Category Archives: Gratitude

What I Often Forget

Each of us hangs here in this world by a spider’s thread, a strong enough wind will put an end to any of us.   It’s a miracle, if you think about it, that an entire mad world has been put together by people in this precarious position.   Immense structures of heavy metal fly through the air, filled with people, all hanging by a string as thin as a spider’s web.

It may last a day, a month, a few years or a century, but the most important thing, I think, is not to leave damage on the souls of the people we encounter.  As the kindly drug pusher told me on that long ago Greyhound coming back from Boston, when I declined his offer of a laundry list of drugs and he then handed me a free percoset, as I was on crutches with a newly sliced tendon on the bottom of my foot, “if I can’t help, I don’t hurt.”

Soul on Fire

I had the odd thought, and true, that my soul is on fire. Feeding the blaze all the skills I’ve loved, and nurtured, burning in a deep, bright flame.  Though it takes all my strength, sometimes, not to call things by their name, I am also amazed, sometimes, at this incandescence.

Ahimsa– the e-book

I write this to remind myself to create an e-book, illustrated by myself and children I’ve yet to meet, stressing the importance of Ahimsa, a practice of peace and gentleness I am trying to perfect without great knowledge or any religious framework.  This book will help me stay focused on Ahimsa– non-harm.

Do not cause suffering, if you have any say in the matter.  If you can’t help, don’t hurt.  If you hate something, don’t do it to anyone else.  Be calm, focused and peaceful when you oppose something.

Suffering is a contagious symptom that feeds on and devours itself along with hope and mercy.  The doctor who would treat it must remain calm, focused and peaceful, because it spreads easily and requires quiet skill to properly diagnose and treat.  

If I can’t help, I don’t hurt.  Practice that for two hours on Thursdays as you and your little colleagues draw, cut, photograph, edit, title, strategize, choreograph, clap, stomp and sing.

Don’t say “you suck,” although it takes almost no breath to say it.  Use your breath to laugh or sing, much better uses for it.  Only, don’t laugh or sing at someone else’s misery, no matter how funny or well-deserved that misery may seem to you at the time.  You would hate it if someone did it to you.

Family and Death

You would hope, and often in vain, that in the end love and forgiveness would overcome anger, and that entire families would sober up from their draining focus on past injuries.   My uncle, a fussy, vain and sometimes difficult man, who operated behind a veneer of chirping mildness, is not going to get off his back again, or open his eyes, or from the looks it, squeeze anyone’s hand.

The damage that makes people selectively monstrous is not easy to undo.  My father, whose selective monstrousness did great damage to each of those he loved the most, as great damage was done to him, believed that people can’t change.  Arguably, he changed at the end when he and I had the luck to revisit the issue one last time as I stood by his death bed.

Few people have this luck, my first cousin certainly won’t.  And so we will never know if my uncle, like his brother, would have spent the last night of his life confessing his many regrets, wishing he could have seen the gradations and colors that make life beautiful, instead of the black and white only that simplifies life into a war that is always lost in the end.

A Mug’s Game

Running in the background, constantly and to everyone’s detriment.  I’ll try to describe it in summary.

Dreams are seldom realized, that’s the set-up, the hard truth, why dreams are mostly dreams.  A variety of myths about freedom, living the dream, exist, but they are mostly bullshit.  Our idea of freedom is like holding a cloud.  Becoming free, in any meaningful sense, is hard, scary work.   Too hard and scary for most of us.  We collect, instead of the thing we actually want, a series of consolation prizes.  Then we try to believe that these prizes are as good as what we once held out for.

There is nothing so terrible in this, except how it predisposes us to cast a critical eye on others while we try to console ourselves.   Nobody is singing our praises, why should we sing anybody else’s?  And the cycle, vicious as any, rides on downhill with the wind at its back.  It takes only gravity to keep it going.

Someone weaker than you, recognized for strength?  Maddening.  A mediocre singer praised for singing when what you love best is to croon soulfully?  Infuriating.  In the real world it’s who you know and who you blow and blah blah blah.  So you send me your best attempt at a poem, in a moment of hope, I’ll let it drop into the silence it came from.  

You’d do the same for me, I’m sure, most people do.  And, of course, we’re all very busy trying to be born before the lights go out forever, or trying to forget death, or trying to write our own symphony, or pop masterpiece, or the perfect haiku, or chasing the distraction to end distraction.

Maddened in the city of abandoned dreams we rush about chasing consolation prizes.  The dream we dreamed fading mostly.  They only torment us when we dream of them again and ponder the gulf that now separates us from them.   Watching somebody else rush towards some noble truth or another only reminds us how far we are from ours.  It sticks in our throats.

Best of all not to even mention it, nobody gives much of what we really need to us, anyway.  In fact, forget, if you can, that I even mentioned it.

Seven Minute Drill

Got to keep climbing, despite the negative chant, the chorus of voices who always say you can’t (tip of the mitre to that rapper who wrote Potential back around 1991) I’d be Dr. Seuss, if I had the juice.  Less than six minutes remain to this scattered refrain, so let me, as they say, make the most of those now 300 seconds.

It focuses the brain, they say, being on the scaffold like this, though it distracts the brain too, the thought that it will all be over in, now, less than 260 seconds.

Thomas Jefferson, my main tragically hypocritical man, stole lines written by a man on the scaffold when he famously wrote that a favored few were not born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us.   He was famously wrong, of course, as he was born booted and sharp spurred, ask his terrified, bloody horse.

“This is how you want to go out?” asks, you, say.

“Absolutely not.  I want to go out with words of inspiration and gratitude for the many gifts of this wonderful life.  Sure you have a right to be sad, even bitter, but why waste time when you have less than 110 seconds before the end?  When you see that tsunami coming to wipe out the earth, right after you gasp ‘oh, shit!” it will not be anger, sadness or bitterness in your mouth.  Terror and wonder, terror and wonder, my friend.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” observed my father moments before he breathed his last.

“Nobody does,” I reassured him.  Then he did it like a champ.

Fittingly Abstract

The dream dreamed that it was not a dream, unperformed task piled upon undone task til they are all-surrounding, heavy as a bag of wet quilts.  In the old days we wrote these on ribbons many miles long, in long hand, while trains rattled and tramp steamers tramped, people embarked, grim yet hopeful.  

Our mothers were alive back then, given the gifts of long lives, gifts they many times fretted over and complained about.   But when the lights went down, and the orchestra throbbed to life as the stage lights came on, their hearts always soared, giddily gulping air as the vault of the sky opened.

“I can’t hear a melody without someone singing it,” my mother, a lifelong lover of the Opera, confessed one day when I’d been unable to completely hide my dismay that she hadn’t recognized Stardust when I played it on the guitar.  I learned to conceal my dismay out of love, and trying to protect her in some small way.  But sometimes dismay can’t be hidden completely.

“Until I hear the singer start to sing, I really can’t tell what the song is from just an instrumental melody,” she explained.   

I was shocked to learn this (though relieved it was no reflection on my guitar playing), because she sang tunefully.  I’d learned the melody of Mairsy Doats from her renditions in the car, probably Swingin’ on a Star too.   She would join in to sing “I’m An Old Cowhand” til the end of her life, whenever I struck it up on the ukulele.  We sang it for her at her memorial at my father’s grave on that hot summer day in 2011.

My father, also a fair singer, also with poor control of his emotions sometimes, and a tendency to snap, would eventually snap at her from the drivers’ seat with a carping comment and she’d clam up.  My sister and I would continue our battles in the back seat and there’d be a heavy, brutal silence in the car, or the radio would blare news.

Funny, to think how well they both sang, that they always both claimed to have no musical ability.  My father was always self-mocking, self-excoriating, really, when it came to his voice, but had impeccable taste in music and an ear for truly great tunes.  He loved Sam Cooke and Bill Kenney and other soulful singers, and he’d deliver his four or five note riff of each selected killer melody with style, off the beat and perfectly in tune.  He loved the crooners, the hip ones.  I wasn’t surprised to find out after he died that he’d loved Bobby Darin’s singing too.

“I’ll never hear Joe sing again,” my mother cried one night over the phone, when the final chemo was done and it was only a matter of time now before a twenty-three year run of relative good luck with the cancer finally came to a bad end.  Joe came by after I told him that, and we looked through some songbooks.   Picked out any we thought my mother would particularly like, or that otherwise struck us as beautiful.

September Song, Stardust, Are You Lonesome Tonight?  We played through them and a dozen more, Joe reading from the computer monitor as I followed on guitar, reading chord charts penciled into small books.   Put some reverb on us, panned us slightly to get a nice stereo separation, it sounded pretty good.  Then I added a second guitar and, on a few, a little keyboard pad.  Joe was backed by a spare trio, or sometimes a guitar duo.

I brought the CD to Florida, played it over crappy little computer speakers for my mother who was sitting on the couch, off to the side.  She sat through it quietly, smiled a few times, but without great excitement, then smiled again when I asked what she thought.  She said “eh….” and apologized for the disappointment I was feeling, thanked me for the attempt, told me she really appreciated it and how sweet it was of us to try, and all that.  

It don’t remember if it occurred to me to tell her right then to listen to it through her iPod headphones, I’m sure I probably did have her listen to it at least once that way before I left Florida.  I left the tunes on her iPod when I went back to New York.  I spoke to her thirty or more times in the next month with no further mention of the songs.

“Oh, the most amazing thing happened to me before, this afternoon,” she began enthusing in that Bronx way of her’s, many weeks later, “I just heard the most beautiful music on my iPod, I don’t even know how it happened, how it got there.  I was lying on my bed, I put the iPod on and suddenly there was Joe singing!” and she began to kvell, as they say.  

Joe has a great voice and my mother always loved when he’d sing opera to her.   She probably hadn’t heard him singing popular music before and she went on about how beautiful his voice was.

“What did you think of his backing band?” I asked her, when she was done.  She was perfectly happy with them, who were they?

“Me,” I said, casually, told her I was so glad she enjoyed it, reminded her of her first reaction, told her about stereo and the fine sound quality of a properly mixed digital recording through headphones, and we went on to speak of everything else.

 One of the great memories of my musical life.

Anger is Bad Policy

And so we see that while we may be right, and righteous, and on the side of the angels, and provoked terribly, mercilessly even– anger is not a good option.

“So, you slammed your arm across your desk and swept everything on to the floor, in front of your third graders?”

“Yes, but….” is a very poor answer, no matter how compelling the long ‘but’ is.

That was more than twenty years ago, a thing to lament when recalled during a somber moment every decade or so.  I’m grateful that I can lament it now, the high price already paid.