Still Life with Coffee

Woke up this morning,
Put on my slippers,
Walked in the kitchen and died.
And oh what a feeling
As my soul went through the ceiling,
And on up to heaven I did ride.

John Prine has the amazing gift of telling a story in a simple, straightforward song. Verse, verse, chorus. Nothing too intricate; some of the tunes sound a lot alike. They're put together like country songs, two guitars and bass, plenty of twang. They're from Nashville, and he looks comfortable in the black suit and black shirt. But in my book it's poetry.

I went to see Prine last night at the Palace Theater, kitty-corner from the stately Ohio Statehouse, and ended up having a sort of spiritual reunion with some old friends who used to appreciate the same stuff. It's not easy to distinguish the work of art itself from what I was going through at the time. How could anyone separate the song, the album, or the artist from their concurrent personal adventures in life as we know it? So my response to about three albums worth of John Prine songs is heavily tied to people I knew at the time who were sharing that appreciation on some level in their own idiosyncratic way.

I'm guessing Prine connects with a lot of people that way. The bass player asked me what songs they didn't play that I wished they would, but there was really nothing missing. What I most wanted to hear was "Hello in There," and I did. I hoped he would do "Sam Stone" because it is so devastating. I had no complaints. I was just there to enjoy the moment.

When my friend whisked us backstage to watch the encore from the wings and then through a labyrinth upstairs to the little room in the old movie house, we thought we might get to meet Prine himself. Turns out he left immediately to go back to the hotel and didn't go back to the dressing room to hang out, but I did get to express to the band, the promoter, my daughter, and my friend who got us tickets that Prine reaches some deep, soft, emotional place, and that was about as much earnestness as anyone could take.

We had an apartment in the city.
Me and Loretta liked living there.
It's been years since the kids have grown,
Lives of their own, left us alone

He didn't do a lot of talking between songs, but he did introduce that particular story with another story about when he was helping a friend with his newspaper route. They would deliver the Sun-Times to a nursing home, taking a paper to each subscriber in their rooms, and some of the old people would talk to him and pretend he was a grandson or a nephew. So he's always had a connection with old people, he said, "and now I am one."

Old soul maybe. He looked fit as a fiddle onstage, and he moves well with the guitar. His voice is as strong as ever, though he has never had operatic pipes. It's a little rough, like an uncut diamond, and his range covers just enough notes to tell the tale. He's a little thick around the middle, but he always was chunky. He never was a prettyboy, and the ordinary workingclass face has only gotten more beat-up looking with time.

But the songs are even more gut-wrenching now than they were in the early seventies when I first became an admirer. And I was ecstatic to witness Prine's two-hour set in yet another provincial capital on yet another stage in yet another old theater and see him holding his own in the battle against the brutal fact that sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

Sam Stone came home to his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served had shattered all his nerves
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased his pain, and the grass grew round his brain
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.

Prine writes about death a lot, and about love, of course, loneliness, despair, betrayal, peaches - all the major themes. There's plenty of religious imagery - God, angels, Jesus, pearly gates - some of it tongue-in-cheek and some definitely not. I guess like many of us who were raised to be patriotic, god-fearing middle-Amerikans, he continues to cast a jaundiced eye on the damage done by his own cultural baggage. Yet wonder of wonders, he maintains a hard-working and indispensable sense of humor.

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches,
Try and find Jesus on your own.

So in a way he wrote part of the soundtrack of a certain version of my life during a crucial formative stage before I was set in my ways, and it was fun to share a little of that magic with Zelda at a crucial formative stage before she gets too set in her ways. These opportunities don't come up every day, and rumor has it there's a time limit.

Butterfly Effect

When a butterfly flits its wings in the Amazon basin, they say, it affects the melting of the polar ice cap. How does it do that? Through a vast chain of multiple causes and effects too complex for anyone to fathom. How do they know this? Inductively.

An individual person who is a member of multiple, sometimes overlapping groups at work, at home, in a family, among friends, in schools, churches, and informal circles transmits and receives hundreds of signs, signals, and messages every day. Spoken, written, postural, gestural, performative, functional, aesthetic. It would be neat to discern exactly what led who to do what.

Why did you do that? People can be very creative when called upon to justify something.

I dreamed about owls. Not one owl, but three owls landing one by one in quick succession on three difference branches. Three big owls flying in from left to right, then landing right to left. Then I forgot about it, but it came back so I wrote it down. I can't tell you what it "means" except that my sleeping mind had owls in it.

I dreamed I was driving in a rainstorm and all of a sudden the windshield wipers blades shredded right before my eyes, splitting into long useless strips hanging by a thread while I stopped the car to try to fix them. In a rainstorm. In a dream. You tell me.

Chuang-tse famously dreamed he was a butterfly and awoke wondering whether he was really a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang-tse. An epistemological conundrum. Who can say for sure. For myself, I am reasonably certain that I am not an owl in this lifetime.

Sitting and forgetting is another big theme in Chuang-tse. He suggests sitting and forgetting as an antidote to strife and trouble, as a way of letting internal measures address the distress brought about by external matters. At least that's how I remember reading it. Sitting and forgetting is the same as meditation, if meditation aims toward tranquility by letting go of thoughts that arise and trouble the mind. Forgetting is just a negative, characteristically Taoist way of calming the mind.

Forgetting is a favorite issue of mine because of my own predisposition (or habit or talent or fatal flaw) for losing track of one thing while focusing on another. I multitask well - one thing at a time. The hard part is switching from one thing to another at the right time, like keeping track of the conversation without missing your exit on the interstate. Period. New paragraph.

Some people are exceptionally gifted at sitting; others have a penchant for forgetting. Rare is the bird who intuitively knows how to do both, and rarer still is the sage who can do both at once.

I'm pretty good at getting so absorbed in what I'm doing over the weekend, without a thought of the work I left on my desk on Friday, that by Monday morning I have no idea where I left off. I'm in the 99th percentile at letting my right brain take over temporarily, so my left brain retains nothing - or vice versa.

There was more I could have said about this momentous topic, but I forgot what it was, thank goodness.

Why I love the rec center, Part two

A warm, clear October afternoon. The qigong class is practicing outside under a big maple tree. Kids are playing on the playground nearby, and a hum of activity pervades the space. Pretty soon the rec center staff are setting up tables next to bales of straw for their Fall Festival.

Our little circle of six is joined by a mother and daughter for a few minutes. They mimic our movements and move on to other forms of play. We're a mixed bag of younger and older, male and female, hipster and nerd, in other words a really cool cross-section of everyday people. We finish our form, talk about next week, and Miss Connie from the rec center comes over to offer us cider and donuts, now that we're all one with nature.

It's too nice a day to just get in the car and go home, so I take a walk past the playground full of kids climbing and watchful parents sitting on benches or standing around talking while keeping one eye on their babies, out to the ballfield, where teams of young adults wearing matching T-shirts play a spirited game of kickball. Some of the twenty-somethings run fast and kick with power; some of them are just starting to get the hang of the eye-foot coordination thing, but they are out there playing anyway, among friends in a safe social environment, doing something physical without having to be athletic.

Pinch me. This is what I want to do when I grow up. This little corner of the park is a little bit of heaven on a Thursday in October.

The next day is a workday, another opportunity to get something done, try to communicate effectively, solve some problems, and get paid for it.

Saturday morning has recently become another classtime in my week. I drive across town to another rec center and do my best to convey to adult students how to practice what I practice, and to my enormous satisfaction they seem to get it. This group is smaller - three instead of six - and a slightly different really cool cross-section of everyday people.

On my way out, I pass an empty gym. There is a leather basketball on the floor calling my name, so I spend half an hour practicing another ancient movement form. Right hand, left hand, legs and back interacting with the ball, the floor, the backboard, and the hoop. Muscle memory kicks in big time, and I discover to my mild surprise that I can still do this meditation form I've been doing for going-on-sixty years.

I'm not alone in the gym. A couple of neighborhood kids are shooting at the other end. The rhythm of their movements with and without the ball show that they know what they're doing, and a lot of their shots go in. At another basket a young man and his son toss the ball back and forth. The dad looks like he's more familiar with the soccer field than the basketball court, but he's getting it too. Dribble, pass, shoot. The drum-like sound of the ball on the hardwood.