Keeping the Good Things

Tonight's soundtrack: Meshell Ndegecello, New York, 1999 (audio only)

Even the houseplants know it is spring!

Yesterday, I discovered a new ding on a wall by the front door. It was a good size dent that bent the metal corner bead and crumbled the plaster. I think I might have hit it with a pedal on my new bicycle. There's another one upstairs where a makeshift cat tower fell and hit the half-wall over the stairs. And another one on the drop of the ceiling over the staircase where a bandmate was carrying a conga over his head. Of course, there is still the hole over the bathtub from the leaky toilet, and a few spots where overzealous showers softened the seam where the wall meets the tub surround. I guess I've been saving up so I only need to mix up plaster once and hopefully I will be able to mend all these spots.

I suppose all houses must have these dings and their subsequent repairs, the same way that our bodies carry the scars of errant x-acto knives, a stray chisel, a tumble off a bike, a football helmet's chinstrap snap, a sharp pencil, a hot woodstove, chicken pox, a particularly sharp porta-potty door, and who knows what else. I used to have a fairly carefree perspective on my body and the potential for injury, but more recently I have found myself aware of the permanence of marks. Years after a fall off a bicycle, a blemish still remains on my shin. These things no longer go away. The resilience of the body that I took for granted for so long, is limited and acts much slower. It is as if the body has redirected its energy to different endeavors, like growing eyebrow and nostril hairs.

I suspect that something similar has happened to emotional injuries as well. There is something to the sentimentality of getting older and the things and people we lose. When I was younger, it seemed like it was easier to let things go, or push them aside.

Perhaps that is not true. Perhaps it was more about ignorance and a lack of attention to such things. A friend of mine lost her mother in the past year and talked about how it changed her outlook on all things. I think the same thing happened to my father when his father passed away thirty-one years ago last week. Suddenly, I suspect, our own lives have much more concrete mortality bound to a specific number of years.

A colleague's grandfather faced dementia at the end of his life, and his own father is experiencing the onset of his own dementia, and it has triggered a reassessment of his own life plans. He now intends to retire much earlier than planned, and he has mapped out the remaining arc of his career with that intent.

Perhaps on a more trivial level, a friend recently pointed out that we are older than all of the Traveling Wilburys except Roy Orbison. That band that seemed like it was made up of a bunch of old guys in 1988. Oh boy.

I still mourn the loss of rockstar dreams.

On the plus side, I have always admired mentors and colleagues who I thought were wise and had some kind of maturity and wisdom. Now that I am getting older, I wonder if what I saw as maturity and wisdom was more about calmness and an ability to be patient. I find I have that more these days. Instead of flying off the handle (where does that phrase come from?), I am able to listen and think through things, and even when I do have a gut level reaction, I can set it aside and address other things first. Perhaps at another time, I would have interpreted that as wisdom. Ha, I know now that it is just patience.

I looked up "flying off the handle" and it has to do with an axe head flying off unexpectedly. Actually, this weekend, while trying to reshape the descent into the gully behind my house I snapped a pick axe head off its handle. Luckily, it did not go flying and cause any new scars. It snapped as I tried to dislodge a particularly stubborn knotweed root.

My body is changing. A year of sedentary office life has left me a little softer with a rising belly swell which I worry will be like the divot on my shin from the bicycle accident four or five years ago. If it does not go away, I'll have to learn to embrace it like the odd freckles, the stray lipidinous lump, or on some days I will become immune to those things and not see them and appear (at least to myself) as unblemished as a movie star.

I wonder if that is how we are remembered. Only the best parts. All the blemishes, all the scars, and most of the faults, allowed to fall away until all that remains is what we imagined ourselves to be, how we always wished we were seen. Maybe that is part of the appeal of publishing books, articles, records. Capturing only the best of ourselves as artifacts.

Wishing you all long lives, love, and the capacity to keep the good things,

Leo

Franklin in a sunny spot.

From Our Friends:

From the UMass Fine Arts Center:

Gallery Talk with Andrea Davis Pinkey April 22, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. ET Online Join Carle Museum trustee, children’s book author, and guest curator Andrea Davis Pinkney for a virtual gallery tour of the special exhibition Picture the Dream: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Children's Books. The first of its kind, Picture the Dream features the conditions leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, highlights key voices and events, and addresses questions about equality in our current time. Register on Eventbrite.
Then check out these events at the FAC!
		Augusta Savage Gallery presents JuPong Lin: Poetics of Repair Being Earth, Being Water Workshops Fridays, April 16 & 22 at 4 p.m. ET Poetics of Repair is a participatory installation of poetry and paper cranes and canoes, concocting a medicine of decolonial love to mend our ravaged world. The exhibition is on view now. Workshops follow on April 9 & 16 with a closing reception on Earth Day, April 22. This event is part of the Art, Science, & Activism collaboration series title Transforming Crisis. To learn more about these events please visit the series landing page.