more normal than not

I don’t have a handle on reminiscing.

If you aren’t always sprinting ahead into the future, at some point you’re going to have to catch your breath…and you might look back a little.

Now, if you have something pleasant to look back on, the past is going to look a lot more appealing.

I’m not some kind of savant (if this was some kind of “surprise! you’re not a savant!” party, now would be the time when people would jump up from behind the couch and yell, “Surprise!!! You’re not a savant!!!”)…I’m not some kind of savant who is the first person in history to recognize that we all sometimes like to reflect.

If the past is appealing, it’s more pleasant to look back at it.

That’s pretty deep.

I guess that everybody can find something good to think back on…if they haven’t crowded it out with the sporadic (or sustained…sometimes, for some weird reason, sad times stick around for a while) tragic memory.

I don’t think I’ve met anyone who isn’t touched by some kind of tragic event.

I’ve been blessed to know a lot of people who don’t define themselves by their tragic event, though.

Any “tragedy” I’ve been around has had a lot of good “crowding it out” for a long time.

So, unless I’m having some strange and unnecessary “pity party”, it isn’t hard for me to have my head filled with good memories at any given moment.

All that “tragic memory” stuff is just a long-winded way of saying, “Holy Smokes!!! What just happened!!! What a great life!!!”

Jenny was looking at some old pictures of the kids last night.

Our children look kind of alike. More so when they were babies than they do now, but they looked pretty similar when they were little.

It’s funny to look at these pictures and see how much the “new crop” looks like the older children.

( “NEW CROP”?  WHAT?)

I know that when you take a picture, you say “say CHEESE!!” and everybody smiles. I know that’s the way it works with pictures.  You can’t really trust a snapshot to tell the whole story.  You can’t really trust the “pavlovian response” to an order like “say cheese”. People are going to put on their best face when someone tells them something like “say cheese”.

But these pictures of these little kids, taken around a funky old house that was in the process of being made “livable”….that was in the process of being made livable with recycled and scrounged materials…all these pictures….what a joyous bunch of little faces.

Now, I had the old camera.  The camera was mine…but it was Jenny who was taking most of the pictures.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures…I don’t know why.

ln all these photos of the kids, they’re looking at Jenny and smiling or laughing. They’re living well…and my wife is there.

She’s right there with them…and they’re smiling at her.  

I bet she never even had to say, “SAY CHEESE!!!”

We forget who is standing behind the camera when we’re looking at the image.  We don’t remember who we were smiling at when the shutter clicked.

I reminisce sometimes. Sometimes, I spend so much time looking back that I trip myself up while I’m trying to move forward at the same time.  It’s probably good to really commit to one direction or the other…it’s probably smart to take a seat before you do any really heavy reminiscing.

I think that a question I may start asking myself is “Who was taking that picture? Look how happy all of those people are! I wonder who they were smiling at?”

I want to take pictures of happy people, too.

We have a four-year old who can be particular.

He is the only four-year old I’ve ever met who can be “particular”.

I’m kidding…aren’t they all particular?  I think so.

I’ve mentioned before that I get up early.

It’s quiet in our house if I can get up early. If I can beat the rooster, I know it’s going to be quiet for a while.

That’s a chance I’m willing to take.  I will get up early for that little window of peace.

Now, the “wild card” in the whole scenario is my little boy. If I do anything that makes noise, I run a good chance of waking him up.  If I wake him up, the chances that things will remain predictably quiet decrease by a factor of one.

The “factor of one” is tremendously variable.

I don’t know math…from what I remember a factor of one isn’t usually all that big a deal.

It’s a big deal in this situation.

This morning, Nate got up.  I’d decided that I’d start the day with a quick shower.

I decided that I’d start the day with a quick shower in the only bathroom we have in our little house. The bathroom is right across the hallway from the bedroom Nate sleeps in.

It’s right across from the bedroom Nate wakes up in, too.

Nate knows that Mommy and Sparrow need to sleep early in the morning…so fifty percent of the time, he won’t go in to our bedroom to wake them up.

Usually, he sits on the couch and watches cartoons…after I get him something to eat and drink…and I write this blog before everyone else gets up.

My typing has gotten a lot faster since I started racing the clock like that.

This morning Nate got up, and one of the first things he said was, “I DON’T WANT A BLANKET!!!!!”

Of course, I could only answer, in the rapidly dissolving quiet of the morning, “Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhdon’tsaythatsoloudshhhhhhhhhhhhwhat?youdon’twantablanket?What….whatdoyoumean?whatblanket?”

The next thing he said was, “I WANT A BLANKET!!!!!!!!!!!”

The next thing he said was, “NO!!!!!!!NO!!!!!!NOTTHATBLANKET!!!!!NOTTHATONE!!!!”

Of course, the only thing that made any sense at that point for me to say, in addition to “shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhpleaseshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” was “WHATBLANKETTHEN?!!!!!!”

“MYBLANKET!!!! MY BLANKET!!!!”

Well…now that we’d narrowed it down to “my blanket”…now that we’d identified it…I only had 3 blankets to choose from.

I finally got it right on choice number two.

And it was peaceful again for a moment.

That’s the way it goes. We get used to it being like that.

I used to tell my wife that I wanted to build a “writing shack” back in the woods.  This was before we had remodeled our old kitchen or built the small addition.

I guess that I wanted a “man fort” back up in the woods that I could do some serious work in without interruption.

I wanted a “tree fort” that I could build on the ground.

Before we’d improved our house, this notion wasn’t met with great enthusiasm.

After we’d improved our house, this notion wasn’t met with great enthusiasm.

Anything that sounds like a retreat, no matter how ineptly I’ve tried to cloak it with a veneer of the “promise of serious work”, doesn’t go over very well.

I don’t play golf.

I don’t “schedule meetings” or “stay late at the office”.

Where am I going to hide? In the mail jeep? Out on the road, opening every mailbox that I see?

Parents have to be empaths. We have to read between every line.  We have to make decisions “on the fly”. We have to listen to a lot of weird stuff.

Right now, I’ve gotten this “blanket thing” under control.

It’s not quiet by a long shot…but it’s “quieter”.

I’ll take my victories as they come.

PS The picture is of Nate when he was a lot younger…but you get the idea. That little baby in the background isn’t ours…I don’t know where that baby came from.

I had an old Datsun 510 station wagon that I bought when I was in my mid twenties.

It was pretty ragged out when I got it. It was a mess. It was a young, single man’s car.

It had a plexiglass rear window that someone had installed in the rear hatch instead of fixing it right with a new piece of glass. The previous owners had replaced the engine with one out of a 280 Z.

The car ran pretty well most of the time. It was only a problem when I was having problems with it.

My Aunt Joyce came for a visit that year.  She flew out from her home in Spokane to see her sister…my mother…and to have a nice visit with all of us.

On one of the days of her visit, Aunt Joyce and I went out cruising in the old Datsun.

I can’t remember why we went out…probably we had some kind of agenda, but from what I remember, we were just cruising around.

It’s pretty fun to cruise around Atlanta.  There’s lots to see.

When we came back out to the car after walking around for a while….something was wrong.

Something was wrong with the old yellow station wagon with the plastic rear window.

The car wouldn’t start. The starter was shot.

“Have you ever roll started a car?” I asked my Aunt Joyce.

She couldn’t push it fast enough, so after a couple of tries, I let her do the “sit inside the car” part.

(That’s a horrible joke…I wouldn’t ask my Aunt Joyce to push an old car…she did the inside part the whole time.)

I pushed the car after explaining what she was going to do with the clutch and the accelerator, and off we went.

It took a little bit of pushing around that parking lot, me yelling, “Pop it! Pop it NOW!!! OK…push the clutch in…we’ll try it again…OK…NOW!!! Pop it!!!Pop it!!!Pop the clutch!!!” before I could finally say, “Good! Push the clutch in…” and get around while the car was still running.

It’s hard to breathe when you’re pushing a little imported car and laughing your butt off at the same time.

We made it…and we made it home.  It was hilarious.

I fixed the starter later that same visit.

My cousin, Julie, wrote me yesterday that Joyce had passed away.

She’d had a couple of strokes and from what Julie said it sounded like she’d slept most of her last week here.

I’d been writing a letter in my head to Joyce from the day I’d heard she’d had her stroke.

Those letters are still up there…I never wrote them and I never sent them.  They are still only up in my head.

I wanted to tell her that I washed every dish before I put it in the dishwasher now.  I’d remembered teasing her about “Why would you wash them first…if you’re going to wash them in there?” when I was a teenager.

I wanted to tell her that now that I was buying the dishwashers, I tried to wash the dishes first so that things didn’t tear up.

But I didn’t tell her that.

I love my Aunt Joyce. She had one of the most consistently positive attitudes it has been my privilege to be around. She was full of good humor.

I spent a lot of years being blessed to laugh with my Aunt Joyce.

Christians believe in the life after death. Christians believe that God loves us.

I’m a Christian…so that’s what I believe.

Losing my parents…and losing any of my loved ones…losing my Aunt Joyce…is a tragedy to me.

I am here…in this world…for now…so when they are “someplace else”, it’s a tragedy.

For me, it’s something sad to lose people that I desperately love.

For them, it is a victory…a new beginning.

My Aunt Joyce popped the clutch…and we laughed our tails off.

We made it home together.

I was going to write about Mike Reynolds and the Earthship community out in New Mexico this morning.

But then I lost interest.

So I thought I’d post a link to this video on YouTube called “Garbage Warrior”….and write about that instead. “Garbage Warrior” sounded interesting…it sounded like an interesting title.

“What’s that about?” I wondered.

Well…it turned out it was about Mike Reynolds and the Earthship community.

What do they call that? Synchronicity? No…that’s not right….serendipity…that’s what I might call it.

We passed this community when we were visiting my wife’s folks out in Colorado.

We were going down to Taos…and her Dad pointed it out to me.

“(we’re) …taking every aspect of your life …and putting it into your own hands”

That’s a quote from the movie.

I don’t think that would be a very popular option.

As much as we rail against it, I wonder if we aren’t more comfortable at this point with someone else defining the “edges” of our lives?

We “go along to get along” just so that we can live in the world.

Unless you build in a place where people are able to turn their heads and ignore you….”Just let him do what he does…don’t look.  I said don’t look! Turn away!  Don’t look!”…unless you pick a place where people don’t consider it “premium” or desirable, you are probably going to get shut down at some point by some kind of “inspector”.

What’s that quote about artists and marginal properties?  I’ll see if I can find it…I’ll be right back…

Found it…here it is…

It’s my experience that artist communities are almost always camps because they appropriate space that nobody else wants (at the time), but by virtue of a creative progressive view of neighborhoods they create a demand from others that ultimately marginalizes them, so they are forever transient.

James Lynch, founder of Fforest Camp.

“They create a demand…”

That’s like the attitude where you say or think something like, “Don’t have anything too nice….don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself too much…somebody else is going to notice and want to take it away if you don’t fly under the radar…”

That’s the problem with artists, I think.  They can’t contain the “spirit”.  They can’t bottle up something that needs to come out.  They have to express themselves somehow.

Without that kind of expression, I think they (the artists) get physically sick. They break their own hearts over and over without the chance for artistic expression.

And we’re all artists in some way.

But I digress.

I usually digress a lot.

The minute someone notices and begins to celebrate a “community”…maybe even the moment you become a community…it seems like the game is over.

You can’t do anything different and fully obey the law.

The law is inflexible. The law doesn’t attract creative people. The law serves the law.

Watch what kind of hoops Mike Reynolds had to jump through to allow this community to exist.  They had to put the veneer of a “subdivision” over this community to get “the people who do the inspections” to approve what had already been built….and what could be built in the future.

Maybe that’s where the real creativity comes in…even if it’s really only a diffusion of creative energy. Maybe the real creative action is learning how to appease the powers that be…so that you can continue to do what you want to do…while “they” think that you’re only doing what “they” tell you to do?

Someone in this movie says that you have to be allowed to make mistakes to really arrive at something new and good.  I paraphrased what they said…probably badly…but that was the gist of what they said.

If all we are allowed to do is more of the same…safe because it’s “recognized”…then we are never going to come up with solutions that are really satisfying on all levels..creative, spiritual, physical…etc.

We become used to mediocrity and “more of the same” only because someone mandates what “the common good” and “our safety and well-being” entails.

Ah, shoot…I’m just blowing smoke.

These guys worked their butts off out in the desert.  Somebody isn’t making money off of their efforts or they wouldn’t give a flip about what they’re doing out there. Somebody in the world is missing revenue or they wouldn’t give it all a second thought.

When you really get down to it, it’s probably all just about the “jack”.

It makes the world go round…even if you’re out in the middle of the desert.

This is a song by a guy named Chris Rosser.

It’s the only song I have with “Benjamin” as a title…so it was the only obvious choice.

It’s my friend Ben’s birthday today.

Ben was a running buddy.

We were friends in High School.

When you break things down in as few words as possible, things look kind of weak sometimes. There usually is more to the story than a few words convey.

I have been blessed with some great friends over the years.  I don’t think it’s a testament to anything other than “divine providence”….it’s nothing I did to deserve good friends, it’s just the way it worked out.  I have been extremely fortunate in the “friend department”.  I am blessed.

Ben is one of the great ones.

And, like I said before, it’s his birthday today.

I don’t remember laughing as hard lately as I did when I was hanging out with Ben.

I remember this one night when we were cruising around one of the subdivisions near our homes in Ben’s old Plymouth.

It was foggy, and we had a few beers…so we were sitting in the fog, drinking these beers. We were laughing…then Ben tried to throw his bottle over the roof of the car.

I watched for the bottle to hit the front lawn of the house we were sitting in front of…but it didn’t make it that far.

It hit the top of the car and rolled off…and we laughed.

Later that same night, a big Newfoundland dog…I think it was a Newfoundland…like a big solid black St. Bernard…maybe it was just a big solid black St. Bernard…I really don’t know….anyway, this huge black dog came out of the fog and stuck his head through the window of the Plymouth…and just rested there for a couple of minutes, letting me pet him…and then ambled off back into the fog.

Like a dream.

And of course, I bet we probably laughed.

I met Ben in the trombone line during the first day of marching band practice.

We were the only “hip” kids in that whole marching band. We were the only cool ones…so it was only natural that we became friends.

(Actually, I was pretty geeky. Ben was the cool one.  I think he befriended me out of kindness.)

Who am I kidding? We were both geeks.

We spent a lot of our time together trying to figure things out…or just laughing.

It would be interesting to have a good long conversation now that we’re mature and know all the answers.

I don’t see Ben much these days.  We don’t get a chance to visit very often.

But he’s one of the friends who is going to be my friend forever.

Whether we see each other…or get a chance to talk…he’s one of my friends.

That’s kind of nice.

Of course, that’s just my perspective. He may be thinking, “Gads, I thought I ditched that dude a long time ago…and then this whole Facebook thing blows up in my face and he tracks me down, and here we are again…right back where we were in High School.  Can’t he just leave me alone?!!”

Nah…he’s probably not thinking that…probably not.

It’s Ben’s birthday today.

Happy Birthday, Ben!

(It should be noted at this point that I don’t condone drinking beer in old Valiants…or throwing bottles onto someone else’s manicured suburban lawn.  It is wrong…and if I hadn’t been laughing so hard, I might have put a stop to it all. Those were different times back then…it was the 70’s.  I think that Ben and I have both grown up a lot since those heady days of youth. I am sorry for Ben’s transgressions.)