Category: See the World

If you know, you know

Satchell Paige is supposed to have asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” It’s a sweet question.

Some days I would be 73 years and 16 days old, maybe even older. But then there are the days when I’m 14 again and being dazzled by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band — imagine hearing “A Day in the Life” for the first time, and now imagine it’s 1967 and you’re hearing sounds you never expected to hear in a pop song and that amazing final crescendo and what the heck is a House of Lords?

Or walking through a patch of wildflowers holding hands — surely I’m twentysomething from the feeling in my heart, but there’s something old and wise in my head whispering, “Enjoy this while you can.”

I know how old I might want to be if I didn’t know how old I am, but that nagging reminder — I think it’s my bum knee — keeps tugging at my psyche and telling me to the day how old I “really” am, and that skews my perception.

I do know one wonderful thing: When I say to myself, “Make believe you’re not this old” or “You’re only as young as you feel,” something lifts inside me and I remember what it was like to be 14 or 22 or 31 or 44 or 56 or 68 or holy cow it can’t be 2023 already, I’ll be 70 then — how terribly strange.

The songwriter poet who wrote in his twenties, “How terribly strange to be 70,” is now in his mid-eighties. I wonder how he’s feeling today.

Miracles in our lifetime

How did records happen? The leaps of faith and logic required seem miraculous. What made someone think they could reproduce sound by attaching a needle to a megaphone and applying it to a rotating bit of wax — and then the evolution that replaced the megaphone with an electronic device called a microphone and developed the means to amplify the needle’s vibrations to fill rooms and auditoriums?

I look at the squiggles etched into the vinyl surface and can scarcely imagine how they will be translated into glorious sound. And don’t get me started on how over the years they have miniaturized the process so the sound from hundreds of these 12-inch records can be condensed into a flash drive, also known as a thumb drive because it is about the size of a human’s thumb.

I am in awe of the technology that brought music into my living room 60 years ago. I am only beginning to wrap my head around the technology that has evolved in the ensuing six decades.

The camera I used to take the photo of a record being played can also shoot video, record sound, take dictation, connect me with countless sources of news, information and entertainment, read me a book, play me any recorded music I want to hear, and oh yes, I can make a phone call with it. 

And it weighs about six ounces.

My father was born three years after the first commercial radio station went on the air. I often marveled at the scientific achievements he witnessed in his lifetime, and lately I’ve been pondering what I’ve been experiencing in my own lifetime. Outside of the realm of politics and government — where the goal seems to be to wreak as much death and destruction as humans can muster — a lot of people have been busy making this a much better world than our forebears could imagine.

Equinox blessings

The forecast is for spring. With last weekend’s snowfall measured in feet, the weather people are predicting high temps in the mid 30s to upper 40s for the foreseeable future. The storm of April 2018 haunts us with the guarantee that it still could snow, but not before this snowfall does quite a bit of melting over the next 10 days.

And so it seems a grand time to throw a spring equinox. We hereby declare that the sun must stay above the horizon longer each day than below for the next six months.

May chlorophyll-green invade and conquer the land. May the sun yield sunflowers and coneflowers and wildflowers beyond our ability to count. May birds nest and fledglings fly and children run and dirty their knees. May the land burst with bounty enough to keep our bellies full through the next season of winter, months from now.

Let bandshells in town parks everywhere sprout music of all shapes and sizes. The music of spring and summer is joy joy joy to the world — let heaven and nature sing!

I look across the yard and into the woods and see gray and white. The only color is from the lawn chairs, and even there you could not sit without brushing away a cushion of cold, wet white. But last Saturday, before the storm, a fresh green glow was starting to emerge from the ground, and no doubt it waits beneath the snow and will be even greener after it quenches its thirst on the spring melt.

“Yeah, right, it sure looks like the first day of spring,” leers the cynic. But he can’t deny the truth: It is, indeed, the first day of spring. We survived another winter, and the season of light is upon us.