran two or three steps, but only in order to catch his toddlers as they stumbled.

As life became still more complicated, the man ran even less, until, eventually, he ran no more. Regardless, he still dreamed of running. One day, he thought, I will complete a marathon.

The Old Bicycle Shop

When I was a kid, when things hadn't yet gone mega-hyper-extreme everywhere you turned, we used to take our bikes, for repairs, to a small bike shop five minutes from the house. We'd bought our bikes there and we always had them fixed there.

When I would walk in with my dad, a forest of bikes seemed to go on forever, though there were probably only twenty in the whole place; it was about the size of a big living room. My dad would take care of the business with the mean lady and her mean husband who would both yell at me if I left fingerprints on the chrome, and I would wander around looking at the cool machines. Dad would pay, we'd leave, and I would go home and hop on my newly greased and tightened bike. It always felt like it went twice as fast as before.

Still, We Write

Lee J. Cobb, the first Willy Loman

The other night, I caught the last hour of a movie masterpiece on TV: Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. It is an inspiring film to watch, in and of itself, full of that 1950's mixture of sinewy intellect and bongo-driven, twelve-tonal avante-gardeness. It is a film that simultaneously, as much of the art of that period did, praises and condemns the register of human action and tendency.

But the old stream-of-consciousness kicked in when I again saw Lee J. Cobb, the disgruntled father who wants a young man to hang as a result of his own feelings against his own rebellious son. Seeing Cobb made me think of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, in which he played the first Willy Loman.

The Simple Truth

Harry is a man with a round, shiny face.

He sits across from a co-worker, having morning coffee. He wears a blue tie and a white shirt. "Jim," he says, smoothing his blue tie, his words heavy with meaning and trailing down in chromatic condescension, "Life is simple. Simple. Things are black and white, and everyone complicates everything . . ."

Meanwhile, Harry's wife walks the kids to school. Again, she sees that dad with the two little girls; the handsome father with the dark hair. She sees him every day. Every day, he talks to her and looks her in the eye and they walk back out to the street together, the sound of the children fading away behind them. Every day, they stand on the corner for a half hour, talking. Talking. Every day she wonders what is would be like to have a husband who looks her in the eye. Who talks to her. All day, cleaning or working in the kitchen, she thinks of this man until the slamming of her husband's car door makes her heart sink.

Accomplish Nothing?

Two nights ago, I truly sat in the presence of greatness. I watched the legendary classical guitarist, John Williams, give a concert at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. Many consider him the greatest living master of the instrument. (By the way, he's not the same guy who wrote the music for Jaws and Star Wars.)

As a student of the classical guitar, I catch him whenever he comes through the area. I fear he might retire soon, so I take every opportunity. He is a true master -- his concentration is superhuman; his technique is flawless. His Greg Smallman guitar is a perfect instrument that fills a small concert hall with its delicate power. Let me give you a sampling of Williams playing a famous classical guitar piece. (The "synch" is a little off -- sorry. On a musicological note, it was originally written for piano, but the transcribed guitar version may be better known.):