Music Monday: Blowing by

Time is always moving at light-speed, and few have lamented its swiftness as often as I.  But this summer has been especially quick.

I feel like I got to this summer movie an hour late.  I'm sitting here ready for it to begin, yet the calendar says intermission has already passed.  Oh well, maybe at least I'll be there for the climax.  Or more likely, as the September credits start to roll and everyone else is making their way out into the lobby discussing their favorite parts, I'll be sitting there wondering what just happened.  (And leaves are falling, in the lobby!  Because the lobby represents autumn.  Am I the only one getting confused by this film/seasons analogy?)

And yet, bygone years have taught me that the next one may be even more fleeting.  So lest I while away the last precious moments of this summer bemoaning its brevity, I should get in gear and see if I can't somehow figure out this plot.

I'd like to squeeze in a trip to Cincinnati yet this season to see the Reds.  And at some point a date needs to be nailed down for a white water rafting trip for which tickets have already been purchased.  But August is my busy time, what with the toddler birthday party circuit coming up and all.  And of course, all this has to be done before September, because that's college football season.  And that's a movie I never miss.

We did manage to fit in a canoe trip over the 4th of July weekend.  I always look forward to being in a place with no cell service.  It's nice to be off the grid for awhile.  That feeling lasts about three hours.  Then I'm looking to trade my soul for someone's WiFi password.

The canoe trip is ordinarily a most relaxing excursion.  The river virtually empty.  If you encounter 4 or 5 other canoes, that's about average.  But this year, there must have been a boom in the local water recreation industry.

There were at least 3 or 4 different canoe companies that had started up since the last time I was there, and they were all taking busloads of people back and forth.  My once quiet getaway now provided about as much peace and seclusion as an amusement park.

The river was an almost non-stop cluster of canoes and 10-year-old kids in kayaks.  It was my worst nightmare.  (Except in my nightmare I whack the kids in the head with my canoe paddle and they instantaneously regenerate into even more annoying versions of themselves.)

However, this was a nice twenty seconds:

Unfortunately, views like that were far between and way too few.  I think I'm beginning to understand the allure of becoming an astronaut.  It's the only way to get away from people anymore.  In fact, is that mission to Mars still on?  Seven-person crew.  55 million square miles.  I think I can handle that.  Can we go ahead and put internet there?  And a golf course.

I also found time to discover some new music recently, downloading the new album from Jason Isbell.  He's originally from Alabama.  And as with many local things, I'm not sure I have a good grasp on how widespread or popular he is.  But he was on Letterman, so... more popular than me, but probably not as popular as, say, the Beatles or Richard Marx.  Somewhere in between.

Anyway, it being Tuesday and all, I figured it was time for a Music Monday post.  The album is titled Southeastern.  The songwriting is splendid.  And this particular song has been stuck in my head for most of the past week.



"I had to summon the confidence needed to hear her goodbye / And another brief chapter without any answers blew by..."

The single shutting and reopening of one's eye

Sometimes it meant camping out.  I know some of the names changed from time to time, but for some reason thinking back on it now, I can only remember the four of us -- Me, Allan, Hollywood, and Mouse.  That was the core group.

Gazing up at the stars, talking about girls you'd dated and ones you almost had, singing any song that came to mind until eventually one of the other guys told you to shut up or threw something at you -- usually the latter, knowing you didn't have to go home until morning.  It felt like freedom.

And there was always a fire -- a big one.  As we gathered every stick and pine needle within a fifty yard radius, it was usually more bonfire than campfire.  I would say I was surprised no one ever called the fire department on us, but for that one time someone did.

Even so, once the fire died down, it seems like we always wound up chilled to the bone or soaking wet.  Sometimes both.  It probably didn't rain as much as I seem to remember it did, but those are the nights that stand out.  I can still vividly see Mouse, who weighed all of 120 pounds soaking wet, sitting there shivering, telling us how he was never doing this again.  But he always did.

I remember one night Hollywood and I rode Allan's tandem bike into town about 1 AM to go to the Walmart, for no reason whatsoever other than it was something to do.  It was about four miles one way, and long before we had a 24-hour Walmart, so we pooled our change and bought a couple of Mountain Dews from the vending machine out front, then rode back.

It feels like there should be more to this story, like we got pulled over by the police or ran into a mailbox or were shot at on our way back or something, but there isn't.  Just me, riding a bicycle-built-for-two, with another guy, at 1 o'clock in the morning.  That is all.

Sometimes it meant tapping on my future (now ex-) roommate's bedroom window late at night -- the universal signal that a game of spades was about to commence.  He'd let us in through the carport door and we'd play for an hour or two.  One night we were a person short, so he went and got his sister to play.  His sister was one of the great crushes of my adolescence.  I spent a good solid four years, I'd say, finding any excuse I could to hang out with her.  So from then on, I always tried to make sure we were a person short.

Sometimes it meant sneaking into the basement door of the Baptist church and playing ping-pong, or cards.  Axl and his parents attended there so he knew where they hid the key.  He said no one would mind, and who were we to argue.  We ended up holding our fantasy baseball draft that year in the classroom for the 5 & 6-year-olds, amidst some Noah's ark memorabilia which I may or may not have played with a little.

Sometimes it meant picking a road we'd never been down and seeing where it led.  Pick A Road, we called it.  The name has a certain understated stupidity to it, don't you think?

Flying through the countryside with the top off my old Jeep sated a bit of wanderlust, I suppose.  As we lamented the lack of anything better to do, all the while pondering life and wishing we had one.

And the radio.  There was always the radio, or some worn out cassette.  Turned up wide.  Letting the songs affect me too much.

I still remember a couple of those roads, and any time I pass by I can feel a smile start to begin.

Such were my late teens and early twenties: One long continuous quest for something to do, some place to be, never wanting the night to end.  There seemed to be time to burn.  So burn it we did.

When I think back on those times now, they're not some faded, distant memory.  Rather, they're clear.  Vivid.  Almost close enough to touch.  Like if I could somehow turn back one single page, there they would be, as real as the day I lived them.  But when I reach out to grasp them I unclench my fists to find my hands still empty.  And it blows my mind to think, and it just does not seem possible, that twenty years have passed.... just... like... that.

I suppose that's how the brain's files work.  Twenty years ago can seem as close as twenty minutes ago.

And just as far away.

"And the sound the king of spades made / In the spokes of my old Schwinn / I was racing Richie Culver / For a Grape Nehi / Yeah, lately I've been thinking / 'Bout Route 5, Box 109..."

I can't tell you why

(My Les Paul/Google effort. It was either that, Jingle Bells or Three Blind Mice.)

Spring is the new summer here. Although I'm not sure what that makes summer. And because I spend way too much time looking at the weather almanac online, I know that today was our eighteenth day in a row over 90 degrees. I have managed to golf a couple of times during the oppression. Nearly shot the temperature one day, so... I guess that's something.

I missed my 20-year high school reunion Saturday. Is missed the right word, if you skip it intentionally?

You know how these things can be. I just didn't want it to turn into the 20-year Bone love fest, celebrating my wit and all my accomplishments in.... blogging and, uh, other as-yet-to-be-determined areas.

There was a picnic in the park for lunch, then dinner at a tavern in the evening. One of my classmates called in between the two -- the girl who once nominated me for Best Dressed, which I always found ironic as on the day she did I was wearing a shirt Mom had bought at a yard sale, which was where I got probably half my clothes then.

"We missed you at the picnic. A couple of people asked about you."
"Thanks."
"So what have you done today?"
"Not much." (Translation: Woke up about 9:30, ate some Cap'n Crunch, a couple of hours just disappeared, fixed a frozen pizza for lunch.)

Wow. Even for me, that was a complete cringe moment. I didn't have a good reason for not going. I didn't even have a bad reason for not going. I'm not one of these people who had a horrible high school experience. Au contraire, I ruled the school, in my own mind.

The best reason I can come up with is that I despise those two-minute conversations where you "catch up" with people you haven't seen in years and may never see again by asking where do you live, what do you do, and how many kids do you have.

But that's weak. The bottom line is it was just easier not to. Story of my life. Or at least a few chapters.

Maybe I'll go to my 25th. Or 30th. Or whatever comes next. I could do some impromptu stand-up so hilarious people will pee their pants and kick themselves because they didn't vote for me for Wittiest in 12th grade. It's quite easy to say that now and have it seem like a very real possibility. The attending, I mean, not the peeing.

So it's not that I regret not going, to this one, or my five-year, or my ten-year. It's just that I'm really not sure what it is that makes me not do these things.

And all this to say nothing of the light-speed at which the time has moved. Realizing I have been out of school for twenty years, hearing that kids who graduated high school this year were born in 1993 -- it's almost incomprehensible.

Years are funny things. When you stand them up next to hours, minutes, or seconds, they appear to be much longer than they really are. But it's just an illusion. Anyone who has ever stopped to look back on ten, twenty, thirty or more can attest to that.

"And there's the old movie house, they finally closed it down. You could find me there every Friday night, twenty years ago..."

Reminiscing at the speed of life

Over the years, my earthly father has passed along to me morsels of wisdom and knowledge that only come with life experiences. Things such as the best place to be in a tornado warning is driving around in a car, never take a shower if it's thundering outside, and of course, if you're fishing from the bank and a snake swims by, the fishing trip is over five minutes ago. You can't put a price on that.

A few weeks ago, he who reared me passed along something a bit more tangible but just as priceless. He had come across some old home videos of yours truly and decided to have them put onto DVD.

Now when I say home videos, I'm not talking videocassette. Oh no, it was a bit more primitive than that. As in, when we watched them back, we watched them on this film-projector-like thing. It had a bulb. I clearly remember there was a bulb involved somewhere in the process. Also, I don't think there was any volume. It was kinda like starring in my own Zapruder video.

We hadn't watched these back since I was little. I guess the bulb went out twenty-five or thirty years ago and we just never replaced it, or more likely, they stopped manufacturing it. So I was anxious to see what was on there.

The opening scene has a young Bone, circa six months, in a swing eating some unrecognizable food. Later, there is footage of me rolling over and then what I assume to be some of my first steps, both of which I still consider to be among my top ten accomplishments. I mean, really, what else?

Then a few scenes in, there is my mom. So slender and so strikingly young. And at once, my whole demeanor changed. Inundated by waves of thoughts and emotions coming so fast I can't begin to sort through them. Her hair, long and straight, she's holding me up to pick mulberry leaves. I teared up and I'm not even sure why. Just... she was so young. And where did all those years go?

A couple of scenes later, my dad makes his only appearance. With his seventies hair and butterfly collar shirt, he's lying in the floor beside me mouthing "look at the camera." His mannerisms too much like mine.

The videos basically document my first four years -- birthday parties, a couple of Christmases. There are at least four guitars, both real and toy, placed in front of me on different occasions. Dad has apparently been trying to get me to play the guitar from day one on, until and including the present, as evidenced by the guitar permanently on loan from him mostly collecting dust in my bedroom. The most I ever do is pluck a few times at one, then or now.

Naturally, I had to show the DVD to Mom. She watched with near disbelief as she let two-year-old me hold and lick icing off a big butcher knife, my hand grasping the blade of the knife instead of the handle. And again as I was learning to walk along a sidewalk, mere feet from a street with cars passing by. Later, there's footage of me at probably 3 or 4 playing in the snow, a coat on but no gloves. All that, and I turned out OK!

It is an odd thing to be watching oneself, and you know it is you, but it seems like you're watching somebody else. But that is how it felt.

Still, the DVD is priceless, because if I had ever thought of those home videos, I would have been quite certain that I would never have seen them again.

No further footage exists to prove that I ever walked this Earth. After the Zapruder camera, I'm fairly certain no one in my immediate family owned a video camera until my sister bought one when Nephew Bone came along. So no first swimming lesson, when I cried and never went back. And absolutely no proof I was ever terrified of grasshoppers, as my family alleges.

Along with the feeling that I was watching somebody else, there was a constant and overwhelming sense of the incredible speed at which time and life pass. There was today and thirty-six years ago separated by just a few feet. And yet, such an untraversable distance.

Where did all those years go? And not just the years, but the months and the weeks, the mornings and the evenings, the doctor's appointments and little league games, the school days and the workdays, the summers and the autumns. Is there nothing left to keep, to hold on to, to show to someone that "This was me. This was my life. This was what I did?"

I suppose there are but scattered pictures. And memories, like invisible pages pressed tightly together in some book that looks surely too small to hold all of our days, all that we were and all that we've done. And maybe if we are lucky some day some wind blows open the book to a memory we thought we had long since forgotten.

Though I was supposed to be the centerpiece of these home videos, as I watched them back I found myself focusing more on my parents. They both turn sixty this year -- Mom in October and Dad just last week. I tried to imagine how they must have been back then, not having a whole lot. I thought about how they must have struggled sometimes to get by, and how in the world they knew how to start raising a child when they were fourteen years younger than I am now.

I wonder if they ever look at me today and think back to a little boy with blonde hair and a cheesy grin playing in the snow with no gloves on and ask themselves the same question: Where did all those years go?

"Though it's clear as day in my mind, the picture of a simpler time. Wish change would just leave well enough alone. Those days are gone now, when daddy was a strong man, and momma was a blonde..."

Death, and life

Death interrupted life again last week. A friend I went to high school with passed away after 37 brief years. He was the second person I knew to die this month. Both from cancer. Both in their thirties.

Unfair is a word that I've said and heard several times in the past couple of weeks. And it does seem so. Then you ask why. But some questions don't have answers.

I like to think I'll live a healthy and long life of seventy or eighty years or more. I suppose all of us do. It's easier and more appealing to put thoughts of the brevity and uncertainty of life out of my mind and continue going through the motions. But eventually and inevitably, those realities are brought to the forefront once again.

Every death serves as a reminder, that life is temporary, that people should be cherished, and that time, sweet time is so very precious. But these... these hit harder. Maybe because they were so young, or maybe because I'm getting older. This time the reminder was in big bold letters, and all caps. And it's not fading nearly so fast.

Too often, I act like I have all the time in the world. Like there will always be another day to visit a friend, spend time with Dad, mend hurt feelings or do any of a hundred things that always seem easier to put off until some other someday.

Some years ago, I came to know a girl who was a cancer survivor. She never spoke about it very much, just little bits and pieces here and there. It always struck me how she often seemed to cram as much as she could into her days. She would do more in a weekend than I'd do in two weeks. It was as if she wanted to drink up every last ounce of life and not let a single precious moment go to waste.

I never asked but always wondered if she was like that because of what she had gone through, if by looking death squarely in the eye she had come to realize the immeasurable value of time, and to cherish it as it should always be.

And I wondered why I hadn't, and didn't.

"I loved deeper, and I spoke sweeter, and I gave forgiveness I'd been denying. He said, some day I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying..."