Is today the day? Is this when purpose falls out of the sky from the mouth of God to declare what your life has been all about and what shall happen next?
Or is purpose an ongoing evolution, and the needs of this moment define what needs to be done? Is it about a big picture or a momentary picture?
What if it’s all the same?
What if by the fruit of the Spirit, moment by moment, we paint the biggest picture of them all?
I was very, very late to the CD revolution. I bought my albums on vinyl for as long as I could, well into the 1980s, and when LPs disappeared from the stores, I took a deep breath and started buying cassettes if I really wanted an album.
That’s how I first heard Hootie and the Blowfish’s immortal Cracked Rear View in 1994. From the jangling opening guitars of “Hannah Jane” to the mournful a cappella verse of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” the album is darn near perfect.
It was shortly after that when I discovered vinyl had not disappeared completely off the face of the earth. I found a nearby store that had a small cache of LPs for sale. I spent $96 I didn’t really have in my first visit — this was when LPs were still in the $15-$20 range — and I went back fairly frequently.
Cracked Rear View was one of the first purchases of my renewed vinyl hobby. I was not disappointed — until the very end. I have never been able to explain why, but there’s just something in the sound of a vinyl record, a presence of some sort, that is lacking in other formats.
So when the mournful sounds of “Goodbye” faded, I was very, very content and waited for Darius Rucker to sing the final, hidden track. And waited. And waited. And waited.
The vinyl version of Cracked Rear View does not have the final, a cappella verse of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” “Goodbye” is goodbye. I was extremely disappointed, but heck, it’s 53 seconds long. I could live without it, although its absence makes the album slightly less than darn near perfect.
In the late 1990s, I discovered that the prices of vinyl records had skyrocketed on eBay, and I did a little profit-taking. The most remarkable profit I made was on Linda Perhacs’ magnificent album Parallelograms, which I purchased in the early 1970s for 99 cents out of a remainder bin and sold on eBay 30 years later for $165. Those early 1990s albums were going for two and three times their original price, and so I parted ways with Hootie’s wonderful debut.
After awhile I realized it hurt not to have some of those albums anymore, especially after I finally invested in a fine Audio-Technica turntable, and in the meantime vinyl has made a respectable comeback. During my last visit to Target, I snapped a photo of their vinyl aisle and posted it on Facebook, saying “I feel somewhat vindicated. Target’s LP section is now bigger than its CD and DVD sections combined.”
After I posted it, I noticed something I had not noticed in person — one of the albums on the shelf was Cracked Rear View. I was back at Target the next day.
As I listened contentedly through the album, I thought to myself, “Surely in 30 years, they’ve rectified the mistake and put ‘Motherless Child’ at the end of the vinyl edition.”
No, they have not.
I did a casual online search or two, but I have never found an explanation why vinyl lovers can’t have the whole album complete with the hidden track. My album cover indicates it’s a 2017 reissue, and I know there’s a 2019 remaster, so maybe they fixed it then. Maybe I’ll find out someday.
It the meantime, it’s just one of life’s little mysteries.
2001: A Space Odyssey • Close Encounters of the Third Kind • E.T. The Extraterrestrial • Contact • Arrival
I love, love, love movies with mysterious aliens who turn out to have our best interests at heart — movies where the “villain” is our human fear of the unknown and the impulse to destroy what we don’t understand.
We need more stories like that.
It Came From Outer Space • The Day The Earth Stood Still • Forbidden Planet
The aliens come in peace, and our instinct is to strike. When our ape ancestor discovers tools in 2001, he goes within seconds from simple work to hunting and then to killing his enemy — the urge to weaponize our discoveries is strong within us, but as we grow we put away childish urges and impulses — don’t we?
I love when the strange and mysterious adversary becomes our best friend, or at least an ally, because we’ve all been strange and mysterious to someone at some time or another in our lives, or we’ve taken a chance to be nice to a mysterious stranger or newcomer who ends up being our best friend for life.
If we dig deep enough, we almost always find that we have more in common than differences. I would rather be the foolish scientist who tries to reason with the alien and gets swatted away than the kid who shoots the benevolent stranger out of fear. Of course, my real preference is to be Elliot helping E.T. get home, or Ellie making small moves on the beach with the image of her father, or Roy Neary signing up to fly into space, or Louise Banks figuring out what Abbott and Costello have been trying to say.
It makes more sense to believe the aliens come in peace, because we come in peace every day in almost every interaction with others.
