Deja Vu All Over Again

I learned something again.

I mean that in all possible ways: another learning experience, a re-learning of something, knowledge once known but lost, a learning of something new, having an epiphany, or any other way you care to parse it.

I am fascinated by how our knowledge of a subject colors our view. When I was first learning to land an airplane, the single thing that grabbed my attention was exactly how quickly the world was getting bigger in the windscreen. The view was mesmerizing. What? I'm supposed to be doing something here? As I became more and more familiar with the process, I learned to make the decisions and perform the actions required to ensure that the arrival was less than earth-shaking.

When I began to play a musical instrument, my first pieces had only two or three notes, then they began increasing in complexity as my skills and knowledge increased.

My point is this: when I first see something unfamiliar, I am often so overwhelmed by the event that it is impossible for me to really absorb the details. When my experience increases, I begin to see things in a different light. I can start to appreciate the nuance and subtlies in greater depth.

This leads to other questions. When do you know enough? Is there always a deeper layer of understanding, always more to learn if you are willing to invest the time? I think perhaps there is.

I had a small epiphany of my own last night. I was transcribling (Not a typo…well, it began as a typo until I saw the truth of it) some music.....the Halelujah Chorus (and believe me, that is some music), anyway, as I was entering the notes for the organ part in my MIDI staff, I could hear the pitches at the same time. I knew on a logical level that the grouped notes formed chords and chord inversions, but listening to them caused me to think about them in a different way.

In my novice naivety, I had always assumed that the keyboardist read every note and figured out which finger went where each time. What I suddenly saw was that each chord could be read as a word, the notes analogous to the letters, and performed by the fingers as a unit as easily as we pronounce a word after we have learned to speak. Wow.

We don’t learn to speak in full sentences, and we don’t learn to play in complete passages. My first instrument was the Cornet, followed by the Saxophone, both instruments that normally form only one note at a time. When I learned guitar, I learned chords, but I learned them individually as hand and finger positions, not as discrete notes. The big deal is thus: if I know a chord, say a C major, and I need to play a C6, unless I have learned the C6 I can’t do it. I have no clue which note(s) I am playing in my chord is(are) the one(s) that need to be modified to change the chord. I just know that when I do this it makes a C.

So…one thing I have not done is to really learn to play melody lines on my guitar. I can read music Ok, I just never took the time to learn where to find the notes on the guitar, There are a lot of places to find the same note on the fret board – some are more useful than others.  I’m taking the time now…crap….if I was only half a century or so younger…this would be so much easier!

The Gift of Storytelling

I met a young lady the other day. I was in one of my favorite restaurants, enjoying my lunch and reading an e-book on my kindle. The young lady in question is on staff at the restaurant. She asked how I liked my e-reader, and a brief conversation ensued. Turns out that she is an aspiring author, but it goes deeper than that. The lady is tee-totally in LOVE with writing and all things writerly.

I asked if she participated in NaNoWriMo 

http://www.nanowrimo.org/ 

(if you are not familiar, this is an organized challenge, open to anyone who cares to play. The month of November is designated ‘National Novel Writing Month,’ and the goal is to write a novel of at least 50,000 words between the beginning and the end of the month.

She admitted to having won (you win by completing the task) 4 times, and last year doing a double……yep, 100,000 words! I certainly admire her ambition and sticktoitiveness. She has a website and a blog and she is all about writing. All about Writing. I read several of her blog entries, the comments and replies to comments many from friends and supporters, other writers offering encouragement. All about writing. I attempted to have a meaningful conversation. After all, I'm an avid reader, but I quickly realized that my experience as a reader did not qualify me to speak with any knowledge about the craft of writing.

Now, I love to read, always have, and I obviously enjoy writing or this meager blog would not exist, but I’m not in LOVE with writing. But…there exists a whole community of folks out there who are. Many also love to read, but their passion, yea their addiction, is writing. If they aren’t writing they aren’t happy. They study writing and writers. They attempt to master the craft of storytelling. They are fascinated with plots and characters, genres and styles…..and how and where to get published. They are fascinated with being authors.

I have no hard facts to back this up, but based on my knowledge of superstars in other endeavors, for every really successful artist or athlete there are literally thousands of individuals who want to be just as successful, rich or famous. And, as fame and success rarely alight on beginners, so must aspirants often support themselves by doing something other than painting, playing second base (or second fiddle) or writing. Hence the staff position at the restaurant. A filler job until the novel takes off.

This underscores for me just how lucky I am. I could not put together 50,000 words that anyone would pay to read if my life depended on it. The only subject I can paint well is a house, but it will look best if someone with a better eye picks the color. I could never hit major league pitching or drive a golf ball 300 yards. I can, however, design things mechanical, things that function and do their jobs with efficiency and beauty. I can imagine the way a thing needs to be made and then build it or communicate my design to those who can build it, I LOVE doing it and I get PAID to do it.

I didn’t sign a 25 Million Dollar, 6 year contract. I won’t read my works to throngs of admirers, or sign copies to become treasured heirlooms. I won’t be chatting with Dave or Conan on late night television. But I will go home at the end of my day knowing that I enjoyed my job today…knowing that I used my God-given talent to do something special. I’ll be pleased with what I have done today and I’ll look forward to tomorrow’s challenges. I am a lucky man.

So write on, dear friend. Let your passion guide you and put everything you have into what you LOVE to do. Do what pleases you with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might, and the Universe will find a way to reward you. Be Happy.

A Little Melancholy

I was listening to the news today. I don’t really advise it. As my old friend Sam Clemmons once said, “Those who don’t read the news are uninformed, those who do are misinformed.”

Any road, the discussion I was eavesdropping on revolved around the nuclear issue in general, and Iran and Israel in particular. The question seemed to be whether or not Israel’s eminent action to interrupt Iran’s Nuclear Programme would result in War, Cyber or Shooting, and if Iran would target sites in the US for terrorist attacks in retribution.

That got me thinking about my family, how war would affect them, be it a shooting war, an economic war, cyber war or whatever. Seems to me that we are so fragile right now, teetering on the edge of the abyss, it won’t take very much to seriously disrupt our way of life.

As I thought about these things, my mind did a zoom out in space and time. As I got farther and farther from ground zero. I saw other families in other places at other times. I had a bit of an epiphany as I realized that there really was no difference between me and mine and you and yours no matter where, or for that matter, when you are.

You don’t love your kids and grandkids any more or any less than I do. Their futures are or were or will be every bit as promising as mine, yet, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t make any difference. They will either live to be full of years and full of memories, or tragedy will overtake.

Live in a quiet little town in Alabama. Save and build your entire life, then one day a tornado reduces all to zero. Time to start over. Then ten months later, go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200 as another random act of Nature clears the works of man from the Alabama countryside.

It has always been this way and always will be.

From Dust you came, and to Dust you shall return.

Can you picture a family living in a small town on the coast of Italy? It is August of ’79, and people are involved, as people usually are, in the mundane activities of everyday life. The kids are running through the house yelling, mom is getting ready to do the laundry. The small earthquakes have been rumbling for a few days. When the eruption begins in earnest, a cloud of super-heated gas rushes down the nearby mountain at a speed that defies the imagination. The strong quake that signals the start of the eruption frightens the children, who rush to their mother, just in time to die together. The year? 79 A.D. The town? Pompeii

Love those you care about with everything you have. Savor each moment and treasure every sunrise. Live each day as though it is your last. 

One day you’ll be right.

You've Come A Long Way, Baby!

I have this image set as my desktop. I downloaded from NASA a picture taken in the International Space Station. The woman in the photo is Tracy Dyson, a NASA astronaut. The photo was taken in the cupola of the station. From what I understand, this is the most popular place in space, and I believe it.

As I looked at this young woman, after I got over my jealousy, I could not help but think: thirty-some years ago a mother and a father held a tiny girl child in their arms. Perhaps they were in awe over the miracle of life they had created. Maybe they were concerned with the responsibility a new child imposes on a family.

Her father may have looked down at this swaddled infant and for a moment wondered, "Where will you go, Little One? What adventures await you there?"

Could he.....did he.......even for a moment, imagine his beautiful daughter floating weightless in space, a hundred miles above the Blue Planet, gazing serenely out the window. perhaps amazed herself at just how far she had come?

Where will my children go? Where will yours?

The Big Difference

Aging is so strange.

I feel like I am looking out of a window, and outside that window I see many things that have changed. Or I guess I should say the things of man have changed. The cars have changed, although they are not the wheel-less, gravity defying wonders that some of my favorite authors had predicted. Other technological change is evident everywhere, and we can freely marvel at what man has wrought.

If you can see past all that, take the time to look at God’s world. It is changing too, but for the most part the change there is slow. I and all that I know or will ever see or do is less than the blink of an eye on that scale.

If I draw my personal window close enough, (imagine me standing inside my own eyeball, leaning forward against the curve of my eye, hands grasping the edge of my iris, and peering through the circular window of my pupil) then my current body becomes something outside myself, and I am free to examine it for the curiosity it is.

I look at my hands and wonder to whom they belong. The strong, supple hands of youth have given way to the ‘experienced’ hands of today. Each scar a memorial to some faded page in time, the weathered skin a testimony to years so quickly disappearing in the rear-view mirror of life.

The collection of experience that is my body rejoices with every new dawn, still each morning the payments due are tallied against accounts received, the black or red ink perhaps defining the day. Eyes that once were clear now dim little by little, needing a bit more aid each passing year.

The ‘me’ inside looking out is still 16 years old, healthy, happy and full of wonder, still wanting to inhale the world like a dog with its nose in the wind out the window (wind door) of a speeding car. I am amazed by the promise of the sunrise and comforted with the reward of a glorious sunset. The smell of the ocean shore and feel of the damp sand between my toes take all my worries, and the immensity of the starry night seen from the top of a tall mountain still reduces me to my just insignificance.

My heart, the one that loves, and yearns, and longs, not the one that merely beats……. my heart still is ready and willing to embrace life, to love and be loved, to ache and fill to bursting with passion. That heart is ready to write checks my body cannot honor, and yet even that sure knowledge is not enough to still its desires.

I am jealous of the very youth of the young, and yet if offered the chance to return to those tumultuous times, I’m not quite sure what my answer would be.

I would like to believe I am wiser today than I was yesterday, but I doubt that is true. I know a lot more than I did then, but knowledge doesn’t necessarily translate to wisdom.

The single biggest thing that really makes a difference to me now, is the fact that contrary to the belief of youth that time stretches ahead infinitely, I realize all too well that my remaining time is not infinite, whether measured in years or minutes, and I am determined to appreciate every person, every moment and every thing to the fullest.

Amen

I think it will always hurt

I am angry, and I don't know what to do with my anger and my hurt, so I'll write about it.

A while back, on a Saturday night, a man killed my eighteen year old cousin.

I am angry at him.

He had been drinking, as apparently was his habit.

I am angry at alcohol and alcoholism.

This man had been picked up in a bar by my cousin's mom several weeks earlier. She brought him to her house and laid him, a one night stand.

I am angry at her.

He came back for seconds but my Aunt wasn't home, so thought he'd try to score with my cousin. She let him in, but refused his advances.

I am angry with her for letting him inside the house.

When she turned him down, he beat her, knocked her down, and shot her twice in the back. Shot her in the back as she lay helpless on the floor of her own home, killing her, a college freshman with her entire life ahead of her.

She was happy, healthy, pretty and smart.

The police caught him, thanks to another man with a conscience who had heard the killer bragging about the score he was going to make with this freshman girl, coupled with the killer's own gross stupidity in covering his tracks.

He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for this cold-blooded murder. I am aware of two appeals he made. Each time, his appeal was based alleged procedural errors on the part of the investigators and the court, and violations of his 'rights'.

His rights....Where is her chance to appeal her death sentence? What about her rights?

I am angry.

Each time, his appeal was rejected, his conviction and sentence confirmed. He did not appeal his conviction by claiming his innocence. He wanted out on a technicality. Thank God for no-nonsense Southern Justice.

This occurred more than thirty years ago. An anniversary of her death is little more than a week away. It hurts today every bit as much as it did when it happened. I hope he died in prison and rots in hell.

Perhaps you can tell, I am still angry.

Draining the Swamp

Jim and I decided to go fishing one Saturday. We often fished together from the rocks on the rugged California coast. Our equipment was simple, but so were the fish and we usually fooled a few into biting on our hooks.

This day was different though. Today we were hitting the big time. We had access to a boat with a motor, and we were sure that all we needed to do was get out there a ways, and man, were we gonna catch some beauties!

The boat was, well......marginal would be high praise, and the motor was just...wait. I'm getting ahead of myself. The boat was an ancient rowboat, about 14 feet long, and had been well on it's way to total decomposition years before, but it had been 'rescued' that year through the ill advised efforts of the entire school. We essentially took a rotten hulk with zero physical integrity, barely enough to hold its  own shape, and fibre-glassed the crap out of it inside and out. This involved layer upon layer of woven glass cloth covering the entire hull, bonded with a two part plastic resin that must be mixed in the correct proportions to set properly.

We learned several things doing that project. If you don't combine the ingredients in the right amounts, the resin either will never set, or set incredibly quickly, and incidentally get amazingly hot and then cure to a really brittle solid, in the can in which you mixed it. To make up for the lack of  structural strength in the rotted wooden hull, we used lots of fibre-glass. When complete, it was a thing of beauty. The hull was painted a brilliant white, with bright red stripes outlining the profile of the boat, and another red stripe running diagonally down from stem to stern.

Fibre-glass is heavy. Our boat could float, but it wasn't a happy ship. It only floated because physics demanded that it float. The darn thing was lighter than the amount of water it displaced, but only barely. And the shoddy workmanship of the fibre-glass crew ensured that the hull was not entirely water tight.

No worries. It didn't leak that much, and we had a coffee can to bail with. and at 14 we were pretty much invincible anyway.

Now we get to the motor, which proved to be quite sufficient to start, and get us out of the cove and well into the current running dawn the coast from North to South. The plan was fool-proof, we motored out to a position well North of the mouth of the cove and killed the motor. We would drift South with the current, fishing along the way, and when we wanted to head back up the coast, why, we would just start that little motor and putt back up stream.

I don't know what I expected, but the coastal cliffs looked much smaller from the ocean. The swells lifted, then dropped us on a regular basis. The wind, which sculpted the low-growing trees along the coast into a dense mat, blew constantly from North to South along with the current, hastening our drift. Because we were outside the surf line, we couldn't actually see the white foamy breaking waves, but we could sure hear them between us and dry land.

The first part of the plan worked to perfection. Out into the current. Kill the motor. Bail just a little. Bait up and cast our lines out. No takers in the first drift, time to head back up hill. This is where the plan began to unravel. That poor little ole motor had pretty much given us everything it had getting us into this predicament. We were drifting directly towards a rock they we called 'Spray.' It got that name because of what happened to the ocean waves when they dashed themselves against the flat vertical surface of the rock that faced the oncoming surf.

We had oars, so I began to row us back up current as Jim yanked repeatedly on the starter handle. Rowing takes on a different aspect when you are propelling a half submerged boat that drifts back a little bit farther than you managed to row it in the first place every time you stop to bail with a coffee can that moves so little water out compared to the amount that is now filling the boat.

Jim and I took turns rowing, bailing and pulling that damned starter cable, for what seemed like hours. First pulling away from the rocks and then drifting back towards them, time and again. The wind had picked up and some spray was blowing into the boat as well. We were both getting soaked, cold and tired. I could only imagine what would happen to us if we couldn't stay off of 'Spray.'

Every once in a while the motor would pretend to start, only to stutter a die again. We had to go quite a bit North before we could try to enter the cove because there were many rugged rocks with lots of waves breaking over them between us and the safety of the cove.

As I fought alternately with the oars and the rising water in the boat, I thought about the fact that we had not actually told anyone what we had planned to do, not that it would have made any difference. There was no other boat for miles; our fate was solely in our young hands.

After almost an hour, we were finally far enough North to began to head into the mouth of the cove. As soon as we pulled even with the surrounding cliffs, the wind, which had been conspiring with the current to drive us on to the rocks, was blocked. The calm was palpable. The constant bobbing of the boat had ceased and we began to be able to actually feel the warmth of the sun. Of course, that is when the motor decided to rejoin the party, when we needed it the very least.

We calmly motored the rest of the way to the rocky beach, got out and pulled the boat above the high water mark, then felt the giddy release of those who suddenly realize just how close they came to disaster. Oh, yeah, during that last hour, our focus had shifted a wee bit. We had no fish, but I now understood the fullness of the saying, "When you are up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp."