A Frightened Boy, His Dad, and the Night Sky; Summer, 1982

I just traveled back to a night from about thirty-seven years ago. At least, I can see it projected like a movie onto the dense trees behind my house. The air smells exactly the same as it did that night; it's the kind of wonderfully cool evening air that carries a spectre of fall and floats through the door like an unnoticed arrival to a formal Victorian party; the kind of cool that can only feel the way it does after weeks of intense heat.

As I said, the night was the mirror image of this one. I was about a week away from heading to high school for the first time and I was nervous and very reluctant. I never said anything, because I was that kind of a kid; somehow I always reacted to fears by turning inward, concentrating like someone trying to untangle  twine. And though I had two approachable, caring parents, it never occurred to me to go to them. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was just my teenage thinking locked onto the rails of some rusty, individualistic instinct.

And while I wouldn't have openly talked about my fears, I would routinely seek out the comfort of company, especially the company of my dad, when I felt troubled. He had a way of making me feel I was standing on solid ground when I felt a quake coming.

This night -- decades ago but still tonight -- found my dad and me lying on the deck of our swimming pool in our suburban neighborhood, hands behind our heads, looking up at the stars. We'd do this from time to time, talking or not talking...just being there. Just feeling the moment. ("Don't think about the next thing you want to do; think of now and take care of business," he would always say to me when I, for instance, rushed through cutting the lawn.)

When we talked, it was usually because he'd throw philosophical puzzles at me (some of them repeats). He was well-aware they were repeats, by the way; he just liked them enough to run them at me again.

One of his favorites: He'd have me look at the moon and he'd say, "You see the moon? It's Truth."

He'd never explain. He'd just let the idea hang there like the great white orb itself: bright against the black of Everything Else. I could almost feel the synapses connecting and creeping like ivy across my brain.

This night, with the lovely chill on me, and the fear of a new experience creeping up my spine, I was hoping for one of the old ones; one of his comfortable, familiar repeats, but he asked me a new question. Just as he asked it, I remember smelling someone's fire -- a marshmallow-toasting pit or a bonfire in the neighborhood.

"What do you think about U.F.Os?" he asked. "You think they are up there?"

"You mean space ships? Flying saucers?" I giggled a little.

"What's U.F.O. stand for?" he asked.

"Unidentified flying objects?" I ventured.

"So, what's not to believe in? Don't you think they see things up there they can't identify? The government has tons of cases of pilots seeing things up there they can't identify."

"So...like, starships?" (If you are a long time reader, you know I grew up on Star Trek.)

"Or...anything unidentified that flies. Bottom line, if you go by the definition, U.F.Os are real. Period. There are things that have been seen flying around up there that are unidentified. Keep looking long enough and you will see something."

Impending, scary newness was obscured for me at that moment. School didn't exist; or, at least, it just didn't matter much in the vast stretches of a lifetime. As we looked at the sky, I was somehow aware of the span from that day to this one, thirty-seven years later. I was aware that some day -- today -- he'd be gone, but that he would always be with me, because of the seeds he planted in the fields of my mind.

But my dad didn't plant trees; he planted beanstalks.

His U.F.O question still resonates with my like a over-wordy koan. Of course he was right, but what it means that he was right is still more of a setting off point for other explorations than an answer to be captured.

They say one forgets the face of his lost loved ones. Sometimes I think it might be true, but, from one musician to another, a voice is never lost. I can still hear my dad's voice; I can hear his tone harmonized by the cars hissing by on the street in front of our house and the leaves moving above the pool. It's a chord of memory. Tonight, I hear my dad again, in my heart, in my ears and in my head, and I look at the stars and I swear I see things moving around up there.

I just can't identify them...I hope I never will.

Goodnight, Dad.

Summer's Slow Goodbye

In my part of the world, summer settles softly to an end. There always comes a week that whispers the season's slow goodbye. The long stretch of woods behind my house becomes quieter. The grass under my bare feet starts to feel chilly at night. The air carries that scent that I can only call the smell of September.

My sons start to get sad that school is coming, their eyes a little wet at bed time, and I find myself telling them all of the positives -- that there are more summers to come; that Halloween is just around the corner and Thanksgiving and Christmas after that; that we can look forward to building snow forts and jumping into fallen leaves. (I've never been the type of dad to try to pretend that school is a blast. I hated it too, even though I loved to learn -- maybe because I love to learn.)

Monet's "Grainstacks at the End of Summer"

I believe in the wonder of all of these things I place before my sons, but I still feel heavy in the heart when summer ends.

Life used to be marked clearly into sections when I was a kid. When the last day of school came, it felt like I needed to break into a run and keep going until the ocean waves flared into white plumes around me. It felt like I stood at the ticket gate of a vast carnival filled with infinite rides. Now, summer comes, but it feels more like it flows around me, as if I were a stone in a stream, until the river finally goes dry.

Tempus Holdit

I just remembered a magic spell I once knew.  Here's how it happened:

The other day, I had my metaphorical butt kicked by a twelve-year-old.  Part of my lifelong musical journey is that I have been studying classical guitar for the past five years.  My teacher is kind enough to hold "salons" for her students several times per year, at which we can perform solo pieces for each other -- mostly adults.  Many self-conscious jokes are cracked before performances (mostly by me), many excuses are made from the stage (mostly by me) and many right hands shake nervously over the strings (mine, especially), derailing passages that sounded so great just the day before in everyone's practice rooms. 

But none of this applies to the kid in question.  He nailed it.  He nailed it because he is talented, no doubt, but (forgive me for this) so am I.  Mostly, he nailed it because he is twelve.  As always, I find there's so much to learn from those to whom we constantly condescend: "these kids."

I'm willing to bet you will hear the name of the young man above, someday.  And, probably, of another student of my teacher's, who is now nineteen and is studying guitar in college.  I love to watch this second young man take the stage.  He lopes up there deliberately, pointedly, and manages to make his formal bow feel like a high-five.  Then, without a moment's hesitaton after sitting down, without so much as the slightest facial affectation, he digs into, say, a Barrios piece the way you or I might dig into a bowl of mint-chocolate-chip.  He proceeds with downright discouraging precision and with a blossoming and quickly maturing sense of interpretation that makes me smile every time.  Again, talent is not the issue here -- he clearly has scads of that.  But, mix talent with youth, and you have a kind of tao as exquisite as a pin balancing on the point of another pin.

I don't think this is just developmental stuff -- throwing information into a rapidly growing dendrite jungle and all that.  It is something else.  You could see it as a cliche, but it comes down to living in the present. 

Oh, we suck this out of our kids as soon as possible: Think of the future!  Plan, predict and educate yourself so you will be financially secure, someday.  Go to college! -- not so you can learn, but so you can get a good job. ("How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?*)  But they refuse to listen for awhile, thank goodness -- until they cave in as we all eventually do.  But, until then, "now" is everything to them. 

So, while they are flying through an arpeggio at dazzling speeds; while they jump from "position one" to "position ten" and back to "position three" in allegro, they are thinking only of the guitar neck, not of what their audience will think of them or what homework they need to do later.  They are living the piece the way they live a layup or a trick on a skateboard that it takes them three hours to land.  "Now" is all there is.  (Yes, they have hangups about what people think of them -- more than adults do, maybe -- but not while they are doing.)

And, by the way, the twelve year old was playing a piece from "book three."  I'm in "book five."  But he played the piece in book three way better than I did at the time -- with greater smoothness, with a quicker tempo and with a whole lot less self-consciousness.  He probably also got to it a lot faster than I did.  The machinations of mind and body are just more efficient at that age. 

As I said, the young eventually lose this ability, the same way they forget the magic spell for making time actually stop.  

On the way home from the salon, thinking about all of this, I saw a group of kids on a corner of a suburban neighborhood.  They had done it -- stopped time; created a hovering "now."  I could see the shimmer of it around them.  Now, I don't know if we grown-ups still maintain sufficient chi to pull this off, but now I know the process, at least.  The thing is, I used to do it myself.  So did you, probably.  Here's the incantation:

You get into a circle with your friends, preferably on a summer night in early September -- a good mix of girls and boys, freshly bathed and changed into T-shirts and shorts after a day's swimming, if possible -- and you sit on your bike, one sneakered foot on the ground, and you slowly and rhythmically rock your bike back and forth while talking.  As far as I know, this is the only way to actually stop the Earth from spinning; sort of massage it to sleep with bike wheels the way you put a rabbit to sleep by rubbing its cheeks with your thumbs.

We grown-ups don't notice this effect because we are busy, of course.  But I have reason to believe that that's why, sometimes, an hour seems to pass too slowly: somewhere, a little pack of wizards is making its magic.  When the streetlights come on and the kids go home, the Great Spin begins again and morning comes much too quickly.

* Roger Waters, from "Another Brick in the Wall."