Ready for an equinox

Red Winged Blackbird © Steve Byland | Dreamstime.com

The red-winged blackbird has a distinctive chitter, and being clever birds, they flee south in the winter, so hearing that chitter again the other day was a welcome sign of spring.

The daffodils ought to be poking up any day now.

Today is the last day of winter in these parts. People who know about such things say the vernal equinox will pass through here around 10:33 a.m. Sunday, March 20. I’m ready.

I tell the story of my freshman year in Wisconsin, having grown up in New Jersey, and we hit a crazy February cold spell where the temperature was -20 or colder for, my memory says about two weeks, but maybe it was four or five days.

Anyway, one morning the sun was shining and the wind was calm, and it felt good walking out from the dorm. I even unzipped my coat a little bit because I was getting too warm under the layers. I walked downtown, enjoying what felt like the first hint of spring, and was shocked to see the Ripon State Bank time and temp sign reading -6. Now, that was less cold than it had been, but of course it’s still too darn cold. That was when I realized I had turned into a Wisconsinite, and have stayed that way for more than 50 years now.

But just because my body is acclimated to this climate does not mean I especially like it. As warm air returns, we feel our bodies relax and only then do we realize how much we have been clenched against the cold and we can start living outside again.

All around the house the red-winged blackbirds are chittering, and robins have been spotted in the land, and cardinals are pairing up and getting ready to make new little cardinals. And the sun …

The sun will be above the horizon more than below for the next six months, culminating on that glorious day in June when we get 16 hours and 38 minutes of daylight. A body can get used to this.

It’s all on us

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Everything irritated me. Except I got up on the same side of the bed I always do. What was the real difference? Why was it that little things I usually overlook were now annoying? What was the — to use a silly overused psycho word — trigger?

It had been a night of interesting, even entertaining dreams. I have no actual recollection of the content, just that I was engaged in the stories and a willing participant. There may even have been a happy ending, and maybe therein is a clue. I didn’t want to leave that world and wake up to this complicated world with its foolish idiots trying to run our lives and its words my failing ears can’t hear and its dogs that demand attention and the new crossword puzzle in the local paper that I can’t solve without over-reliance on my cheat website.

It’s all in the attitude, they say. We can’t help that politicians are almost uniformly sociopaths who commit evil because they can’t help themselves. We can’t help that wars are started to change the subject from their incompetence, and people die to cover up their mistakes. We can’t help that the sun isn’t shining or we’re out of breakfast cereal or the film we watched last night had a stupid ending.

The only thing we can help is our reaction and how we process what happened.

I have to say, that realization does make it easier to let go of the irritable feelings. I remember I love our home and all its denizens and that life is pretty good here. I remember that as much as they want to be the center of our lives and bombard us with reasons “why they need us,” they really don’t affect our everyday lives substantially and we’re free to live more or less as we wish.

Why are petty thieves and villains in charge of the world? They’re not. Petty thieves and villains are in charge of the world’s governments, but the governments are not the world and the governments are not “us.” When governors and their governments act, we didn’t do that; the alleged bosses of our lives did. Oh yes, when we blindly obey or do what they say, we did do that, but they don’t represent us when they go about their everyday madness.

I have no quarrel with you; I just want to live my life my way and let you live your life your way and beg pardon when we go different ways, as long as we don’t infringe on each other. I saw a quote from John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist, the other day, in which his character said, “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same of them.” I must say that’s a lovely way to live, if stated a mite harshly. Essentially it’s “Be kind and expect kindness, and you’ll get up on the right side of the bed more often.”

My make-believe Beatles reunion

I like to imagine myself a record producer in an alternate multiverse somewhere. Two of my favorite productions are the 1998 Beatles reunion album Flaming Pie and my mix of the lost Beach Boys album SMiLE, more about which some other morning. I even had my own “record label” for such imaginings, WARP Records, for “Warren’s Alternate Reality Project.”

Yesterday I found my CD of the WARP edition of Flaming Pie, which features tracks from the real-life albums The Beatles Anthology, Flaming Pie by Paul McCartney, Vertical Man by Ringo Starr, and Photograph Smile by Julian Lennon.

From the “liner notes”:

“The success of the singles ‘Free As A Bird’ and ‘Real Love’ finally motivated the surviving Beatles to reunite for this 1998 project, with Julian Lennon sitting in for his late father. It was the band’s first album in more than a decade and, sadly, turned out to be its last with George’s death three years later. The title, of course, comes from John’s legendary joke that the Beatles’ name came in a vision of a man on a flaming pie who said, ‘You are the Beatles with an A.’”

Among the highlights are Ringo’s remake of “Love Me Do,” their first single, and Paul’s lovely ballad “Calico Skies,” which bears the still-relevant lyric, “Long live all of us crazy soldiers/Who were born under calico skies/May we never be called to handle/All the weapons of war we despise.”

I picked what to me were the two Julian Lennon songs that most reminded me of his father — one day maybe I’ll do a “new” final Beatles album circa 2002 that features bits of Brainwashed, the unfinished George Harrison project that son Dani Harrison completed with Jeff Lynne to lovely effect and released posthumously.

I tinkered with “Beatles albums” from the early 1970s, using the most Beatlesque tunes from their solo projects, lost interest after about “1973” but was rekindled when the Beatles Anthology came out. One of these days I may work back through the late 1970s and 1980s when the boys kept putting out intriguing solo projects that might have been even stronger if they were still working together.

If you want to produce your own copy of “my” Flaming Pie, here’s the track list — or I challenge you to make your own version.

1. The Song We Were Singing

2. Love Me Do

3. Free As A Bird

4. Somedays

5. I Don’t Wanna Know

6. King of Broken Hearts

7. Young Boy

8. Flaming Pie

9. I’ll Be Fine Anywhere

10. How Many Times

11. I Was Walking