It’s 86 with a “feels like” of 93, and I’ve been home from a trip of errands for about 30 minutes. After I couldn’t find a third of what I wanted at the Lowe’s gardening center and finding out that the prescription I needed to pick up had been filled at my old pharmacy instead of my new one, I negotiated a ridiculous traffic pattern to cross the street to a grocery store. Parking halfway up one aisle, this is what I observed as I got closer to the store:
You know those handicapped parking spaces with the extra wide ‘stripey section’ to assist those who need more room getting out of a vehicle? A nondescript sedan, an older Chevy or something, swung in front of me quickly and parked haphazardly in that space such that it was half in the parking space and half in the stripey section. Sensitive to these things both because my late mother and father both needed handicapped parking, and because one of our closest friends now seriously needs it, I noted it had no handicapped license plate, nor did I see a placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. I saw only a driver, a 25-35 year-old. She popped out of the car without any obvious ambulatory issues, left the car running, and zipped into the store ahead of me. “Oh, probably an employee picking up a paycheck or something,” I thought. A bit cheeky, but at least just a minute or so. Nope. She pulled out a shopping cart and took off into the store.
Seriously? I felt like going back to her car and seeing if I could move it to a different parking space. (No, I didn’t, but it sounds good. People pack lethal force in this state.)
I’m reading Constance by Lawrence Durrell, set in the years immediately prior to and at the beginnings of World War II. It’s the third book of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet. Last night Constance has returned to Avignon as a Red Cross liaison to the Vichy French. In the passage I read last night, she is shocked when she realizes that the Germans stationed there (who in actuality run everything) aren’t embarrassed by their actions in executing 20 villagers because someone fired on a tank; are not embarrassed by collecting all bicycles in the area and destroying them with two tanks because now no one can take messages to the supposed resistance in the hills; are not embarrassed by seriously discussing the processing of Jews for the camps in Vichy.
This lack of embarrassment, exemplified by the young woman this afternoon, continues to defy my brain’s ability to parse many behaviors of the past ten years, mostly political ones. I eschew politics on this blog. I merely will say how disappointed I am that a large majority of centrist politicians have capitulated to their respective fringe elements, and worse, so have voters. The arena of civil discourse demands recognition of differing opinions. It demands certain social niceties.
Whatever. The Curmudgeon has an appointment with the Old Fogey Police. Apparently I need an OF license now that I’m 70.
A few hours ago I surpassed seven decades upon the planet. My first memories occur somewhere around three to four years of age; make that six and a half decades of consciousness. I rode tricycles and bicycles with playing cards clothes-pinned into the spokes for noise. I saw the first television come into our house, the advent of easily available color TV’s, and the beginnings of data processing centers (long before personal computers became a thing). I celebrated the first humans going into space. I cowered under my desk as I practiced “what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.”
I entered my teens as we kicked off the Summer of Love (“we” being a rather generous term for my inclusion in it). I protested the Vietnam War in a lukewarm manner. I wore strange clothes, even considering what teens normally do.
I campaigned with my father in 1960 for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. I voted for the first time in 1972 for George McGovern. I watched as Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. (Imagine that, Bill. Donald.) I jump aboard the personal computing “thing” in 1982 and never looked back. I became a newshound; a teacher; a cog in corporate America; a consulting ‘expert’; and a retired, lazy bum.
So what? Every single person born before 1960 can pretty much say the same. It’s because looking back shocks one. My grandparents saw the advent of cars which radically changed society, and they knew grandparents or great-grandparents which served in America’s Civil War. My parents watched as first radio and then TV made changes almost as radical. And those of us of a certain age have witnessed computers do the same as the automobile. I cannot convey the visceral feeling of being the head of this time-worm, with a tail stretching back to days which did not know any color of T-shirt but white, which never saw a man wear hair which touched or covered his ears, which had just completed two significant wars in a little over 15 years.
You’ll have to experience it yourself. It’s a trip.
I’ve been thinking about Pop Music a bit the past week or two, prompted by being forced to listen to my wife’s choice of music in our car one day. It’s some “hits of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s” piece of something-or-other…unless you like that sort of thing, then it’s a wonderful FM station which plays all the greatest songs you know and love. I’ve assiduously avoided listening to radio from the first opportunity I had to not listen to it, sometime in my late teens or early 20’s. I suppose some readers don’t understand what I’m talking about. Through high school we listened to music in two places, basically: cars and our bedrooms. We had AM radio in the cars and vinyl records in our bedrooms. If you really got into it and had deep pockets, you bought a big Wollensak reel-to-reel tape machine, but if you were a wannabe like my brother and me, you bought a cheap little portable recorder and stuck the painfully crappy microphone in front of a tiny transistor radio speaker to record “off the air”.
In small-market Spokane only two radio stations catered to young people and their shocking tastes in music: KNEW (neé KJRB by the time I left high school), and KXLY. All popular music of whatever genre mixed freely on these stations. No FM station played popular music until around the time I entered college when KREM-FM suddenly started an “underground” playlist. Underground radio featured stoned out DJ’s: “Hi, I’m John. Yeah. We’ll be playing some heavy tunes for a while. I hope you like them.” We programmed the buttons on the radio–oh Lord, do I have to explain how car radios worked back then? Those too?–to the two AM stations and became adept at punching the button for whichever one wasn’t playing a song we loathed, which happened frequently. You’ll understand in another paragraph.
But back to that moment a week ago when I listened to many songs I hadn’t heard in years. The one which sticks in my head is “If This Is It” by Huey Lewis and the News. I’m going to hate myself for looking that up and reminding my brain about it: I had a viral ear-worm for days after hearing that song. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Mr Lewis, it’s that I don’t particularly like that specific song. “I Wanna New Drug” has sentiment I can get behind. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” zips along quite nicely. But a slow near-ballad which basically says, “do you see this going where I think it’s going” struck me then and continues to as ridiculously mundane. Maybe you like it. Fine, you’re entitled because we all ask music to deliver different things and if the song delivers, great…for you. I like absolutely stupid songs because of a bass line or because the singer’s voice seems to mock the very words being sung, or because it has a frenetic beat, or a multitude of other reasons. I’m not going to mention two extremely popular groups which demographics say I should love, and I can’t stand them. I lost a friend over that once.
Listening to my wife’s radio station, I had a startling realization. I had been getting pretty egotistic about how broad my musical horizons are. I like country, blues, rock, blues-rock, folk, world/ethnic, jazz of various ilks, classical, a little bit of hip-hop and…pop. My enforced listening session in the car showed me I don’t really like pop per se, I like it very selectively. I protested to myself about all that pop music I liked from my youth. That’s when it hit me: we like all those songs which formed us as we left childhood, negotiated adolescence, and became adults. After that? Not so much. We went in different directions. Some folks I’ve met never went anywhere. They only listen to songs from the oeuvre when they were 10-25.
Today proves my point. Yesterday I finished chores and declared it to be Birthday Week. I’ve decided one day isn’t big enough to handle 70 years. Until Tuesday June 11th, I’m celebrating. Today unfolded at a leisurely pace, pointed toward some music listening, writing, and a Phillies game. I decided to listen to music from the beginning of my listening life, and then realized “the beginning” eludes definition. I settled for the year my pre-teen fan-tasy grew into musical appreciation: 1966. Until then I’d focused on whatever TV and radio served up: The Beatles, early The Rolling Stones, The Monkees. In 1965 my brother and I began buying a few different bands on 45rpm records, and in 1966 I got my first 33rpm LP, The Young Rascals. It coincided with my birthday and the end of the school year. I ran out of the schoolroom never to return to elementary school, and I ran into adolescence with a newfound appreciation for the melding of pop, soul, and rock which had started to occur.
I decided to re-introduce myself to 1966 by looking at the Top 40 lists for the year and selecting songs to listen to from it. Locating a wonderful site called Top 40 Weekly, I selected 1966 to be presented with the Top 40 chart for every single week in 1966! Wow. Here’s the beginning of the first one from January of that year:
Top 40 Weekly’s chart for the beginning of 1966.
This proves my point. (Of course, it’s self-referential, but nevermind.) I look at the first song and start singing the lyrics. I look at the second one and smile and hear Paul singing the title words. Likewise with #3 and #4. I’ll admit #5 threw me for a minute–I’m more familiar with “Catch Us If You Can” by that group, as heard on the Lloyd Thaxton show. Giving it a play, though, it came back to mind. How about #6? Check. And #7? Check. Not until #8 did I say to myself, “punch the button.” I like a few Righteous Brothers songs, but they carried a crooning 50’s style of music into the 60’s, and it didn’t play well. But who can’t smile listening to #9?
Then we hit #10. Lord knows how Eddy Arnold managed to get a charting song out of that number. I felt the revulsion rise up. Today’s form of button-pushing, the skip-track button on the streaming service came into play quickly. The remaining songs? I smiled again at #11; sang the lyrics to #12 with my wife; and wondered how #’s 13 and 14 got on the list. I don’t recall ever hearing them. The Shangri-Las managed to push out a charting song in 1966? You gotta admire that, even if the song was horrible. (I never heard that one either.) Gary Lewis’s song typified his talentless group, but made me remember “This Diamond Ring” so it wasn’t worthless. I couldn’t find #17 on Tidal, and then a relaxed wide smile–the Beatles again. Before there were LP’s in my life, there were 45’s:
Both songs in the top 20 starting January 1966.
I couldn’t find Ramsey Lewis Trio’s version of “Hang On Sloopy” and wonder what the heck a jazz trio could’ve done with The McCoys’ big hit. The Beach Boys were a selective thing for me, and #20 didn’t hit the spot. I continued through the list until I hit #40. It kinda made the whole journey worthwhile: “Lies” by The Knickerbockers. I loved that song; still do. They had another great one as shown at the top of this post.
The final 45 I bought occurred in 1976. I bought it only because I knew I would never like the album, but I wanted the song for posterity’s sake:
“The king is dead but not forgotten…this is a song about Johnny Rotten” –from “My My, Hey Hey” by Neil Young.
Our musical likes have more to do with where we grew up and what we listened to at the time, than anything objectively wonderful about the music. We like what we like, and we don’t what we don’t. Objective criticism fails precisely because it rejects subjectivity. Do I like “bad” songs? You bet. Do I dislike “good” ones? True. Are you totally inexplicable to me because you like “A White Shade Of Pale”? Abso-effing-lutely.
Sometimes I feel like a baby spider floating through the air on my gossamer web-string, wondering when this little journey will end, where it will deposit me, and in general, what does the near future hold. I’m in one of those in-between times right now. I would like to tie this up neatly by saying, “Well! I’m approaching my 70th birthday this weekend, and that explains it! Ipso facto, easy-peasy, make no buts about it.” It’s not so. I’ve never lost the summer vacation feeling we all used to get at the end of May as we eagerly anticipated the end of another school year and the beginning of a responsibility-less (or less responsibility) summer. I had barely joined the workforce at the beginning of 1978 then I returned to college in September 1981. From then until 1992 I taught in public schools–summers off! After taking a year off, working the summer of 1993 started my final move, this time to a permanent career in pharmaceutical manufacturing. But…my antsy ways caused me to move cross-country in May 1997, and we moved to a new house in May of 1998, and we moved to New York in May 2001. In May 2003 my job situation changed markedly and by August I started looking for something new. Cutting to the chase: I started many of my dozen or so consultant contracts in May, plus or minus a month. Then there’s our society’s natural predilection to mark the end of May as summer, and the end of our church choir season, and the beginning of really warm weather, and the fact I’ve always loved warm weather, and…and….and…it all seems tied up with my birthday in the beginning of June.
Turtle cannibalism
My wife and I came across an odd sight this morning. The photo below, though taken in poor lighting and into murky water, shows a snapping turtle feeding on something.
Snapping turtle eating….a turtle? Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.
I’m pretty sure that’s a snapping turtle. I estimated the shell at around 15 inches lengthwise, maybe 18. Snappers average 10-18 inches, so that’s the right ballpark. It took awhile to make out what was going on until I realized it was feeding, and the object of its meal-affection appeared to be an upside down turtle of pretty good size itself. They are omnivores and eat carrion.
Other sights during our walk around Lake Lynn:
One of two geese of this species we see frequently. This one stands one-legged up the slope from the lake near an apartment in the many buildings which ring the lake. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.The Lake Lynn southern parking lot has a small butterfly/pollinator bed including these Bachelor Buttons. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.In the butterfly/pollinator garden Black-eyed Susans predominate. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.
Coming home we remarked that our own surprising volunteer Black-eyed Susan plants were starting to look pretty good:
Or maybe this isn’t a Black-eyed Susan…or the others aren’t? June 2024.
Our hydrangea plant continues to weird us out by changing color just a bit every year, getting more and more pink:
Pretty sure I shared one like this last year. The blue stamen/pistils are really something. June 2024.
And this year the main hydrangea bush’s outlier, a new plant coming up beside it and presumably from the same root system, shows a new color scheme altogether, seeming to lean in to the color scheme of its parent:
New hydrangea. June 2024.
What I’m brooding on…
These lyrics by John Prine in “Hello In There” haunted me in the 1970s and do so more the older I get. “Happy” Monday to you all.
"Hello In There"
We had an apartment in the city, Me and Loretta liked living there. Well, it's been years since the kids had grown, A life of their own left us alone. John and Linda live in Omaha, And Joe is somewhere on the road. We lost Davy in the Korean war, And I still don't know what for, Don't matter anymore.
You know that old trees just grow stronger, And old rivers grow wilder every day. Old people just grow lonesome Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there. Hello."
Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more, She sits and stares through the back door screen. And all the news just repeat itself Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen. Someday I'll go and call up Rudy, We worked together at the factory. But what could I say if he asks "What's new?" "Nothing, what's with you? Nothing much to do."
You know that old trees just grow stronger, And old rivers grow wilder every day. Old people just grow lonesome Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there. Hello."
So if you're walking down the street sometime And spot some hollow ancient eyes, Please don't just pass 'em by and stare As if you didn't care, say, "Hello in there. Hello."
Maybe my purpose simply lies in imitating Charlie: hang out at the bar and drink a half gallon dry? May 2024.
I’ve several pieces of writing sitting on the shelf in a to-be-born state. Some even sit at the front edge of the shelf, just waiting to be taken down, polished, exhibited. This beckons now, however. It underpins the others.
I’ve too often settled for what I can do instead of striving for what I want to do. This blog and its recent lack of activity exemplifies that. There exist but a handful of activities which bring me as much pleasure as posting photos, essays, poems, and other pieces of writing here. Why the weekslong gaps?
At the age of 13, as inchoate as any such a creature, I became focused by two things: my Language Arts teacher said (using a bit of poetic license), “Damn, Pilcher, you can write! You should consider being a writer!” The other event occurred in the same year when a partner and I debated some topic which I now forget in front of the entire 8th grade class, all 300-400 of us. I got a glimmer into my innate bent toward logic and reasoning, both inductive and deductive. Our duo lost the 8th grader vote, but we won the teacher vote, similar to winning the electoral college but losing the popular vote. I considered myself a Writer and a Debater from that point forward. I did not know they were sometimes mutually exclusive.
In high school my teachers redirected my interest in writing. I learned they placed little emphasis on writing creatively, focusing instead on the expository writing of the essay, the critique (book reviews), and the like. Can one function in society where business letters rule the day? (At least they did then. If those teachers could only see today’s society…alas, most are dead.) I therefore looked to the available outlets, enrolled in Journalism, and joined the school paper (an elective class). In my senior year the two points of view in C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures collided. All that expository writing reached new heights when Senior Humanities brought me the two-hour essay as a substitute for a test. But…the loosening of curricular philosophies brought me the elective of Creative Writing. Suddenly I wanted to go back to the latter. Yet already I had applied to the University of Montana because it had an excellent School of Journalism.
To shorten this up: I did attend the U of M, but enrolled in an experimental education program instead of journalism. I spent one year there. There followed a year of earning money, a two-year stint at a regional college learning to be a recording engineer—no, wait, a radio-TV newsman—no, wait, a weird combo of that with Economics—before I enrolled in journalism (again) at the University of Washington, determined to make my way in that field because, “if I don’t focus on something, I’ll never do anything!” And I did work in newspapering for almost four whole years.
Pause. This supposedly promised to be about how he couldn’t focus his desire to write into the pursuit of WRITING. He settled for what came to hand, taking the path of least resistance, doing what he appeared to be reasonably talented for. Compress the next twelve years: convenience and aptitude led to a ten-year teaching gig. Divorce and early-onset midlife crisis led to One Last Attempt to Be A Creative Writer. It failed in less than a year. (Insert all the comment you want; I/we know our psyche. I/we did what seemed necessary to maintain mental health.) Through a series of events which defy a bad Hollywood script, I wound up analyzing data and writing scientific reports for the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturing company at that time. I did well. I spent a quarter century at it, eventually as a consultant, and retired.
WAIT! WTF? I THOUGHT THIS PROMISED SOMETHING ABOUT HONOR AND ALL THAT?
What is honoring thyself? Youth #1 has innate talents for playing baseball, thinks “I really like buying and selling stuff” but goes into baseball because his/her innate talent take them that way. They succeed as expected, then coast for the rest of life realizing passive income from the insane amount of money earned as a ballplayer. They neglect to build a business empire based on that initial desire to be a capitalist. Youth #2 loves baseball despite having mediocre talent at playing it. He/she works every waking moment for years to make this dream come true. They are drafted into professional baseball, succeed despite what their projected ceiling is, and spend the rest of their life in baseball as a coach or a manager or a consultant developing young talent.
Which one honors themselves? The one who leaned into their innate talent? Or the one who ignored who-knows-what talent to pursue a dream? Youth #1 drifted into baseball on talent. Youth #2 ignored talent to pursue a dream which consumed the remainder of their life.
And for the religious among us, which one is pursuing their God-given path? Youth #1 made the most of their innate talent. Not #2.
How can I be nearing 70 years on the planet and still wonder which one of these I am, and what the answer is to that question about honor?
When I volunteer to write a database/listing application for my church choir, am I fulfilling my innate talent, or am I defaulting on my dream? Ditto for ditching teaching to write business reports that pretty much anybody could write. To make it more mundane, when I derive great joy and satisfaction in planning a set of weekly menus, selecting good recipes, and cooking them, am I dodging my greater dream, my greater desire to Be A Writer?
Is Being A Writer just an ephemeral dream, a wisp of wanna in a wind of reality?
Deep down I think I fear that though I have a talent for crafting language, I have nothing to say with it. I need to be explaining something, reacting to something, pontificating upon something. (I’m doing it now.) Avoidance mechanism or recognition of doing what I truly want to do? I fear it’s a bit of both.
I intended to end this with a promise about upending my approach to the day, the week, my life. To declare, “I will write FIRST, I will read FIRST, and only then will I tackle the mundane!” (“Dear, have you emptied the cat boxes yet?”) I cannot do that. I’m sitting here thinking about the monks with writing skills who eschewed them to pray aloud and work the fields. Of soldiers skilled in various practical skills who instead served on the front lines. Of women (and a few men) who gave up promising careers to raise children. What is a Calling and what is a desire?
In the end I come back to this: you have done what you wanted to do at the time. If more high school guidance counselors—do they still have those?—had told this to their junior and senior clients, a lot more of them would have been able to pursue what they were drawn to. I know I would have.
There will be no end to this piece. Not until I reach my death bed and give you the answer, and likely not even then.
The piece I wrote last night isn’t quite ready, my tasks outpaced my time available, and I really want something to be posted. Ergo….
THOSE WHO DAWDLE MUST STAND ON CURB
I guess the two on the curb are crossing guards. May 2024, Raleigh, NC.
One of the best blues-rock live albums of my lifetime: “LIVE” FULL HOUSE by J. Geils Band, released 1972. “Whammer Jammer, lemme hear ya, Dickey!” and Mister Magic Dick on the lickin’ stick takes off with some serious Southside harmonica work. (YouTube also has a 1979 video of the band performing this onstage–worth it for Magic Dick’s bush of hair alone.)
Ideas I will never write (feel free to steal):
I was only hunting moonbeams/But my eyes got in the way
The scariest monsters don’t lurk under your bed. The scariest ones climb into bed with you and pretend to love you.
“He’ll worry all about the bugs on the windshield but not about the car coming at him in his own lane.” Not sure where that is from. Was it me?
Many people will travel the world on a regular basis but will be unfamiliar with the land and culture within a 300-mile radius of where they live.
The oak-leaf hydrangea has recovered from the complete devastation of the squirrels two years ago. Though only one stalk remains, it has leaves on it as big as a small dinner plate, and this lone but lovely bloom cluster. May 2024.
Guilt motivates, terrifies, handicaps, and depresses us. It informs, too. My guilt about not posting more than weekly here tells me I want to write more, photo more, pour myself into creative pursuits more than I have been. It also informs me other things must carry higher levels of guilt which trump my Creativity Guilt. Taking on a project, though, motivates me. Therefore, I’m tasking myself to write daily/frequently about what’s blocking the blogging.
A partial inventory of our beer fridge. April 28, 2024.
Take a look at that spreadsheet screenshot above. One would think I created it to keep track of the approximately 22 kinds of beer in the beer fridge. Sigh. I wish it were so, and it remains a side benefit of the real reason I created it: that “Beers/unit” (Column O) feeds another sheet in the same workbook which is used to calculate how much I drank yesterday. Every morning for the past decade I make a short entry in my Health Log, maintained in Microsoft Excel. These days it’s simple: record my weight, make sure the meds I took yesterday is complete and accurate, and write 3-6 sentences about my general health mental and emotional. Examples? Life’s slings and arrows manifested as aching hips, arthritis starting to develop in my fingers, whether my collapsing ankles have caused any more ligament damage, and the condition of twitchy back. Lately it gives a couple terse lines about what happened yesterday, a sort of bulleted journal entry. I began adding these more and more in retirement.
More consistently than anything else, this log daily has tracked my ongoing battle to Not Drink So Much. It unflinchingly has recorded for the past decade the exact amount of beer I drink (I don’t drink wine or hard liquor anymore). It has done so with graphs illustrating rate of consumption, with 7-day and 14-day moving averages, with tables that project how much more the next beer will cost me, with histograms–and not one bit of it has made much of a difference in my rate of consumption. I had thought simple awareness would make a difference, much like cigarette smokers are told to record how and when they smoke. Awareness has made no difference whatsoever, even when I have done it in real time, as I’m drinking. The snippet of the calculating worksheet is shown below. Columns D, E, and F are the ones which look to the inventory sheet, multiplying the Beers/unit by the quantity drunk.
How to calculate a medically-defined beer. April 2024.
Columns A and B record odd-quantity beers, which usually occur when ordering at restaurants. I’m not going to go into all the calculations for what a medical beer is; you can see the definition at the top there and do the math yourself. Although I quit (finally) graphing the daily intake, I still list it in the health log entry. And now the beer-rating sheet gets maintained all the time. Filter the quantity on hand to ignore “0” and you can narrow the 400+ beers to a handy beer list to print out for when your wife says, “What’s in the fridge?”
This isn’t a cry for help. It illustrates the premise of the introduction: setting up these interlocking worksheets takes time. There are five other worksheets in this spreadsheet file that I’m not describing. And this is but one application. There’s a monster financial one which I think I could’ve sold back in the day I roamed the country as a self-employed consultant and needed to keep track of hours, rates, contracts, bills, accounts receivable, and how they drove our personal budget and finances. I just updated a Google Sheets app to plan music for our weekly masses and to show our choir what the music will be for a given Sunday–hymn numbers, responsorial psalm number, and the name of the anthem. It’s not a listing tool, like electronic paper. It requires the music director to pick the liturgical name of a given mass (such as the 5th Sunday of Easter) which then causes the application to pick the correct psalm information. The choir list looks to the planner. The printout for the cantor to use is driven from the planning sheet and the liturgy sheet. And etcetera for other things in my life.
In short, I analyze. I might read some political thing about the imbalance of power inherent in the two-US Senators-from-every-state part of the Constitution and go down a rabbit hole to compare the ratios of state populations in 1792 versus 2020 just to see if they’re markedly different or not. (I stopped myself on that one, thank goodness.) I might spend two or three hours to make some points about baseball like I did 18 months ago on this blog. This stuff happens all the time, and….
That’s one reason I don’t get to my writing like I think I want to.
Symbolically, this peony represents why I haven’t been posting. It’s two days ago, I’ve got about 30-45 extra minutes in the late afternoon, and I think, “Hey, I better get that peony tied up before it blooms, and for sure before those hard rains hit that are forecast for tonight.” My two peonies will fall right to the ground as soon as they bloom fully. The rain didn’t materialize, but this photo, taken yesterday, shows many blooms are on their way and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow “for sure” and…you get the idea. The idea that I could instead get something posted never entered my mind.
I wrote a very lengthy essay last weekend the first of a series to explain from various points of view explaining what I think is more important than writing. Though sober (a good way to write!), I left it overnight to review in the morning, and decided at that point it just was too personal. My desire to be a writer and accept that a writer needs to write where the words will take him conflicts with my desire to be liked by at least a few people and with my desire to not expose every piece of my soul and psyche.
There won’t be many posts in the near future either, but I keep saying I’m ‘going to do better’ and maybe this time I mean it. Hey, I finally started going back to the gym after a six-month hiatus, didn’t I? And that’s for something I don’t really want to do!
A door by any other name. Stained glass lighting of the ordinary. March 2024.
Among the plethora of button-pushing statements to set me off is, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” No. Shit. The sentiment behind it? Okay, sure, don’t drag yesterday’s baggage into today. Yet who among us feels wise enough to know every single one of the elements from the past which represent baggage (versus valuable life-informing lessons)? I’m a Jacob Marley sort. I drag a long, long chain of emotional bondage behind me, all the little boxes filled with guilt, remorse, sorrow, and pain. I’ve been blessed/cursed with an excellent memory so all of that stuff remains instantly retrievable. (My family: “How do you remember all of that?”) I’ve been blessed/cursed with an exactitude which drives me to excel and drives me to repel. And I’ve been taught by my father to dwell on failure, hold it close, never let go, and fixate on the darkness behind instead of the light ahead. This works especially well if one can punish oneself for some splitting-hair issue which no one else can perceive.
With that in mind, it’s perplexing how much of an optimist I am, and to that end, over the past week or so I’ve felt yet another “new” beginning in my life. Maybe it’s caused by looking ahead 70 days to the eve of my 70th birthday. (Huh. That’s numerical coolness right there!) More likely it’s just the relief of warmer temperatures coming to join the much longer, much brighter days. Whatever. I feel the same soul-searching and goal-setting vibes as I do at the beginning of Advent or the New Year. I’m getting in shape! I’m rededicating myself to my scriptural studies! I’m planning a cool getaway that’s been on the books for over a year! I’m getting back to writing more, photographing more, and posting it all here! Yes! Yes! It could happen!!
Perspective says, “No, you know it won’t happen that way. You’re going to light a birthday-cake’s worth of hope-candles which will be snuffed out quickly in the winds of your ever-changing mind and the vagaries of life. You’ll move on. You’ll declare a New Normal. You’ll dive, you’ll soar. It will be Life As Usual.”
Okay then. I’m leaning into life as usual, but I’m redefining usual! So there, Perspective!
And speaking of perspective, this last thought: I recently told a friend in his mid-80s that I had been dwelling on “how much time do I have left” and it saddened me that I had so little time remaining to study the underlying scholarship to the Bible. His immediate reaction: “Why would you do that!” He noted I likely wasn’t ready to pursue the studies until I did. Generalizing from there: one does what one does when one does it. Would I have had a different life if I had listened to my inner voice of reason in 1992 and said, “no, I’m not moving to Philadelphia just to pursue a fling with a young woman?” Sure. Your life flows through the geology of existence, creating a channel called My Life. I’ve tried to choose the most natural, easiest path on the theory it represents what’s best for me at that time. It led to many wonderful things, but I can’t say any one decision made differently wouldn’t have led to many other wonderful things.
Perspective–it’s a bitch. That’s why old folks are so bitchy–we have more perspective.
[I was too exhausted to post anything, so I’m making it up this morning evening…]
…sent to me…let’s see…”pipers piping”…(sigh)
Today brought out my darker side of anger, depression, and fear for my health. Or perhaps it’s a side effect from our beginning a Damp January (as opposed to Dry January which would actually less difficult than “dampness”). Regardless, when your really cool cat gets on your nerves simply because he is, after all, a cat–then you know you’re seeing some kind of stress bubbling out of the nearest weak point like magma seeks a weakness in the earth’s crust. I think many of us who blog have at least a small mental-health reason for doing so. I tell you things as I would a psychotherapist. In doing so I see myself, I discover things about myself, and it’s cheaper than engaging the real thing. (What do they do anyway? “How did this make you feel?” Really? I would like to think they’re like a baseball hitting coach: they say little of note except “attaboy” and “you really caught that one!” until with just one deft comment they say, “hey, are you dropping your lead shoulder a little more on purpose?”)
But to continue our theme: we are now one day behind and the pipers piping remind me of my days at Shadle Park High School in Spokane, WA. Our mascot was the Highlander. Our marching band wore kilts plus those cool tight jackets up top over white shirts and ties, and the drum majors (maybe the whole band?) wore sporrans which are those horsehair things that hang in front of the kilt and seemed designed to keep the front from flying up in the breeze. Our drum majors wore those incredibly tall, fuzzy hats on their heads. And we had bagpipers…piping.
I co-edited the newspaper in my senior year. I also edited one section of the yearbook, and when I couldn’t get a good [expletive] photo from the photography staff, I bought a 35mm and became a photographer myself. I had a period for each, which meant half my day was spent in the journalism room. Seniors only had two required classes anyway, a couple of social studies type classes spread over the two semesters, and English. Like many college-bound seniors, I took Senior Humanities which combined the Current World Problems/World Geography classes with English to give us a more challenging venue (and to earn us advanced credit in college which now has become common but back then was innovative). We rolled with the times. 1971 segued into 1972. We looked forward to graduating as we protested the Vietnam War (or not), indulged in the licentiousness of the times (or not), frequented the rather new thing called McDonald’s (everyone), went to dances, protested the ridiculous rules which are always foisted on high school students because, frankly, adults are afraid of near-adults, and we looked forward with eager anticipation to exercising a newly-won right as citizens: we were going to vote for a president in the fall. Nixon won. Figure it out.
This is a photo of my journalism teacher at the beginning of my junior year, except I don’t have permission to use his photograph, so you’ll have to imagine a guy that looks a bit like Dickie Smothers complete with a curly-ended handlebar mustache and a page-boy haircut. The photo was taken for some kind of promo thing for the yearbook company. He left us at the end of that academic year to go teach cinema studies in Edina, MN. I stayed, dithered, took journalism, veered to creative writing, and wound up doing neither when I went to college at the end of 1972. Ah well.
Me, aged 16. Note really cool leather band for my wrist watch. Note cool floral pattern in the bands of the T-shirt. (Hell, note that I’m wearing a T-shirt at all.) Fall 1970.
all the voices in my head 