Month: February 2026

Where angels dance

The internet is down in my neighborhood for the third time this month, and typing with my phone is excruciating, and so I humbly offer this from the archives from July 27, 2021.

“Write only what you love, and love what you write,” Ray Bradbury wrote.

What would be the point of writing words of hate, or words that don’t speak love, no, shout love? What would be the point of wasting any moment of life on the mean, the small, the spirit-breaking nastiness?

Given a finite time to have any impact on this universe, spend every minute in love, in spirit-lifting, on big ideas, on generosity, on making every moment count for something positive.

Do you see why I do not write of politics if I can avoid it? Oh, I stumble sometimes and snap back at nasty minds, and I point out foolishness when instead I should laugh and turn another cheek, but in my most free moments I soar in love and remember those who lifted me, not those who dragged me into mud to wrestle with demons.

Angels walk among us (most of them on four loving paws), and I love to write about those angels and victory over those demons.

When I write what I love, it’s easier to stay in the glow of that love and dismiss the baser senses, and it’s easier to rest at night knowing I reached for stars where angels dance.

How can I hold onto this thought and speak or write only in love? That may be the biggest challenge of a life — or indeed, of an age.

I revisit the early days

Monday afternoon I opened my ancient songwriting drawer for the first time in a very long time and discovered that I have kept just about everything, going back to my earliest days of trying to unite words and music with my own two hands.

I once was able to play “Stairway to Heaven” on solo classical guitar and did so in public two or three times — I am mostly a chord-strumming kind of player and so the only thing fancy about my version was that I could, indeed, pick the familiar opening chords to introduce the song — it has literally been more than 50 years since I attempted it, so I had long forgotten the sequence, but I found the sheet where I wrote it all down way back when, and so I (very slowly) gave it a whirl.

And here were some of my early songwriting “triumphs” — defined as my friends actually saying something nice, not just polite, about my compositions. Songs with names like “Emerald” and “Because of You” and my first “hit,” titled “Bacon in the Jello.” Yes, one day while in line at the Ripon College cafeteria, a friend said, “Ewww, I think there’s bacon in this jello,” and I became inspired.

As I paged through these forgotten treasures, I saw that I was a little more adventurous in those days, tossing less-familiar chords into the mix to stretch myself as I learned. Most of my recent compositions rely on old familiar chords as I settled into the “three chords and the truth” school of songwriting.

I preserved those early songs with a primitive system of multitracking involving first cassette recorders and later reel-to-reel tape. Nowadays digital apps perform the same task much more efficiently, as I found when I played with multitracking and produced an album of songs I’ve dubbed Crimson Sky on New Year’s Morn, coming to streaming and downloading platforms this spring (stay tuned).

The success (if I may say so myself) of that project got me wondering if any of my long-ago songs stand the test of time well enough to be re-recorded using the modern tech. I think, like everything, some of them do stand up and some, not so much.

It was fun to plunk around like old times. We shall see if it leads anywhere or if this was just a way to while away a winter’s afternoon.

Another analog observation

I used to carry a notepad, pen and iPhone in my shirt pocket until I traded my iPhone 7 in for a slightly larger iPhone 14, which is not THAT much larger but larger enough to crowd out the notepad.

At Sunday morning brunch, I grabbed a napkin to make a note and Mary asked, “Why don’t you use the Notes app on your iPhone?”

“I forget that app is there. I never look back at my notes,” I replied, and to demonstrate I opened the Notes app for the first time in a very long time.

I read:

World without cats
Death on the Shore Michael P

Y3

I had no idea what those notes meant. Piecing them together with the help of DuckDuckGo, I must assume that at some point someone must have recommended the books World Without Cats by Bonham Richards and Death Along the Shore (sic) by Michael Pritzkow, but I have no memory of it.

And Y3? What could that have been? Adidas has a line of clothes and shoes called Y-3, but I would not have written a note to myself about a brand of clothes. That’s just not me.

In contrast, over the years I took hundreds if not thousands of notes to myself on my paper pad that I stuck in a pile under a paperweight, and in most cases I could still tell you what I was thinking when I wrote them.

I think there’s something about the tactile act of writing with pen on paper that helps etch the memory into the brain. Why this does not work when touching a finger to a screen to type the same note, I can’t say.