To the Crazy Ones - always on the road again

Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine.
They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,
are the ones who do…”

― Jack Kerouac

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/08/kerouac200708

We are History

It was said that, as a literary spokesman for the post World War II generation, he didn't have the talent of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  That he was, by comparison, a kind of literary James Dean.

His work, "On the Road" was a journal of adventure, observation and an earnest search for revelations. Revelations which, while pondered, sadly never came.

He was Jack Kerouac. Poet, bard, beatnik and philosopher.

I imagine Kerouac in a smoke-filled diner - hungover, smoking and scribbling words into a notebook ... perhaps on a red vinyl bench in a kind of otherworldly diner - a place few of us can visit. Penciling his intoxicated and sometimes despondent narrative. 

In a collection of journals completed during the late 1940's, Kerouac wrote his historic, spiral stream of consciousness, which became the book "On the Road" in 1951. It was later described as one of the best and most important treatises of the twentieth century. 

In fact, The New York Times called it, "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."

I can see him in that cafe, looking down at his own shaky cursive, squinting his eyes through the haze:

“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” 

Many months ago, I was in a country on the other side of the world. On that trip, I received a kind of Dear John text saying, “I owe you nothing.  All we share is a history.”  The unspoken inference was that it was a paid debt.

They were words that felt as cold as the February wind that used to blow across Lake Michigan and down the icy steps of my college dorm. Words like erasers. A disclaimer, a hurt.

In that strange hotel, I felt Kerouac's same uncertainty - that I was disconnected and I didn't know who I was - lost in a land of nowhere. Sent by those words.

Looking out my hotel window, it was like watching a movie - a staged drama of street vendors, flashing lights, taxis and motorcycles. Not real; disconnected. I felt like a ghost.

But now I feel better. I know better. No one owns history.

I've been thinking about my Dear John text and about history. And slowly, my thoughts are coalescing; that our history is created and shared together. It's best described, for lack of elegant poetry, simply as who we are and who we were. A past and a present that exist - that can only exist - together.

Who we were on Easter mornings, remembering the brilliant greens of newness together - is who we are. We are who we were looking at the storm that night, holding hands. Our now is an eternity of coming home after work and holding a child together in parental bliss. Visits to the obstetrician and pediatrician. Weddings, funerals.

It's not a thing, it's a soul's journey - meandering across space and time and collecting character. It becomes an impressionist sense of self, its colors and textures and brush strokes materializing into something beautiful and intangible - like art ... or music. But it can only be seen and heard - especially - looking back.

It's not a forgotten 80's song with cheesy lyrics and guitar solos. It's Bach and Beethoven and Mozart - historic and ageless symphonies that are a concord of sounds - scores built upon individual musical parts.

Movements. Moments. Merging into a timeless atlas of life when played just right.

Perhaps our history is a kind of karmic puzzle, its pieces pre-cut and scattered across time and space, waiting to be placed into a proper design, its image slowly emerging piece by piece. But those pieces are there – and they fit together. And no one owns them.

But, one night, I saw the puzzle, in all of its wonderful pieces, spread across my floor. I felt calmness and connection. I knew.

My children and their boyfriends and girlfriends were visiting. One of the kids asked, "Dad, what's in this box - are these pictures?" They started pulling old Kodak envelopes out of the box, and soon we had a room full of memories.

They were showing the old printed photographs to their friends, laughing and smiling and hugging. Taking pictures of the pictures. Sharing them on Facebook and Instagram; younger days, old school friends, forgotten family vacations. Catching fish in the backyard. Little league games in forgotten uniforms. Grandparents and cousins.

Scores and scores of instrumental love. The music of our history filled the room. The past and the present sat on the carpeting together, merged into a perfect harmony. The future ... perhaps it could be glimpsed too.

And it really helped heal my soul.

In the Weekly Standard, Ted Gioia described Kerouac's book.  He said, "...if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page. In truth, 'On the Road' is a book of broken dreams and failed plans."

Well, maybe so. But, I think Kerouac was like all of us - but with a keener eye and a better pencil. Because we all have broken dreams and failures on this journey of our soul.

And that's OK, because our journey, our history, is who we were and who we are.

It's beautiful music, this journey of the soul.

We all keep traveling, just like Kerouac - filling our journals. And making history on this long road.

It's all we have - she was right. And so wrong.

Daniel Burnham, Columbus, and dad

This winter, the boys and I spent a few days together in Chicago.  We decided on a meaningful exploration of the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry. Just off Lake Shore Drive, they are part of the architectural collection that remains from Chicago's World's Fair and Columbian Exposition.

Columbian, as in Columbus. It was part of the World's Fair held in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492.

In the living room of our old house, my father had hung a carved bust of Christopher Columbus - which resembled a sort of ship's prow - on the wall.  He'd point up at it and say, "That Columbus statue was the centerpiece in the main entrance to the Columbian Exposition. It's priceless."

We'd look up at the balding man carved into the dark wood and suspend our disbelief in deference to his knowledge of Chicago history. And then add it to our list of dad's other priceless treasures. The centerpiece of the Fair was actually the large water pool, which represented the voyage Columbus took to the New World. But to dad, it was his statue.

The Chicago Columbian Exposition was, in large part, designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted. Burnham, born in Chicago, would eventually become a master designer of cities, including Washington, DC and, of course, his own Chicago.

After Burnham was rejected by both Harvard and Yale, he decided to apprentice as a draftsman. From there, at 26, he met John Wellborn Root and his future. Namely, Burnham and Root.

The Exposition was a prototype, a collection of iconic buildings that were to constitute what
Burnham and his colleagues thought a city should be. It followed Beaux Arts principles of design, which was the French neoclassical architectural principles of symmetry, balance, and splendor.

This collection, in prototype, became an architectural heaven of sorts for future generations. Today, the buildings house Chicago's most prized collection of natural science artifacts, artistic treasures, history, knowledge, and beauty. Things like impressionist masterpieces and a captured, life-size, World war II submarine. The buildings are now known as the Museum of Science and Industry, the Field Museum of Natural History and the Art Institute of Chicago.

I always thought that the Field Museum was an apt reference to a kind of natural history that had to do with indians, prairies and fields. Actually, it was named after Marshall Field in 1905, after Edward Ayer convinced him to be its principal benefactor. Little did he know then that it would cement a legacy Macy's would never have.

Back to my exploration with the boys. At the Field Museum, we were especially awed by the dioramas - particularly the models of native American history. These tiny depictions of early American life under glass were intricately crafted, like model train landscapes - only way cooler.

The real native Americans around Chicago - the Illinois and Miami indians - camped and trailed along the lower stretches of Lake Michigan, and they flourished on the bounties of the prairies, woodlands and, of course, the lake.

The Sauk Trail was used by many regional tribes.  It followed the southern boundary of the lake, winding between dense forests and mixed grasslands.  A mastodon trailway was found along the same path, which indicates that the indians may have been just using an old game trail. The same paths today host a mixture of modern peoples, from the destitute and dangerous (no match for even a Mastodon) to the wealthy and privileged.

Despite the mind-freezing beauty of the steel and concrete towers that bully the icy blue waters along the western shore of Lake Michigan, there is an underlying sense of tension among those who bundle along its modern trails of midways and streets.

Perhaps it is the numbing cold.  But I think it's more than that. There is implicit agreement (or at least a resigned acknowledgement) among its residents today that the city can only "work" - can only remain stable - via a complex political system of life support. It must provide for the city-employed, the under-employed, and the socially and financially destitute. All in the form of entitlements. Proffered via pensions, union contracts, bursting city payrolls, welfare, healthcare and housing.

To fuel this massive political machine, it takes sacrifice, money, and compromise. This is probably not the kind of social and political structure that World's Fair planners had in mind for future generations when they hosted the celebration in the White City.

No, Burnham and his colleagues had definitely not envisioned this. Today's city has the highest sales tax rate in the country. 550,000 residents fled the metropolitan area in the last decade. The worst bond rating in the country. 18.7% private sector unemployment in the downtown district. Violent crime rates so high that, in 2014, the mayor asked the military to help patrol the streets of Chicago - just one step away from declaring marshal law in the third largest US city. And a disparaging social media moniker of "Chiraq" - comparing the city to the war-torn country of Iraq.  

Residents and visitors are charged a gluttony of entertainment and restaurant fees, taxes, and surcharges. They endure red light photo-tickets, traffic jams, and crowds. With the parking meter system privatized to a foreign country, the city has no control over excessive parking fees. Employers are taxed and then taxed again with surcharges.

When we visited, we joked about the ridiculous prices. We'd say, 'imagine a really high cost for some simple thing, like a cup of coffee or a hot dog. Then double it.' In other words, if you can't afford a $7.99 hot dog ($8.80 with tax), a $5.29  coffee ($5.80 with tax), and a $175 red light ticket ($325 if paid late) on your lunch break - don't go out to eat. And don't go without a bodyguard.

And so, things have changed,  But we can still go to our 1893 slice of heaven, where Burnham and his contemporaries imagined a more perfect city - then built it for us, right on a beautiful lakefront. Then the city's patriarchs filled the buildings with impressionist works of art, submarines, and - my favorite - dioramas.

So maybe my dad wasn't really all that far off when he pointed up at the bust of Christopher Columbus and told us it was priceless.

Summer 1971, a day just like today

Last night, I was driving alone along a deserted stretch of a coastal highway, listening to a song from the seventies. Out across the Gulf, past the endless rows of mangroves, the full moon sparkled on the waves. It was soothing and mesmerizing - the music and the moon and the sea.

It was "Sunshine on my Shoulders," from 1971. Listening, I was pulled into a kind of swirl, a swirl of memory, a living black-light poster, like the kind we used to pin to our bedroom walls.

In that spin, I was moved to a tree-lined Chicago street, which smelled of dandelions and pine and fresh-cut grass.

It was the summer of 1971. My father had just moved our family into an old Victorian home, three stories tall and filled with leaves and ghosts, across the street from a city park. Our old brick house, silly and small, could have fit inside our new coach-house garage.

My memories of 1971 are jumbled. They're an odd collection of stuff, like piles of old Polaroids and candy wrappers and album covers spread out on my bedroom floor. Things that fell out of my pockets, like Bazooka bubble gum cartoons and real silver dimes and my pool pass. The key to my bike lock.

Some of these memories, these jumbled feelings, make me especially miss my father. 

I remember my father then - it was a time of excitement and hope when we moved into that big old house. I can see my father in glimpses of images during those days. I can see his short hair and his buttoned blue oxford shirt. Coming through the green screen door on our old back porch after he came home from his gallery. 

I can't explain why, but there's a heartache there. A sadness. It's a sense of loss - for the passing of young hope and endless possibilities into future days of reality. But it's so comforting that I know how the story ends. And it's a happy ending. 

Hopeful. Happy. Sad. It was the 70's.

During that summer in 1971, there were several of us who would hang out in the park across the street. There was famous old pine tree in one corner of the place.  It had huge, gnarled old branches that stretched out across the concrete city water fountain just below it.  Three giant shoulder-high branches around the trunk. We'd take turns on them, smelling the sticky pine sap and listening to the gurgle of the water from the fountain below. Patches of the summer sun on our faces.

For us - at those moments - time stood still. We didn't think of existence outside that moment. Outside our world. Or beyond that afternoon. We knew what we knew. The park, the trees. The ice-cold water fountain. The summer sky and the pine sap and the dandelions.

We didn't know then, sitting on those branches, that the 173rd Airborne Brigade was being deployed to Southeast Asia, where they would fight under that same summer sun, collecting nearly 6,000 Purple Hearts in those summer days while we drank from our fountain of youth under the pine tree.

I was so young I didn't pay much attention to the radio. I didn't have a record player. But good heavens, 1971 was a magical year of music. It brought the world Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Joan Baez, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, the Who, Cat Stevens, Issac Hayes, Gladys Knight, and Aretha Franklin.

Among them, was a hippie country singer named John Denver. His was a sweet, soothing, and melodic voice. 

In 1971, John Denver sang about a day. One day, with sunshine and perfection. A perfect day that he poetically sought ways to share with us.

I never thought much about the song until that night, driving along I-75. 

But as I listened, I remembered the timelessness of that summer in 1971, with the speckled summer sun shining on us as we clung to our pine tree. 

And, across the street in that old Victorian house, hope. The hope I see now, in the fullness of time, in the images of my young father. His hope for the future. In those memories, I feel happiness and a certain sadness.

And now, I better understand Denver's words. It is a moment of bliss and perfection - impossible to fulfill except in memory. The happiness that exists in the innocent hope of days past. Discovered in a time warp.  Ageless and timeless. The time of a life, of youth, of childhood, of old age.  But that perfect moment is there. That perfect day of sunshine is there.

And that day is a day like just like - a timeless today.

In 1971.
  
If I had a day that I could give you
I'd give you a day just like today
If I had a song that I could sing for you
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine, almost always, makes me high

If I had a tale that I could tell you
Id tell a tale sure to make you smile
If I had a wish that I could wish for you
I'd make a wish for sunshine all the while