Nostalgia

Oh whisper me words in the shape of a bay… Shelter my love from the wind and the waves…

My daughter’s Facebook status quietly switched from “single” to “in a relationship” one day. That is the way of things now. The way that these things are announced. It is puppy love, filled with youth and dreams.

“He listens to me… and he doesn’t try to fix me…” she said one day. And I smile. Remembering.

I walked in earlier and she was talking to him. I could tell just by watching her body language. There was an electricity that is alive there… it is almost visible. And it reminded me of those times so long past.

She is metal ore… valuable but unformed. She and her beau could take any shape that her imagination drives her toward.

But my relationship was beaten into shape long ago. Tempered through heat and quenched in cooling waters. It has been hammered and curved, and then hammered again until it formed a definitive and beautiful shape of our making. It has been polished, bright… and then, as is often the case, it grew tarnished through neglect. Not purposefully… but because there are so many other things that needed tending. It gets an occasional buffing, brightening it for a moment or two. But it is an artifact now.

Hanging in the galleries of the world are thousands of similar works of art, admired for their technique and their skill. But lost in all of these works is that moment when the artist sat in front of the canvas, blank and white. Before the brush made its first stroke. When all was potential. That moment when the electricity was palpable. All that remains is the artifact which attempted to capture the immense beauty in their inner vision.

The artifact that is mine is beautiful… there can be no doubt. It means the world to me. It created a world that I inhabit and breathed life into three souls that have changed forever my place in the world. And time and oxygen might conspire to makes its surfaces less shiny, but the beauty is still visible, even if faded.

But I can’t help but feel that bite of nostalgia when I see the crease of a smile and excitement cross her lips as she talks to him. She is an artist in front of her blank canvas… and I wonder if the vision she will paint will truly match what is in her mind’s eye now. Or if that is even possible.

Hydroplaning

It is easy to take things like traction for granted. We travel thousands of miles and things work as they should, with the laws of gravity working. Our feet or tires or whatever remain firmly attached to the ground. Then something little happens and throws us into a panic and we realize how close to the border of chaos we all walk on a daily basis.

It was raining the other night. Not the normal sprinkle, but a good, hard downpour. I was traveling on the yon side of hither and yon... heading home in the dark. I hit the puddle on the side of the road going about 60. And suddenly I wasn't attached to gravity any longer. I was airborne... riding a wave a fraction of an inch thick, no longer in control... but subject, instead, to the whims of momentum. I have hit puddles many times before. A few feet of water that tugs the wheel hard for a moment. I have driven on highways where a car beside me has sprayed me with a coating of water so deep that I was blinded for moments. But nothing quite like this. The puddle must have been 50 feet or more.

They say war is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. I think this is true of many things in life. We grow comfortable and complacent in the sameness and only when things upset our carefully organized world does that panic rise, like bile, and overtake us. With age comes the knowledge that an instant can change everything. With age the knowledge of consequence. And a knowledge that we are only mortal.

But with age comes patience. The understanding that ups are followed by downs... and downs are followed by ups. And that if you fight your body's natural panic reflex and stay relaxed... sanity will be restored.

Eventually.

In this case it probably only took a few seconds... a few seconds where I was driving a missile and fighting to edge it in the right direction despite its desire to pull me off the embankment into the dark. Sometimes it takes much longer for sanity to be restored. But panic only makes us pull the wheel harder and lose control before sanity can regain that control.

Chaos is always a few feet to the right... down an embankment. It is easier to just ignore it and follow the lights down the road... between the white lines where all makes sense. But we can only maintain the road if we override the panic with calm.

SBT: Trust

Beyond the last last line of defense... past the places that you hold sacred... and at the edge of reason, lies a boundary which you dare me to cross. You entice, and cajole, and plead with me to step over that line. And yet you say nothing. It is all unwritten except on your heart, and deep in your eyes. Away from public consumption. But the signs are there for one who knows that path.

It is well worn with only my steps. And yet each trip I take there is unique. Each journey requires its own dance, with steps that are similar, but not quite the same from the last. At the heart of the matter is a emotion that is simple and pure. Trust. It is a simple helix with infinite variety. A genetic code all its own that wraps its way forward and back in time... pulling history and mingling it with possibility into something that is new. It is an emotion that is as solid as smoke, difficult to grasp, and impossible to regain once it has dissipated.

But once there... once the invasion has begun... it devolves into naked fury, hand to hand combat, where both sides sweat, and both sides struggle, and both sides die a little death.

And once the battle is over... and we lay there, spent... the lines resolve again into north and south, and we stare at each across the parallel and await the next battle.

Closer to Fine

Socrates said that "A life unexamined is a life not worth living." And while Socrates was undoubtedly a smart guy, he doesn't give a whole lot of guidance on how much examining we should be doing. Does this mean I should be examining your life? Or mine? How closely? Is a financial statement enough? Or do I need the full Monty, complete with sleazy investigator pics of your vibrator collection. See what I did there? Cleverly employing some Socratic irony... and vibrators.

I'm thinking he was talking more about self examination... and not the monthly kind for lumps. But the internal wrangling with who we are... and what we are... and why we are.

For most writers... the written word is a formalized wrangling. Regardless of the topic, it is impossible not to inject some of your own soul searching between the lines. Writers of history are not, as a general rule, a happy lot. Oh, I'm sure that there have been some painfully happy writers. Just not very successful ones. The process of laying oneself bare in the form of the characters that we create can be very taxing. Blogs are no exception and in fact they can be even more so... since the character generally has little in the way of fiction. Comedy or tragedy. They really are two faces of the same internal dialogue.

I've been writing less of late. Both here and elsewhere. I suppose it is a natural flow where we are driven to write and then just as quickly emptied out. Writers are typically "a little bit bipolar" as my mother terms it. She should know. She's been treating them for years. Driving around my home town with her is like a mobile PDR of diagnoses. "Oh, there's Bob! He's a little bipolar." I think we all have a bit of the manic depressive cycle within us. We are more prolific at times than others. But at the heart of the matter is our own soul searching. Is a life unexamined really not worth living? Do we really need to dig into the knotty problems of our jobs, and our loves, and our mistakes, and our mid-life crises on a daily basis to be "worth living?" Or can we just check in from time to time to see if we have any new lumps.

There are more days than not when I don't really feel like writing. Does this mean that I am not feeling as deeply as I do on days when I do write? Am I more in touch with me when others can read and connect? Or am I just repeating the same words time and again?

None of these questions really have answers. Your answers will be different than mine... and my answers today will be different than they will be tomorrow. And this lack of clarity is the thing that has kept real philosophers and amateur ones tied in knots for eons. But I wonder if Socrates is a little off some days... and if there were days where he just laid in bed and watched the tube and didn't really do any thinking at all.

Personally, I've begun to prefer the philosophy of the Indigo Girls: The less I seek my source for some definitive, The closer I am to fine.

Off to watch some mindless television.

The Ties that Bind

My youngest has started her own business. It isn't much of a business since she doesn't charge for her wares. She does it for love. And because she is a busy body. Somewhere along the line someone taught her how to make bracelets from multi-colored string. Now she can't stop making them. And she takes orders from friends, family, strangers who dare to ask her what she is doing. Her little fingers flying as she weaves the thin string into multi-colored bands.

On the surface of it... it is a childish hobby. On a deeper level there is much that is symbolic about it. It is her way of making her mark in the world. Of staking her claim on the people that she loves. Public displays of affection, if you will.

Love can be like that. It is our deep, unspoken desire is to make our mark on other people. To bind them to us in ways where they can't escape. In some cases this is sweet and lovely and happily ever after... but in other cases it can be stifling and limiting and troublesome. My dog has a way of binding us with his love. He sits on us. It isn't really comfortable for either party. But there is a territorial protective part of his behavior that is funny. But it is also hot, smelly and uncomfortable when he steps on areas of you not made for stepping. But the concepts are the same.

We are surrounded with symbols of owning and being owned. Wedding rings are only a hop, skip and jump into metal from the string colored bracelets of my daughter. There is desire to own... but a reluctance to be owned. But owning someone when it means we have to sit on them to keep them where we want them isn't very satisfying. Being our own people by running away from any possibility of being owned isn't very satisfying either.

Of course, love isn't really about owning... or being owned. It is about willing giving oneself over to another. Choosing to stay. And letting the other person decide whether to come or go. That can be joyful. That can be heartbreaking. But it is a lesson that comes to us all at some point. I hope for my daughter the heartbreak is minor and the joy overflowing. But those lessons are far away from now. A now where a piece of string is all it takes to say "I love you".

And so... for the time being at least... there is a middle age man walking around with some woven colored thread on his wrist. She owns a piece of me. I accept that and embrace it. And I love her back, even though that means that I can't tie her down and keep her with me forever. I will let her fly away when she is old enough to fly. Perhaps she will return or perhaps not. That is the risk we take whenever we give a piece of ourselves away with no strings attached.

Cause and Effect

The older I get the less the question "why" really matters. As a child it was the only question and it is asked with annoying frequency in my house now. There is an innate desire in humans to unravel the mysteries of cause and effect. It is bred into us and ingrained into us by our elders. It is soaked into the fabric of our culture... just flip to any channel incessantly playing Law and Order re-runs... and there it is. Justifiable cause that our fearless sleuths unravel and our prosecutors prosecute. We NEED our answers wrapped up neatly in sixty minutes. The tragedies that we can't wrap our brains around those where there is no cause... just fateful timing. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our culture lacks the patience for the Greek myth of the Fates and so we seek black and white answers. Even our religion steeps us in this concept... predestination, karma, purgatory... all cause and effect in their own ways.

We want the world to be a place where goodness is rewarded and evil punished. We want to know that if we act well to our neighbors, they will, in turn, treat us well. But it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes the bad guys win, and sometimes the goodness results in nothing more than heartbreak. There are supposedly (and according to a writing teacher of mine once) only a handful of plot lines for fiction. These plot lines are repeated all around us every day. The good guy gets the girl and lives happily ever after. The bad guy kills the good guy right at the point of success. The girl turns out to be the good guy... or the bad guy... or just not that into guys in general... etc. But they are rhythms that we are all very used to. Comedy. Tragedy. Two sides of the same face.

And at the apex of the maturity level in terms of plot devices is what is called "no plot"... popular among the Coen Brothers and others of their ilk. The hero is not that heroic and manages barely any change through the story. The plot points are vague and fuzzy. The message is in the background and at the end of it we are left scratching our heads or demanding our money back.

But perhaps that is life. We are the heroes of our story. And in one storyline I can be the hero... and in another storyline I can be the goat... and yet another the bad guy. But my life is all of these things together. And all that really matters is the perspective of the person delivering the judgment of who belongs in which category.

So it isn't why that matters anymore for me... all that matters is perspective.

Tiny Dancer

For over a decade now, the summer has started with a night of dance. Two nights, actually, if you count the dress rehearsal. The bitter cold auditorium filled to capacity to watch the multitude of dresses and music and choreography. But no matter how many people are on stage... I only have eyes for you.

Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult to find you among all the other tall, thin girls with their hair pulled up. The groups have grown from a few in a static row, laughably attempting to remember the steps while craning their necks from side to side to watch their neighbors... to your groups now. Dozens of girls whipping around in long lines. First you are there. Then you are suddenly there. Popping in and out of vision. Your smile fixed firmly in place. Your timing always perfect. No longer is it just enough to remember your part, but now you must fit in seamlessly to all the others, forming a single unified unit devoid of individualism.

You have already grown out of believing me when I tell you that you are the best thing on the stage. The only one that knows their part. The one with the best smile. You know that it is only my job to tell you such things. You chide me for focusing the camera on you, instead of on all the girls together. For you, the interest is in the whole dance. For me... I can only see the tree and not the forest. The forest overwhelms. But I remember the tree when it just a sapling, and I remember the endless nights and days of care that we lavished on you so that you would bloom.

When you watch the video, you make fun of yourself for all of your mistakes. Hypercritical to the end. An unflattering trait that comes genetically, I'm afraid. You roll your eyes at my attempts to deflect your criticism of yourself, because you know so much more than I do. And that I am not really observant because my eyes are blinded by love.

And perhaps you are right. But I notice one thing. In the ballet number, right toward the end... you stand in the back, in the center of the stage against a giant blue scrim. I watch the graceful lines you make in silhouette. And just for a moment, your fingers splay slightly in a break of form. Then all the other girls leave you alone on the stage before you finally make your way off... the last girl among all the other trees in the forest of girls.

There is a tear in my eye. Because I noticed the splayed fingers. And it reminds me, viscerally, of the way you were ten years ago. I remember those sames hands... smaller and more childlike... splayed in the same unique way, which made you.... you.

And I love you all the more for it.