Quiet! Ye restless spirit that itches to jump into the fray. The bait is dangling right there — that foolish, ignorant, lying comment, that ridiculous meme just dying to be ridiculed, that — that thing that must not go unchallenged.
Quiet. What’s that expression, “Don’t feed the trolls”? One of the better memes out there says something like, “Life is too short to be spent arguing with strangers on the internet.”
But what if it’s no stranger? What if it’s a friend who posted something foolish, ignorant, or downright false? Now there’s a conundrum.
My humble advice is to pray. If you don’t believe in prayer, that’s another conversation, but for now, just contemplate and meditate on your friend’s words or deed. Then, check your facts. Is it really downright false? If so, speak the truth in love, gently. Is it really something worth risking a fight over? If so, speak the truth in love, gently.
And if you can’t do it gently, with sincere love, well, then …
We were packing up our guitars after practice and my friend was using his handy-dandy tuner to make sure he was in tune. Yep, he was, and that made him very happy because the guitar had held its tuning perfectly for a week.
Wanting to brag on my own git-fiddle, I allowed as I had only needed to tweak one of my trusty old guitar’s 12 strings that morning. We both were duly impressed by each other’s instruments.
It suddenly occurred to me that I have owned that guitar for 50 years now.
“It was the first toy I bought for myself with my first radio job,” I said.
“I bet there’s a story there,” he said. Yep.
It was a hot, sunny day in the summer of 1975 in Waupaca, Wisconsin, and I had been thinking of sneaking into the radio station’s production studio some weekend to record some of the songs I’d written. I had grown enamored of multi-track recording and had recorded some of my songs by going back and forth between cassette recorders, harmonizing with myself. Now I had an opportunity to play with honest-to-gosh professional reel-to-reel machines.
All I owned was a nylon string classic guitar, which is perfectly fine for picking and strumming, but I thought steel strings might add a little punch to my songs, so I walked into the music store with whatever cash I’d been able to accumulate in a month or two of radio news gathering.
I don’t actually remember the specifics from inside the store or even what led me to grab the Ensenada 12-string guitar off the wall. What I think I was probably thinking was I could get the sound of two guitars strumming for the price of one.
All I know for certain is that for $59 plus the cost of the guitar case, I went up to my little apartment above the TV store that afternoon with a guitar I would still be playing 50 years later.
And I did record with professional machines for the first time that summer. The downside was that they were monoraul machines; owning stereo equipment was not a priority at the time for a small-town AM radio station.
Of course, I did not go on to fame and fortune, but I sure do enjoy plunking around on this old thing. Here’s what it sounded like in 1975; you can compare with “Song for My Daughter” elsewhere on this page, for what that’s worth.
The fall equinox will occur at 1:19 p.m. CDT today. For the next six months we will have more nighttime than daylight as we enjoy a lovely autumn and the bitter cold of winter, and the spring equinox will arrive at 9:46 a.m. March 20.
“Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain,” said the poet Richard M. Nixon. And only if you have lived through the coldest winter day, can you ever know how magnificent it is to sit around a fire with friends on a warm summer night watching the stars dance.
And so we celebrate the four seasons, even if the only nice thing I can say about winter is how pleasant it makes the other three seasons feel. OK, and winter starts with Christmas and New Year’s, so there’s that.
And after the winter solstice the days stop getting shorter and slowly, but surely, we work our way back to the point where we have more daylight than darkness for six months. So there’s three nice things to say about winter.
Why are these thoughts accompanied by a photo of Mary and me smiling with a wildflower plucked from my backyard? A friend sent me a Facebook message Sunday morning: “…Where’s Mary?” It seems I had been posting happy pictures of the two of us for many weeks and suddenly stopped.
I felt compelled to grab a quick selfie to assure my friend, and any others who wondered, that we are still sharing time with each other, still smiling together, still grateful for the God of the universe for arranging for our paths to cross, and still sending mushy messages to each other several times a day.
I was blessed to share nearly 26 years with a remarkable woman and partner whom I will always love dearly — the summer of my life, as it were. I continue to be amazed and grateful to have been blessed a second time as we move into autumn. And no worries, friends — we are still together, still hugging, and happy as clams. Still, I do wonder why clams are apparently so happy.
