MUSIC!

During the summers, on many years past, my father and I would climb into the red van and make haste to a concert being played. We'd sit under canopies and under the stars to listen to musicians play music that tugged at their hearts. Music was an escape that we shared and music provided harbor for ships once on tossed seas. Tonight, as our conversation was ending, after we'd laughed, told jokes, reminisced on days past, and hoped for what tomorrow holds, I played the guitar as he listened, in support, on the other end. You see, he's more than my father, he is also my friend and my friend has always told me that flight is what teases my wings. As the turnaround was ending and my playing was done, I heard a beep on the line and my goodbye was said. I joked with a friend, and we mocked our day, I sent my dad a text, and his reply did my heart break, "Seriously it sounded good to a man who likes the blues." The practice is paying off because he's never held back, his truth was my truth because I never knew him to lie. He said I sounded good; compelled to make his words more true, I sacrificed my homework to play just a little more. Now I'm up and my eyes are burning, I've many pages to read and a couple more essays to write. All the while my guitar taunts my unrest, pleading for attention and a chance to expel my stress. Music is my "personal, private, vanishing evocation;" taking many forms and heard in many syllables. My guitar provides a means for my attempts to create while my father, with the oration of a man majestic and grand, speaks in a cadence to make a warrior feel weak. I miss hearing the music, on Sunday he plays, to audiences with hungry ears and needing souls. How blessed am I that his words fill my ears, and provide a nest for hope when I've not found it in myself.


(Quote from Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin)

So Early, but I'm Thankful!

I'm up early today. I got up, felt the air crack between my joints, pulled the covers back and was greeted with a gust of chilled air. The apartment is quiet, all except the steady silent roar of the water sprinklers. It sounded like those old WB cartoons when the dog would open a jar to hear applause from the fleas in his circus. I'm going to drive to work soon, listening to the radio, as I do, as I'm heading there. I'm going to hear more bad news...jobs lost, the economy worsens, inflated health care costs, billions of dollars to be allocated to businesses so they can cut jobs, collapsing banking infrastructures, sub prime mortgage crisis, fraudulent cases against security managers...all stuff to feel hopeless. I won't feel that way though. A couple of weeks ago I watched the football game, the Super Bowl, at a friends house. Prior to our leaving, his mother had us all stand in a circle. Before she prayed for God's blessing over our lives she said that despite the economic woes of the country, she remains optimistic and hopeful because her God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, that, in a time of famine, you still will be blessed with what it is you need. There was a time when I would not have ardently supported that claim, but today is different. I am going to drive to work soon, and that is reason enough to be thankful! It was not long ago when I woke up without a place to go.

Need I Say

There is something strangely comforting and eerily disconcerting about the escapism associated with a foray to the cinema. The curtains lower, and the lights grow dim, the crunching of popcorn is trumped only by the whispers of excited patrons. Eyes are lit up brighter than the screen and for a brief moment, the audience, the captive moviegoers, the participants, all along for the same ride, sit in unabated eagerness for the moving picture story that is to unfold. I am one of those parishioners of fantasy, the guy who twitches and laughs, and holds his breath and waits and cries and hopes that the developing idea on screen will be one I'm brave enough to hold onto someday. I was unexpectedly caught in a surreal moment this evening, as I watched the lights dancing and heard cell phones being turned off. The movie started rolling; annoyed, frustrated, bored, utterly apathetic were the majority of feelings that had engulfed me, empathy and a wish to dream again - freed me. I wanted, briefly, to have a fascinating story I could tell others. I wanted to be able to say that I knew this girl and it was this but it ended up like that, who knew that we felt that way about each other? But, the lump in my throat thickened and my breathing became short. My brow began to bead, darts of sweat raced to be the first to sting my eyes. Hands that gracefully composed sonnets in calligraphy and played chords that left my fingers twisted like speaker wire were full of sweat and unable to stop sprinting on my knees. I've not felt that feeling before so I don't know what to call it, but I liked having that feeling - it seems one I'd like to call again. I can imagine sitting in front of her unable to speak because her eyes are reading my secrets - that one written loudly on my face, the one I can't recognize, but everyone else that's had, you know, that look, knows it, is familiar with it and are enormously entertained by the enormity of what is about to occur, dare I say it? No, no, I'm going to keep playing it cool. I'm going to continue to act like there isn't a gargantuan ray of sunshine on these cloudy days. I'm going to incessantly ponder the what if's because the what could be's are scary, yet utterly exciting, but unnecessarily nerve racking, but grossly exhilarating and despicably fulfilling. Yeah...you know what that feeling is...you didn't even have to sit through 7 movie previews, the "Twenty" or tuck your legs in as people pass to know it because you live with it everyday. Psssttt...I will too! Really! I will.