A note in time...

To: Nephew Coen

From: Ted

Re: Just because

Dear Coen,

I’ve been seeing pictures of you in fairly regular intervals since your arrival in Texas on April 25^th, 2015.  It is apparent the move to Baltimore in early June has agreed with you.

This letter is the third in what I hope will be a series that you will be able to leaf through at your leisure when the time is right. The first was written prior to your arrival in San Antonio, and the second just after you got there.

By now you have had little over six months experience here in the U.S. I’ve waited to write, because I did not want the correspondence to be so frequently as to become overwhelming.

In these notes, I will try to do two things…one is to tell you a little about me, and the second is to share something that I have learned that has increased the quality of my life.

Today, however, I will simply say how delighted I am and how fortunate you are to have come to this planet through the love, guidance and protection of your mother and father. I must say, with all modesty and pleasure, that you have picked your parents well!

From them you will learn the importance of faith, hard work, modesty and honor. To you, growing up in this household, these things will seem most natural, but what you learn under their care will carry and protect you throughout your coming life. You will be given the protection you need to gain a good education and moral instruction, which you will find as you get older, is not so common as you might think. 

Most importantly, you will know above all else that you are loved and greatly cared for.  They have been charged with giving you the best of what they have, and there is little doubt you get all they have to give.

I would like you to know you have come from pretty good stock. Your mother’s people were from Scotland on her grandmother’s side and Austria on her grandfather’s. These second generation families made their homes in Toronto Canada, where your great grandmother and great grandfather grew up, met and married.

They immigrated to the United States bringing three children…that would be your grandmother Nancy and her two siblings – Anne and Ted – that would be me!

Your grandmother was, like her daughter, smart and rich in the spirit of humanity. Your father, like his father before him, understands the importance of quiet diligence and hard work.

Where do I fit into any of this? Well, I have more than the good fortune to have come to this earth in the family of your mother. Her mother was my sister, and for the record, a better sister one could not have had.

I have the extremely good luck to be the fellow who will come into your life from time to time…a fellow who, if I do this right, will be fun to be around. I hope you will look as forward to seeing me as I will look forward to seeing you.

I will do my best to make whatever time we have together as pleasant as it can be, after all I will come to you in small doses, that even you might enjoy!!

Finally, I want to share with you something I learned from my mother…gratitude!

She taught me to be grateful for life. In the years I was privileged to live with her, she never failed to remind me that I had been a gift to her. A gift she cherished and honored…a gift for which she had prayed long and hard.

She was grateful God had given me to her, and she made sure I understood how important it was. When I was younger, I did not understand the depth of gratitude she felt. As I got older and had the chance to go out into the world, I began to realize that it wasn’t she who should have been grateful for me, but I for her and for all that she gave and sacrificed for her favorite son…her only son…

I want you to know how grateful I am to have you become a part of my life. I hope the day comes when you feel the same…

To the future…

- ted

An unexpected touch...

“If your heart is open, what lies around the

corner might just take your breath.”

- Author unknown

My dentist posted a short video from a concert of Mozart’s music he attended in Prague – Mozart’s home. The orchestra was dressed in period costume. The music was thrilling and brilliantly uplifting…it doesn’t get much better than that.

My earliest girlfriend and her hubby Dave posted pictures from Lisbon and Evora Portugal as part of their overseas holiday. The photos were stunning.

That's them...

While they were sampling culture and history at its best, I was watching short video clips of contestants performing auditions on ‘The X-Factor UK.’ 

You know these kinds of shows. People show up to perform, who typically say, “...music is my passion…” or as a 12 year old once said, “I’ve wanted this chance all my life!”

Most of the contestants are everyday folk who either feel they are gifted, or have been told by someone they were…most are not. Even the winners of these sorts of shows, seldom emerge into a sustainable performance profession…life in this business requires more than a good voice.

I suppose Susan Boyle, the 50 something, cheeky and unkempt woman is the exception. She looked like a chimney sweep’s mother until she opened her mouth and sang, I dreamed a dream from Les Miserable…no doubt she was a phenomenon who has found a career.

'Under the covers' so to speak...

It might be argued it is a guilty pleasure for me to hear some of the stories and listen to the boys and girls/men and women, sing covers of artists we all know – hoping this will be the golden ring to remove them from the small towns or jobs they are hoping to escape.

I don't have the patience to watch the whole shows, so I just pick up the actual performances. Maybe some of my psychologist friends might have a thing or two to say about my attraction to these ‘…putting it all out there without a net…’ kinds of efforts.

At the end of a long day of auditions, a young car mechanic, Josh Daniel, loped on to the stage to cover a song by a fellow named Labrinth – an artist I had never heard of – called Jealous. It’s a plaintiff piece about the loss of love and the raw, open feelings about it.

Part of the lyric refrain goes like this:

'Cause I wished you the best of

All this world could give

And I told you when you left me

There's nothing to forgive...

It's hard for me to say, I'm jealous of the way

You're happy without me

The singer said that he had a different take on the piece, because he had lost his best friend a couple of years earlier and when he heard the song, he felt a sense of jealousy that his friend, now in heaven, was happy without him.

I was watching this with the casual interest to which I have become accustomed, until he began singing the lyrics. In the context of this young man's interpretation of the song, I immediately thought of my sister, lost much too early, in 2012 to the opaqueness of Alzheimer’s.

This led to a cascade of video images racing through my mind of people who I deeply loved and have lost.  I had not really considered their exit from my life as a freedom, nor had I thought that somehow their lives (consciousness) are better without me…until…until I appreciated I have some time left before I - as they have already done - ‘go home.’

Going home…I don’t really understand what that means…I know the words, for God knows I have studied them and have faith...I think I have just been busy enough with my own journey and considering the here and now, to be caught up in the '...what might be...'

This performance, however, put my brain on pause.  I thought of those I love who still have breath. I felt an inexpressible longing and I wept.

I have been blessed to be touched by the music of Mozart and other masters and seen a lot of the amazing architecture of the European Continent…but this reached into a deeper place than I can probably express.

I am so often amazed that there are those wordsmith's, so gifted, who in a few short words can reach so deeply into our hearts as to strike such rich chords reminding us a our common bonds...amazed, yes, but more so grateful...

ted

You may, if you wish, watch this performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_iiSIn4OI

Over almost before it starts...

“They lose the day in expectation of the night,

and night in fear of the dawn.”

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca,

On the Shortness of Life

I’ve been thinking about dying lately.

I’m actually kinda looking forward to it.

These thoughts have nothing to do with big disappointments in life, or accelerating the time course, or hoping for an unexpected event that might end it all –> lights out –> the big sleep –> a one way “…ticket to ride…”

They have nothing to do with hoping I will not end up in an extended care facility rocking back and forth until my last breath, nor struggling through a terminal chronic disease robbing me of all self respect and awareness.  All of that is an uncertain and totally unpredictable fantasy of the future. 

Death is not the fantasy, but spending time in fear of what might happen truly is…

Truth? We have no guarantee of tomorrow…

My thoughts have been more along the lines of knowing the time ‘working for the company’ is not permanent and within the constraints of my own expectations and desires, getting as much out of the ride as is possible.

Life passes so quickly, we often miss doing things we meant to and find ourselves immersed in thoughts of regret...missing the moment we are in.  It is easy to fall into a mind-set that ‘time and gravity’ have taken more than they have given.

The thing is that from the moment we take our first breath and enter the theater of life ‘stage right,’ all signs point toward the exit ‘stage left.’  This is simply the natural order of things…there is no eternal youth, no magic potion, no ‘deal with the devil’ that gives eternal youth in exchange for our soul. We are, as Mark Aurelius was fond of saying, “…but a small wet spot…” who should get up every morning and fully live the life of a human being – whatever that means for us!

In the end, I suppose it is all about the way we view life and the decisions we make on a daily basis (minute by minute really).  Importantly, it is never too late to do things now rather than putting them off.  

Country music lyricists and musicians Tim Nichols and Craig Wiseman, in a song recorded by country artist Tim McGraw, sum it up best in their pop culture piece “Live like you were dying.”

…I loved deeper,
And I spoke sweeter,
And I gave forgiveness I've been denying,
And he said someday I hope you get the chance,
To live like you were dyin'.

The Roman poet Horace (Odes) provided the frequently used phrase – “Carpe Diem” (seize the day). I kinda like a modification of that phrase a friend sent along to me: “Carpe the heck out of the Diem.”

Nichols and Wiseman were right, we should do the best to “…live like [we] are dyin’…”

‘Cause we are…and that is not a bad thing….

- ted

Still dancing, but the music’s slower…

“We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn

to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to

live by practicing living…one becomes

in some area an athlete of God.”

- Martha Graham

As I looked around the room, nobody appeared as old as I had expected!

Moving along in life has its benefits, and I suppose deficits too. I try hard not to think about the down side of aging, because unless I am doing something that requires a fair amount of exertion, I really don’t notice much difference in the effects that time and gravity have unrelentingly brought to bear.

In fact, my ‘several times a week’ exercise classes at the YMCA are really the only time I feel exhausted – or at least close to it – in the course of my daily life. The regularity of exceeding my predicted maximal heart rate for 20 minutes or so of the 50 minute classes, seems to have increased my functional capacity enough that I actually don’t notice much strain in my activities of daily living…well except those 40 pound (18kg) bags of cat litter that seem to be relatively heavier than they used to!

I recently attended my 50^th high school reunion, and if confession is truly good for the soul, I confess I expected to see a bunch of tired old folks doing the best they could to look chipper. I expected to have to squint indelicately at nametags and do the best I could to remember who some of my classmates were.  The first night, I expected to eat a little food, have a little to drink and then along with everyone else, tuck in early to prepare for a second day of activities.

As it turned out at the first evening’s affair, I was surprised to see an extremely lively group of people genuinely delighted to see one another. I listened to and participated in conversations that were upbeat and appreciative, and to be frank, just plain fun. It was, in the vernacular of my day (our days), a happening!  There may have been a wallflower or two, or a couple of fuddy duddies somewhere, but I didn’t see them.

There were some folk I had not seen since walking across the stage at graduation, and yet there honestly did not seem to be a real stranger in the crowd. Surely, I didn’t know everyone, nor had I known everyone when I was in high school, but the sense of family, community and fraternity was palpable.

All of this happened against the tapestry of everyone knowing the time we have left on the planet was significantly less than the ‘time in service’ for which we had been called.

That really is it, isn’t it?

None of us asked to be born and come here, let alone to a specific era or time…and yet, here we are – and there we were, all together…people who entered life with little in our toolkits than curiosity and faith…curiosity to wonder what the heck was going on, and faith that like glue, caused the things we saw, touched, smelled, tasted and heard begin building a tapestry of thought and experience allowing us to navigate this foreign and new world.

As I looked around the room on the two nights I spent amongst these fellow travelers, I could not help but remember moments I had shared with many of them, but more so at the mystically magical urge we have to bond together as human beings…even more, that as the faces though a little more ‘mature’ and possibly less resilient from decades of breathing untold number of breaths and heart beats…something else had matured and that was a sense of gratitude for the few moments of our lives that we shared together in that small town in the West Virginia hills from whence our lives were cultivated.

I was reminded that time and gravity has no governance on the human spirit, and for those brief and shining moments, we floated together like brilliant leaves on the autumn winds.

- ted