Another Valentine

“In everyone’s life, at some point, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” — Albert Schweitzer

This quote appeared in my web wanderings on Friday morning. I’m grateful for people who post research online about just about any subject, so I can confidently know that Schweitzer did, in fact, write those words — or to be precise it’s a faithful translation of a passage from his 1924 memoir.

I’m also grateful for web archives, so that I know I was writing every day between the end of June 2023 and December 2024, and some of it was very good writing, if I say so myself.

The truth is my inner fire was out. I was stuck in the hospice room where I left my beloved partner, best friend and wife.

I was driven by the words I was reading to her when she passed — “Love God and love your neighbor” — but if I’m honest, I felt hollow. The life I had known was over. This was a time in my life when there was only one set of footprints in the sand, to recall the old story about Jesus carrying us through bad times.

I am grateful for my pastor friend, who invited me to join the worship team, because without any weekly commitment to be in that church, I’m not sure where I would have been, and I certainly would not have been there when a beautiful woman named Mary prayed for a companion, and when God answered that prayer by showing her a guitar player behind the singers in that church.

When I saw Schweitzer’s quote on Friday morning, I saved the meme and forwarded it to Mary, adding, “You are my rekindle girl.” She is the human who found the ember of my inner fire and burst it into flame again. It began with the warmth of a hug offered one Sunday morning after the service, and it continues to this day.

I told her Friday I was lost for ideas about how to celebrate Valentine’s Day because, in all seriousness, every day has been Valentine’s Day since the hug grew into something as special as I’ve ever known.

Mary has become my Valentine. I thought I had lost my inner fire forever after my Valentine died, but God had other plans and gave me an encounter with an amazing other human.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Mary, every day.

Cover reveal

I picked up my guitar on the morning of Jan. 1 and glanced out the front window of my house, which faces east. The sunrise was a brilliant red, calling to mind the old aphorism about red skies and sailors.

I grabbed my pencil and wrote, “Crimson sky on New Year’s morn, Old sailors take it as a warning; Crimson sky on New Year’s night, Sailors ready for delight.”

That seemed like a good start, so I lifted the guitar again. I decided to try starting the song with a more exotic chord than your plain vanilla C or D or G, so I droned out an Asus2, which has a strange, lovely sound made by pressing just two strings side by side (four strings on the 12-string guitar).

I called out the lyrics I’d just written, and my mind seemed to say the moment called for a rather standard transition to G and then D.

Somewhat to my surprise, the words that I sang next sprang from the Old Testament book of Joshua.

“As for me and my house, we’re gonna serve the Lord.”

A short time later, I had a composition of eight verses that have not changed much since then, my first new song of the new year. And the adventure was on.

I had ended the old year by crafting a medley of songs about peace and love that I dubbed “Peace Trilogy,” reminiscent of Mickey Newbury’s “American Trilogy,” and a romantic song for Mary titled “What You Mean To Me.” “Me And My House” continued that musical momentum, but I couldn’t have foreseen what the next six weeks would bring.

Between then and now, 11 more songs emerged — 10 newly minted and one ancient cover — and now I have enough material for an approximately 40-minute album. Wednesday night I fiddled with ideas for the album cover, and a natural title came to me: “Crimson Sky On New Year’s Morn,” my first lyrics of the new year.

They are songs of peace and songs of love, folk songs and rock songs, serious songs and silly songs. I have eight completed recordings that may or may not require further tweaks, and I have six songs yet to be turned into what I hear in my head.

As I said a few days ago, I expect to be ready to share these recordings in the spring. At this pace it may be the very first day of spring. In any case I have the structure of a 14-song album and now a title and a cover.

On New Year’s Eve I made a list of 9-15 creative projects I thought I’d like to produce in 2026. “A collection of new songs” was the 15th idea on the list. I could not have suspected it would be the first project I’m likely to finish. It’s going to be an interesting year.

Run into the future

On Monday I shared my 10-year-old recollection of the first time I encountered Ray Bradbury’s prose poetry in my youth, and how every so often I need a booster shot of Bradbury to jumpstart my creative juices.

Wednesday morning the Ray Bradbury social media page shared a moment I had never seen before, from a 1974 interview with a journalist named James Day. The author talks about the importance of imagination, saying the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow.

“Boys and girls at the age of 10, 11, 12, 13, right on up through, the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, into being something,” Bradbury says in the clip, “so when you’re a child, you begin to dream yourself into a shape, and then you run into the future and try to become that shape. When I was 10, 11, 12, I began to dream of becoming a writer …”

I love that image of “dreaming yourself into a shape.” When I was 10, 11, 12, I was writing dozens of songs and putting them on Top 40 lists on imaginary radio stations, and I was drawing my own comic books, and writing poems and collecting them into “albums” of 12 poems each, because the average record album had 12 songs, so why not poetry books?

As an adult I found myself fitting into those shapes. I went to work for real radio stations. I kept writing songs, started recording them, and tinkered with sharing them with the world, but it remained basically a hobby. My making comic books evolved into making newspapers, and I spent the second half of my career primarily as an editor.

In my semi-retirement I have published a couple dozen books as both a writer and editor, and thanks to my pastor friend who invited me to add my guitar to the worship team, I have reignited my love for making music. And thanks to modern technology that makes it easier than ever to create recordings that reflect what I hear in my head, and share them with the world, I am more than tinkering.

Ray Bradbury never stopped dreaming himself into new shapes. He dreamed of becoming a writer of science fiction stories, then of becoming a novelist, then a movie screenplay writer, then a TV and movie producer, a playwright, a poet, a mystery writer, and many other shapes. 

When he died at 92, he was probably the oldest child in the world. May we all aspire to keep dreaming ourselves into a shape and running into the future to become that shape.

Ray Bradbury remains my single most important human role model. 

W.B. at the Movies: Song Sung Blue

You know your date is into the movie when she cries out in shocked surprise at an unexpected twist. Such it was Tuesday afternoon as Mary and I finally watched Song Sung Blue on its second-to-last day at the local theater.

We knew it was about the true-life Milwaukee Neil Diamond interpreters Lightning and Thunder, but we knew nothing about the duo’s real-life ups and downs, so this particular scene came out of left field. Mary literally cried, “Oh!” I was both equally shocked and quietly pleased that she was enjoying the film so much that she reacted so strongly.

Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman are amazing in the lead roles, and I’m not surprised to see Hudson nominated for the big awards. It’s a breathtaking performance — literally, as Mary can attest.

We may be among the last to see this Christmas Day release in the theater. In this day and age, it should be streaming any day now. If you haven’t seen Song Sung Blue, make it a point when it hits TV and try not to learn any details of the plot in the meantime.

Creative breakthroughs

It’s 5:01 p.m. Monday and it’s still light out — sunset is 10 minutes from now — and so the promise of springtime continues to grow.

Dean Wesley Smith wrote today about authors’ reluctance to toot their own horns. It seems we want to appear humble, and so we don’t use “power words,” like “captivating” or “compelling,” to describe the work we love enough to send out into the world alongside those millions of other books.

I have used the tag “shameless self-promotion” when I write a post that’s mostly about one of my books or songs or albums, but maybe there is a little shame in there after all. Maybe I’m a little ashamed to describe myself as an author when my book sales are barely in triple digits most years, or as a singer-songwriter when my royalties over 16 years total 90 cents from the various streaming services.

But you know, my stuff IS compelling, darn it. I read bits from A Declaration of Peace or See the World! and I realize this guy has something to say. Maybe I only sold $200 worth of books last year because I didn’t tell enough people.

And then there are the songs that have been popping into my head of late. When I released New Dog, Old Tricks last year, I decided to send the songs out into the world with just my voice and my guitar, no overdubs, no harmonies.

For this work in progress, I’m playing with as many bells and whistles as I can coax out of my GarageBand recording software. This will be the 22nd album I have produced since 1972. Most of them exist only on tapes and hard drives in my basement, but the last two are available on Spotify and Apple Music and wherever else music is streamed and sold. This next album is shaping up to be pretty amazing.

The songs are heartfelt, some songs are funny, some are reverent, two or three are irreverent, but I think when you hear them, you just might be, well, captivated.

The album will arrive in the spring, which you may have noticed is just six weeks away — the Milwaukee Brewers pitchers and catchers report tomorrow. When the album gets here, if I may be shameless for a moment, you will owe it to yourself to check it out.

And hey — think about buying a book, will ya?

R is for Rocket


FROM THE ARCHIVES: What do you do when it’s late Sunday night and you still haven’t written anything new and interesting for Monday morning? You look back and see what you were writing 10 years ago … This was my post for Feb. 10, 2016.

I’ve written in the past about how I fell in love with Ray Bradbury’s prose from the first paragraph in the first story in the first book I ever read by my favorite author:

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go …”

Ever since reading those words, I have picked up a Bradbury book whenever I forget who I am or where I came from but dream of who I might be and where I might go.

It’s been a while since I read beyond that magical opening paragraph and finished the rest of the story, a 1943 Bradbury short story called “R is for Rocket” that leads off a collection of 17 Bradbury stories named R is for Rocket.

Sunday morning, ready to remember who I am and where I came from and dreaming of who I might be and where I might go, I read the rest of the story again.

And what a story it is. Oh, well, it has its flaws: Like many early science fiction stories, it leans a little too much on talking about future technology (”It was hardly 7 a.m. and there was still a lot of fog roaming in off the Atlantic, and only now were the weather-control vibrators at each corner starting to hum and shoot out rays to get rid of the stuff; I heard them moaning soft and nice”).

But it’s also a sweet coming-of-age story about a boy of 15 who is invited to take a step into adulthood and fulfill his dreams of who he might be and where he might go.

Bradbury was a storyteller without peer, whether he was writing about rocketships or boyhood or dinosaurs or book burners or Martians or butterfly effects. “R is for Rocket” was, for me, the perfect introduction to all of it. He hooked my 12- or 13-year-old mind with the spaceships and brought me along as he celebrated being a kid and growing up and a terrific mom and the adventure of exploring the universe all in one 15-page story.

If you haven’t encountered Ray Bradbury’s work yet, “R is for Rocket” is a pretty good place to start. And if you’re an unabashed fan like me, it’s a great one to revisit.

“And, walking, I went beyond the fence.”

Stuff to consider

I have a great deal of trouble following my own advice, even though it’s rooted in Scripture: “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” and in popular wisdom: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.” Jesus and Tom Petty (in that order) are very wise. And yet here I am worrying about stuff.

I do consider the lilies of the field, and they are lovely — maybe not this time of year, but at least while they’re blooming. And I do consider the sparrow, who manages to eat and fulfill his destiny, which is to maintain the species and add beauty to the world.

And so I ought to feel safe in the knowledge that if he cares about the lilies and the sparrows, he will keep an eye on me. Of course, there’s also that notion that he won’t throw anything my way that I can’t bear with his help — and what can THAT be? — but then he also says don’t worry about tomorrow because today has enough troubles of its own. Wait, what? Today has troubles?

The point always comes down to “Trust Jesus,” and I do. He did, after all, give himself as a sacrifice so that we who trust in him are OK for eternity, which includes today and tomorrow.

I look out at the bird feeder expecting to see some feathered friends enjoying what I can share from the Lord’s bounty — instead I see two fat squirrels. This agitates my two dogs, of course, but when all is said and done, I just sigh and decide to enjoy a sunny morning. If he cares about lilies and birds and me, surely God loves squirrels, too. They ARE pretty fat for this time of winter.