What Endures

Heavy northern autumn sky
Mist-hung forest — Dark spruce, bright maple –
And the great lake rolling forever to the narrow gray beach

I look west along the red road of the frail sun
To where it hovers between shelf of cloud and spiky trees,
Receding shore;

The world is full of seasons; of anguish, of laughter
And it comes to mind to write you this:

Nothing is sure
Nothing is pure
And no matter who we think we are
Everybody gets a chance to be nothing

Love’s supposed to heal, but it breaks my heart to feel
The pain in your voice –
But you know, it’s all going somewhere
And I would crush my heart and throw it in the street
If I could pay for your choice

Isn’t that what friends are for?
Isn’t that what friends are for?

We’re the insect life of paradise:
Crawl across leaf or among towering blades of grass
Glimpse only sometimes the amazing breadth of heaven

You’re as loved as you were
Before the strangeness swept through
Our bodies, our houses, our streets –
When we could speak without codes
And light swirled around like
Wind-blown petals,
At our feet

I’ve been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I’ve formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door

Isn’t that what friends are for?
Isn’t that what friends are for?
Isn’t that what friends are for?

Bruce Cockburn – Isn’t That What Friends Are For?

Choo Choo Christmas

I don’t make friends all that easily. But the ones I do make, the true friends, seem to stick with me forever.

You know how you can vividly remember stupid little moments in your life? For example, there are times when I’ll be right back at the Smart Bar in the basement of Cabaret Metro ordering a Bud Dry at the bar while the guy next to me smokes a clove cigarette and smells of patchouli. “Everyday is Halloween” by Ministry is playing and asymmetrical haircuts are not silly, but the order of the day.

Ta Da!!

Back in 1976 or 77, I remember being over at Mitch’s house with Kenny. There was a picture of him playing guitar in white pants that had blue inserts to make them bell bottoms stuck on a cork board and a picture of an astronaut he’d painted hung on the wall. He got a phone call and for some reason asked Kenny to pick it up. Kenny informed us that it was an obscene phone call and I, being the impulsive youth that I was, immediately took the phone from Kenny and asked something stupid like, “would you like to meet somewhere” or “what are you wearing” or some such nonsense. Whereupon the caller immediately hung up on me. And that my friends, was the very first interaction I had with my dear friend Annette.

30+ years have passed since that day and Annette and I became fast friends. Net has been fighting medical battles in the past few years and in mid July passed away. As you can imagine, it wasn’t a high point in my summer.

Whoa! Snowflakes!!

There’s no way to capture more than 30 years of friendship in a simple blog post, so I won’t even try. Every time I’ve thought about what to write, I come up with a new memory. The fourth of July party out at Net’s when we were blasting Yothu Yindi across the fields of Iowa. The Thanksgiving in Austin when we all explored the cave and spotted the hole in the ceiling for the bat poles. Net singing “Butch” in the band Windstar at the Wagon Wheel. Singing Christmas carols at Jervis’ every Christmas eve. Kimber’s evil Jack Russell named Heddy, who likes maybe 4 people in the entire world, immediately crawling up and going to sleep on Net when he first met her. There’s just no place to begin. At the end of the day though, isn’t that the point? I don’t really care about how she died, that’s eclipsed by all the memories I have of her actually living.

Net and the Gregs

All those things you could say about your close friends apply here, she had a huge personality, she was incredibly talented, she was funny…. But so many of the memories I have of her involve my other friends as well. And if I’m going to talk about loss, this is where it applies the most. C. S. Lewis says in his book “The Four Loves”, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole (person) into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all (their) facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.”

With a bow on top

That’s where I’m at now. Not only have I lost my dear friend Annette, but I’ve lost all those things she brought out in all the friends we shared. I don’t think one of us who were home for her service got through that week without wanting to either call her up or go over to her house or ask her about something only to realize that she wasn’t there anymore. Things will be different for us and we’ll continue to feel her absence in little ways. From missing her soprano voice at Christmas or her 12 string accompaniment when the musicians among us get together to simply not having her house to hang out in when we head back to the home town.

I suppose it’s the nature of life to grow then fade and at half a century, I should start to realize this. To quote another poet from Britain “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. While I realize that Annette’s passing isn’t as apocalyptic as the second coming, it will still leave a hole in my life that will never be filled. But when my friends and I get together and tell a story about that time when Net came over and… the memories will endure.

Days Go By

What Fassbinder film is it?
The one-armed man
Comes into the flower shop and says:
What flower expresses
Days go by
And they just keep going by endlessly
Pulling you
Into the future.
Days go by
Endlessly,
Endlessly pulling you
Into the future.
And the florist says:
White Lily.

Laurie Anderson – White Lily

Yeah, I know. Days have gone by and I haven’t posted in forever. Originally, I had planned on doing a post/rant about the banking crisis. I had tons of references from Wall Street Watch, Rolling Stone, Keith Olberman and a whole host of others. I was going to talk about the Glass Steagall act, the Securities Act and all kinds of things. It was a good topic for a great rant. Thing is, I got so depressed every time I started to put it together thinking about how badly we’ve been raped by the Banking Industry and the politicians who shepherded the deregulation through the system that I just gave up. When you start wondering whether or not it would be worth the risk/time in prison to hunt down and shoot the asshats responsible for that mess, it’s time to give up. And then days went by.

A Snowy Trail Awaits

So leaving that topic and getting back to what this blog was originally intended to do, tell my friends and family what I’ve been up to lately; here’s the news. Back in late March, Mitch and I went hiking one weekend. What with our advanced age and all, we decided that it was probably important to actually get out and move once a week or so. In Denver, the “active” seasons are usually in Summer and Winter since the “shoulder seasons” as I’ve heard them called, are usually muddy and prone to quick weather changes. In Chicago, the best seasons seemed to me to be Spring and Fall since Summer was hot and humid and Winter was too damn cold. Our hike was nice enough, but was indeed a bit muddy and chilly at times. It did demonstrate that Mitch’s hypothesis was correct, we definitely need to get out and move *at least* once a week.

Do they make chains for bike tires?

With that in mind, I went out and purchased a bike the following week. My Fuji bike was stolen out of my garage just a few weeks before I moved out here in 2006 and I’ve been without since then. I picked it up after work one night and it immediately snowed. Of course it did. Eventually I was able to ride to work and I’ve been making the effort to do so whenever possible. It’s a nice ride at about 2 1/2 miles, and the uphill part is in the morning. That makes the ride home after a crappy day a bit easier to take .

For those about to Rock

We went out to see a Primus cover band on April 1st. Mitch had played with the guys in the band on occasion and we wanted to support them. They played the Bluebird here in Denver, nice venue. Following the Primus cover band was an AC/DC cover band called High Voltage. Here’s the thing, they range in age from 12 to 16. The girl bass player is the tallest member. There’s a few YouTube videos off that link. I tell you, you haven’t seen an AC/DC cover band until you’ve seen a 14 year old boy shirtless, wearing shorts and playing his SG while lying on the floor and spinning in circles. ROCK AND ROLL!!!

Captive viewing

Mid April brought Easter at Mitch’s house. A batch of the theatre crowd that Mitch plays with gathered up at 9000 feet for Easter dinner. We watched a few videos from previous Magic Moments shows and I think a bit of the “Concert for George“, though that might have been the DVD we watched at the Derby party. Either way, floppy ears were worn, chocolate was eaten and parachuting bunnies were thrown in the air. I think Austin pulled off the ears the best.

Insert cheers and screams here

Tom Pazen is going to have already read this, but two days later, Thievery Corporation played the Filmore here and they were *awesome*. The two guys on keyboards, conga percussion, tom percussion, bass, guitar, sitar, saxophone, trumpet and six different singers from Tehran, Buenos Aires, Brazil, Guiana, either South Africa or the Caribbean and Frank from Chicago. Great show, two encores. BTW, this should be the last crappy cell phone pic from that gawdawful Nokia. It broke a while back and I replaced it with an iPhone. Next concert I’ll be there with a better cell phone camera and my cyber zippo lighter.

Another mint julep please

Did anyone else watch the Kentucky Derby? Dude, Mine That Bird kicked some serious butt! Blazed from how far back? Last place? Not really a horse racing fan, but watching the Derby with Laura is like watching basketball with Jon Kindred, the enthusiasm is infectious. Besides, we all got to wear the big flowery hat (modeled here by the lovely Annie) and lose the imaginary bets we placed.

So purty and flowery

A few weeks back, I decided to try growing flowers on my deck to try and attract humming birds. I tried putting up humming bird feeders last year, but didn’t seem to have much luck attracting the birds. So it was off to the hardware store for some window boxes and flowers. They seem to still be growing, even though I’ve never had much luck keeping plants alive. The humming bird feeders on the other hand, are pretty much useless. I’ll need to look for something else I guess. If I continue to have luck with the flowers, I’m going to try growing the peter pepper seeds I ordered online.

Intrepid camper

That brings us up to last weekend. We went to the Great Sand Dunes National Park again this year. I missed last year since I was in Texas working on a job I believe. This year was lots of fun even if the weather wasn’t cooperating. Laura’s friend Christy joined us this time out and brought this year’s group to 7 (was that an appropriate use of apostrophes, Laura?). The last day, we were getting ready to take our picture by the Great Sand Dunes sign when an Asian family drove up wanting to do the same thing. It’s been suggested that I might have been speaking the bits and pieces of Japanese I know to a Korean family. Personally I still think they were Japanese, what with the peace signs (which Mitch called gang signs) and the fashion sense, but I could be wrong. On the way home, we played a game where we linked band names by the last letter in the name. Beatles -> Supertramp -> Pretenders -> Steely Dan, etc.. We found that there are a lot of band names that end in D, H, E, S, N, O and M. I realize it’s no “Cow Poker”, but it seemed to pass the time nicely .

Suffer my wrath!!

That pretty much brings us up to date. If you’d like to hear me bitch about all the crappy things going on, you’ll have to give me a call or drop me an e-mail. Apparently, I just get depressed and give up writing when I start to do that . Thursday is Anita the wonderful hairdresser’s birthday, so let’s all wish her well and book an appointment! If you don’t, Kahn the Terminator Cat will melt you where you stand with his deadly stare. Love you Anita, I’m a month behind you. I just have to let a few more days go by.

– G