What started out as a small celebration has turned into quite the tumultuous event. I remember my father saying most of the guys in the Army wanted to spend New Years at home while he was one of the few that would rather be home for Christmas. Everyone has different traditions and Continue reading
Here it is Election Day 2009, corny as Kansas in August, and I’m reminded of last year at this time, the curtains and levers. It was all about the making of history, but it was also about ditching daddy’s boy as our national mascot.
Charlie Sheen once said that with his past of drug and alcohol abuse, an arrest record and public disdain for the military, he could never be president just because his father was. I never voted for any of the Bushes - but that didn’t work out for me. Some people didn’t vote for Obama and it’s not working out for them. Tough taffy!
My son and I voted at the American Legion today, right before I dropped him off at the bus depot to return to school. The League of Women Voting Machine Operators, bless their hearts, was in charge and the levers and the curtains were gone. Now we have paper boxes to fill in with markers and a scanning machine. I checked the boxes instead of filling them in and was Continue reading
For all my followers, devotees, fans, readers and fellow earthlings, I am leaving for a few days on a minor vaykay. Please do not dismay or applaud, for I will return, perhaps brighter but definitely older. Behind I leave my kites, harmonicas, eagle claw, African walking stick and banjo. I’m taking the bamboo back-scratcher.
Of supreme importance is the gratitude I have to offer. People like me - actually there is no one like me - similar people never say thank you enough. So thank you. There it is - thank you Popeye, Tiger Lily, Scarecrow, Beatles and my old baseball mitts. My life has been lived within the vibrations of wood and steel, brother and sister, mother and father, wife and children. To be any more fantastic could only be untrue.
The reach of my wonder is tied with sneaker laces and guitar chords to the nonsensical joy of laughing alone and sometimes with others. I call to the page and it opens with the nudge of a breeze borne from the wings of angels and the collective summation of a certain family of bees. Butterflies elude me for the benefit of whimsy but I have no sadness for my choice not to evolve to fly. There is only joy.
I don’t drink coffee so that I can hold my favorite cup and I don’t eat bananas for the fun of a good peeling, but I do believe in magic even though there’s no such thing. There it is.
So spend the next few in good health. Talk amongst yourselves and try to listen without judging. Have a cold drink on a hot day or a hot one on a cool morning. Read a good book and listen to glorious music. Leave a big footprint but erase it when you leave. Take a good look but leave as much as you gather. Plant a tree; let it grow. Chop it down and build a house, then plant another tree.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m waxing poetic about leaving for four days. I’ll be back shortly, maybe as a nasturtium, maybe a guinea pig. God willing, I will return as an aged if not exact replica of my current self. There are pages to turn, walls to paint and silences to mold. Tally ho.
Not that it matters, for nothing does except everything, but the destination of this little jaunt is Pearl’s place, where Beezly hides, in the land of meat-on-a-stick, just out of the shadows of the tall buildings. We will visit family, blow out birthday candles, conduct scavenger hunts, ride the waves and subways, poke fun at ourselves and others, eat Boar’s Head, lick spumoni ice, listen to a rock band in the city that never sleeps and even take in a Yankee game. It’s all in the snap of a finger now that we have the E-Z Pass.
We’ll load the van with sandwiches, drinks, CDs, pillows, my Taylor, bathing suits and a yo-yo. We’ll hug the highway through Pennsylvania and New Jersey before we re-enter the great Empire State. We’ll embrace the speed limit at times with one eye on the road and the other on the lookout for coppers.
Here we are in our bodies that carry our precious souls. Here we are in the vehicle that carries our precious bodies. Here we are on 95 singing Springsteen songs like they are the hymns of our bible in the holy land. Here we are in the mighty traffic, the cross we must bear. Here we are at the toll booth, not having to stop to pay with coin. And here we are high up in the air above the river, returning to the state from which we came, a little older but almost the same. Look right; there it is.
For now…
Though the bitter taste of pain and loss clings to my tongue like a splinter of glass, I’m always one to make lemonade when dealt a lemon. Instead of saying last night’s gig at the Lincklaen House was poorly attended, I prefer to think of it in more positive tones; it was fun. It’s a good feeling to know the applause for a fine performance of an original song. It never gets old, even though I am.
Getting old is a performance of an original song as well. Those of us lucky enough to enjoy a modest longevity of life are tasked to age gracefully. Not for the post life applause but for the performance itself. Applause is fine, but there is nothing like the realization of a performance well done.
Singing songs to people is something I like to do, but I’ve always been my own worst critic. The bad gigs are always the most memorable and damaging. I was once paid to stop singing - easy money, but damaging. There was the gig I never made because I hit a deer on the way. The car needed body work and I got kicked out of the band - no more bands for me.
The most damaging thing that ever happened occurred before a gig. I wanted to make some lemonade but our plastic pitcher had mold in it. So I crushed it, threw it out and made lemonade in another pitcher which was made of glass. My wife saw the crushed container and complained about its dubious condition. I responded with a spilled milk reference. Later on, I loaded my van with all the accoutrements of a solo musician - guitar, sound system, mikes and wires. Late and in a bit of a rush, I popped a vitamin C and went to wash it down with some lemonade. Someone had left the cover loose, so when I grabbed it from the top the glass container fell. In the course of a nano-second, my left hand reached to catch the descending pitcher. But the container didn’t fall to the floor; it fell only to the counter where it shattered. The palm of my hand was immediately lacerated by a pointy shard from the bottom of my wrist to my heart line. I had a backward c shape of about seven inches flapping in the wind as blood mixed liberally with the lemon beverage on the linoleum. My wife, hearing the crash and my ensuing non-verbal response, rushed to the kitchen to find a mess on the floor and me holding my bloody hand under cold water at the sink. Her initial reaction was to chastise me for crushing and throwing out the old plastic pitcher with the mold in it. I still had the pill in my mouth and swallowed it without further hesitation.
Needless to say, I never made that gig. I washed out the wound and patched it up without the use of a doctor or stitches. It healed with only a minor scar. I was lucky I didn’t hit a vein, playing guitar again two weeks later.
Sometimes my hands are slow or sore or calloused or arthritic, but not last night. Though the hands I was given from the modest crowd throughout the course of the night were appreciated, they cannot compare to the gratification I have in my own hands. They are only two, but that’s all you need for applause.
I’m in a garden inside the walls of a forest like in a folk tale by Italo Calvino. I’m in a mangrove in a Jimmy Bucket song. Not in a foxhole or on a mountain top, I’m just at home, in my man-cave. There are no deer heads with antlers, no pool or card tables, no pizza boxes and beer cans. It’s basically a room with a lot of cool gadgets, more like very large wrap around dashboard.
I had made dozens of intricate plans, but now I find myself on a deserted island, paralyzed and wavering between listlessness and ennui. I may even skip my plans entirely. You see, my family went on a vacation without me, to the sunny beaches of Maryland for a week. The peace and tranquility I had foreseen does not exist. There are only melancholy strains and tortuous knots in the belly of my soul.
The dust of the street work has blanketed my home and my consciousness. It feels like a slow burial as a sledge hammer pounds a generic beat, metal to metal. Motors run, rocks fly; the street has fallen; the curbs are dug in.
There is a movie on about a couple with a dead child. It takes place in the future where having children includes miles of government forms and agency permissions. Because of their situation, the couple is chosen to adopt the prototype “loving” child robot. I don’t want a robot. I don’t want to watch a movie. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to drink. I don’t want to play my guitar. I don’t want to talk to anyone right now or even check my email. I’m in a bad place, like a grave.
I can still see their faces pressed against the car windows, saying they love me. The car was on the side street because we can’t get into our driveway. I stood there strong at the time but could barely hold back the tears as I walked home past the men in the hard hats, the gravediggers, holding their hammers and shovels, smoking their cigarettes. They’ve seen me for weeks, always home with the children. We nod to each other politely and share the occasional joke but I bet they wonder what the hell it is that I do.
The dogs always jump at my every move as if I were skipping toward a throne, tossing sirloin bits like flower petals before the king. The guinea pigs squeal and kick out their bedding every time I pass like I’m starving them with cruel moments of not actually having something in their fat little faces, the pigs. When I sit still, the dogs lay down and the pigs go quiet. Right now I am a held breath, as motionless as a forgotten pot pie in the bowels of the freezer, a fake cadaver, dead calm.
Ordinarily, I am the official family cook, food procurer, lunchbox filler, skipper and team leader. When my wife dubbed me that, I recalled the song by Dan Fogelberg about his father. “The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old. But his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul.” Fogelberg’s father died and then he died. Who will be the team leader when I’m gone? Who will be the skipper? It gnaws at me.
I cook consistently and sometimes I complain. I don’t know why, for me cooking is easy. Sometimes the little one requires three hot meals daily, waffles for breakfast, grilled cheese for lunch, baked sausage and riggies with a quinoa tabouli for dinner. The older one usually skips breakfast and makes her own lunch. I cook every night, except when we have a biggie salad with a dozen ingredients; then I just chop.
I won’t chop today, nor cook. I won’t clean the dust from the street work. I won’t wash the dishes. No honey do this; honey do that. No daddy fix this; daddy fix that. My time is finally my own and I am supposed to feel relief but all I’ve got is this emptiness, like an empty grave, people dying to get in.
I wanted to tell them I loved them, but I was too busy being strong. I just smiled and waved. This was supposed to be a vacation of sorts for me but I’ve come to the realization that my life is non-existent without them, a black hole. Maybe love will conquer the day. Maybe I’ll get a column out of it. Perhaps I will regain motion soon. There is always hope for a skipper like me. The day is young. I have some meetings lined up, some interviews, a movie star, a millionaire, the professor.
Time will pass and eventually I will write. I will report. I will edit. I will pick up my guitar and sing, maybe even sell another book. But until then, I’m overcome with grief, heartbroken on an island.
Another layer of dust lands on my shoulders. I see it as a measure of time and time can never be skipped. They’ve already been gone an hour.
The new General in Afghanistan does 10 miles before first coffee. I woke up and whispered to my wife I was going to do my 10 miles before coffee.
“What are you driving to Bruegger’s Bagels in Manlius?” she said. “I’ll have an onion with light cream cheese.”
Wearing tan shorts and a whitish Hawaiian shirt, I set out for a one-hour
Summer kicked in suddenly like the roar of a lawn mower after several false pulls of the rope. I was already sweating through my white Van Heusen dress shirt before I could locate and dust off my fans. I had been out pounding the proverbial pavement looking for work without any luck. My intermittent freelance writing income is proving to be insufficient even for my bohemian standards, but traditional employment opportunities have became sparse in my area, which is America, specifically Upstate New York.
With a Honeywell fan in my face and the other installed in the window, blocking my vision of the girls going by, I was finally able to cool down.
Everybody wants a bucket of hope, an anonymous gesture on their front porch as down payment for a lonely if not meaningless life to be lived before an ultimate and ensuing death. I may be half a century late and short on my mortgage, car payment and attention span, but here goes.
I am hopelessly in love, thoughtlessly in tune, cantankerously adrift, spontaneously awry and flamboyantly deranged.
By Willie Kiernan
The battle of the infrastructures is being fought right outside my window on a day that simultaneously hints of soft sunshine or cloudy gloom. National Grid has trucks parked across the street behind cones determining the demilitarization zone as the jackhammer machine guns at one speed going in and another coming out. It sounds like volleying bullet fire without the flying lead.
