Things About You, About Love

This week, I've been thinking about love and about time.

About spontaneity. How some of the best moments just - happen.

Timothy Leary, famous for trying to discover a higher level of consciousness, once wrote, "Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other people, with other forms of energy."

I think Leary, despite his fascination with psychedelics, got it just right.

Which is why these moments are so rare. Because a "serene merging" with someone requires a special state. A higher level of consciousness that most of us - perhaps all of us - have a really hard time achieving. But - in those rare moments - we feel its power.

Powerful, profound. A high, an epiphany, a euphoria. A narcotic transfiguration of who we thought we were - and whom we thought you were. For a moment - for an instant - we change. Time freezes.

Maybe these frozen moments in time are simply achieved elements of our destiny.

Leary also wrote, “If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love."  You see, he knew that conscious love was impossible to create in the vortex of mixed emotions. Dr. Leary's prescription for serenity was the removal of emotion.

For how can this merging of self and others be achieved in an environment of thinking, analyzing, reacting, comparing, hoping and resenting?

It just can't be. It's spontaneous and karmic.

What I'm saying is that this is different from the continuum of a relationship that is wrapped in commitments and history and connections. It's a moment in time.

It's why we desperately seek moments like these. Whether we do it knowingly or not. And I think that these flashes in time are what souls long to experience. It's a drug that offers a brief glimpse of heaven.

I've had a few of those experiences. They are sweet and transcendent. And hopeful. Certainly addictive. And, like everyone, I think of them with longing.

Like that night. In that old house, when we talked almost all night about life and love and the world. You were sitting on your knees on the couch. As we were talking, you spontaneously sat on my lap, laughing and looking into my eyes. You barely knew me. But my love felt, in that moment, deep and conscious.

I wonder, from time to time, if either of us will find it again. But I hope that we both always remember that feeling. It was about you, about love - and about time.

You know what I mean.

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

Christmas tides

On this morning before Christmas, I'm on my balcony looking out across the Gulf of Mexico. Staring at the blue horizon, squinting and thinking.  Thinking how the cadence of our lives seems to move like the ebb and flow of this majestic turquoise tide.

And about poppies.

Watching whirlwinds of sand on the beach, they look like mini-tornadoes trying to escape the grasp of the bleached white shore, which is clogged with New York tourists and annoying seagulls.

The towers of determined sand spin and twist, longing to escape back into the silence and infinity of the blue green waters. Among the unseen and the magical.

Shallow and glittering and peaceful, the Tiffany waters move enticingly closer - then dance away as the moon and heavens chase each other across the skies.

Away from the beach, the city is alive with people preparing for the holidays. Like marching ants and swarming bees, it is a pheromonic-like procession.  A directed, animated process of observations - learned in dining rooms, Sunday schools and churches. Reinforced in social engineering and in religious education and doctrine. Confirmed as conveyances of happiness and, sadly, meaning.

No one would argue that traditions don't provide a sense of greater belonging and purpose - regardless of one's social, economic, racial, or intellectual status. They help transcend our production-line of existence and cement our collective and individual religious values. They're important to goodness and community.

But aren't they really just an anesthetic? A numbing to the realization that perhaps we're just another grain of sand on the beach?

For if our souls do truly have a purpose - and I believe they do - a meaningful existence transcends these merely mechanical observances. Of course, religious constructs are important elements of how we interact with our God.

But we can't ignore our soul's real purpose. How can we escape the billions of other grains of sand that make up this beach if we don't create a whirlwind? How can we fling ourselves into the turquoise waters?

I believe the Dali Lama has a soul that is connected to other higher souls over the infinity of time and the universe. People all over the world, whether they are Buddhist or not - also believe. Someday, perhaps quantum theory will begin to explain it - if it's comprehensible at all while in this existence.

The purpose of the soul is not love. It is not about being an expert at following tradition or being a good keeper of religious conformity. Grains of sand know, maddeningly, how to fit nicely next to each other.

It is about seeking justice. The meaningful work of the soul is to make a difference in achieving justice.  Seeking justice for equality and freedom and human rights. Justice that each soul that arrives in this time and space has an opportunity to make a difference. That our souls aren't sold into a slaver's chains in Charleston or slaughtered in a French field. That entire generations aren't eliminated in Polish and German camps. That babies can't be poisoned by toxic chemicals.

Souls like Abraham Lincoln and Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou.

And Martin Luther King, who once wrote, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

And from army surgeon John McRae. During the warm days of May in 1915, in France, he was near the Ypres-Yser canal. As he watched a fellow soldier die, he composed a poem, heartfelt and poignant, about wasted lives and its profound sadness. Its simple lines are as compelling as the most righteous defenders of justice our world has known:





















Today, in the moat at the Tower of London, individual poppies commemorate the nearly 900,000 British and Commonwealth servicemen who died in that war, one of history’s bloodiest conflicts. It is visited by many millions of people each year.  John McRae's simple but powerful words echo across space and time. A poetic treatise that suffering so many souls is a greater loss than any land, any conflict.

Poppies of justice. Like grains of sand on the beach, swirling and coalescing into something forceful.

It is this noble effort of the soul that Robert F. Kennedy described when he wrote:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” 

And so this morning, looking out across the water, I'm thinking about poppies and poems and justice. And why Christmas is really, in many ways, about the birth of Justice.

A Felt Longing

Today, as Katie and Maria gather to bake Christmas cookies, I know they'll be thinking about Cathy. I know I am.  It is a sad longing but also a reminder that her essence still fills our lives.

This was a story I wrote last year - and I can't say it better. It's still true.

@@@@

I think this rickety old house knows it will soon be sold, along with its quirks and antiques, its funny smells and its memories.

Today, Kellie visited the house for a final tour. As she walked past the dining room mirror, I could almost see Cathy on her arm, in bell-bottoms and a sweater. Just the way this place remembers her. And the way I do.

To Cathy, who left us last winter, Kellie was one of the inseparable few.  Like Sally and Bobbie, they seemed to be souls connected in early childhood - and maybe long before that.

And now, too often, the vacuum of Cathy's absence seems like an empty ocean that needs filling.

On a bitter and cold January night, I told Sally that we'd miss how Cathy helped each of us feel important. That who we are, what we've done and whatever we'd experienced in that moment in time was special.  She made our lives feel special because she believed in our goodness.

Sally stared at me.  "Now what?" And with that, she disappeared through the front door and into the night - without a coat. Just covered with sadness.

Now what indeed?

"I remember our first day in this house, before you moved in," Kellie said as we walked through the dining room.  "Cathy and I counted all the knobs in the kitchen because we'd never seen so many before.  There were 57."  Just like Cathy to see wonder in every little thing, like the number of kitchen knobs.

I offered Kellie a laminated copy of Cathy's secret cookie recipe, which Meg found in the back of a cookbook in the kitchen.  She smiled, "She never wanted me to have this whole recipe; she'd just give me parts of it and leave me wondering why my cookies were never as good as hers," she said, laughing, "I won't take it now, but I will take a picture of it." Just like Kellie to keep the joke rolling between heaven and earth.

As we passed through rooms and closets and different parts of the house, she'd recall what the two of them did there.  "Your mother asked us to make chocolate chip cookies so often in this kitchen that we used to time how fast we could finish a batch. I think our fastest time was eight and a half minutes."

She told us how they felt when they first saw the house, with dried fall leaves and dust covering the parquet floors. I'm sure we both thought of the transformation that would happen as we filled those same rooms with Simon and Garfunkel music, high school parties, and holidays.

Like Christmas.  When Cathy would decorate it with pieces of herself.

Every Christmas, from bolts of felt, Cathy would create Christmas stockings for each of us. With scissors and glue, she'd decorate each of them with illustrations.  They were her portraits of us - painting, cooking, our dolls, our music, our sports - us.  Reminders of how she felt we were special. And we were.  Together, we were.

Of course her green parrot, Charlie, was always on her stocking. Charlie, now an adopted member of Sally's family - spoiled and glorious and indestructible.

Last night, I received a text from my son Andrew. He was telling me how much he loved that Katie, his sister, was again making felt stockings for our family. About asking him for ideas for her boyfriend's family. He said, "For a moment I was sad because it reminded me of how much I missed Cathy. But then I thought how cool it was that Cathy lived on through Katie."

Cathy lives on in so many different ways. In felt stockings, in turquoise Christmas ornament parties that her inseparable soul-mates host in her honor, in stories and smiles, and in much much more.

Even in Sally's new adopted parrot.

But mostly she lives on in us - as we find ways to remember that we are special and that our lives are wonderful - which we thought would be unimaginable without her.

Now, her lingering sweetness - and goodness - is part of us, all around us.

Now what?  I think we found the answer.

Jamestown, Plymouth and the Camping Trip from Hell

I think I can picture it. The bubonic plague had just swept through England some twenty years earlier, and people had had enough of 17th century London. The exodus started with John Smith via the London Company and the Jamestown settlement.

It probably wasn't too hard for the Puritan leaders to pitch the Mayflower cruise to parishioners. They were probably only too happy to exchange the streets of London for religious opportunities and the imaginary landscapes of the New World.

John Rolfe had found his own heaven in the New World in 1614 with Pocahontas. Right?

And, after overcoming early horrors, John Smith and the Jamestown colony had started growing tobacco, reinforcing their forts and working to rebuild their relations with the local native Americans.

But then, even as preparations were being made on the Mayflower, the settlers in Jamestown passed smallpox to the native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay area, killing 90% of them between 1618 and 1619.

Then, in September of 1620, 102 delusional - or brave - passengers aboard the sailing ship Mayflower arrived in the New World, at the eastern tip of what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They arrived into a beautiful and vicious land; unforgiving and violent. An imminent winter was waiting. It was a land of disease and danger and starvation.

By the following spring, over half of them had died from malnutrition and disease.

Those that survived, like Smith's group, planted corn and other crops.  Ironically, it was Squanto from the Pawtuxet tribe - a people entirely lost to smallpox - that the settlers relied on to learn basic survival, hunting, and planting skills. He spoke English because he had been kidnapped by the British and taken to England years before.

The abundance of their harvest in the fall of 1621 was cause for a celebration.  A gathering that we commemorate across America today as Thanksgiving. No doubt they had reason to be thankful - for having survived a terrifying ordeal across the Atlantic only to witness many of their friends and family succumb to death aboard the Mayflower, moored upon the icy New England shore.

Chief Massasoit (of Wampanoag tribe), who gave them 12,000 acres to colonize, was invited to the November feast. Massasoit showed up with 90 men - so many that they had to hunt for deer and fowl to supplement the foodstuffs of their hosts.

The following year, in 1622, in the English Colony of Virginia, natives of the Powhatan tribe
attacked the settlers along the James River and killed 347 people - men, women and children. The number amounted to about a quarter of all settlers living in the New World at that time.  It is alleged that this was precipitated by John Smith's violent raiding parties into the Indian settlements to demand food.

This brutal massacre emboldened the colonists and their homeland backers. Historian Betty Wood writes:

"(this) ... gave the colonists the excuse they needed to take even more of what they wanted from the indigenous population of the Chesapeake. As far as the survivors of the Massacre of 1622 were concerned, by virtue of launching this unprovoked assault native Americans had forfeited any legal and moral rights they might previously have claimed to the ownership of the lands they occupied."

Following counterattacks by the English colonists that same year (1622), a peace parley was arranged. The Jamestown colonists poisoned the Powhatan liquor for the parley's ceremonial toast. The poison killed another 200 Powhatan natives.

Taped to our refrigerators this time of the year, there are craft paper drawings of belt-buckle pilgrim hats and horns of plenty. Crayon sketches of indians and pilgrims sitting peacefully together sharing the abundance of the season.

Perhaps they were for a day. And maybe that's reason enough to be thankful.

That Thanksgiving afternoon was probably a brief respite from their camping trip from hell.

Dad's Felt Tip Halloween

This time of the year, I'm thinking of my father. To me, he's still just off on a short trip to Bass Pro shops, looking for fishing lures for one of his grandchildren. Or sneaking off to get something to eat. He'll be back soon, and I'll see him drawing on one of his mat boards or playing his piano. I can't imagine he's really gone.

Because he'll never be. There are so many ways he's still here. And he's especially with us on Halloween, courtesy of the witch sisters.

For a man who created so many timeless works of art in his lifetime, he could never match his sisters of the fall - even though it hangs in no gallery or museum or living room.

My father always told me that the best way to describe a beautiful work of art was the feeling that it evoked in the observer.  If the artist could express a feeling with his work, it became alive; true art. It became meaningful, relevant, timeless. Art without feeling was not art, it was just a colorful utility.

And, if you knew where to look, he kept proof of that everywhere - at home, in his gallery, and at his lake house. John T. McCutcheon's  "Injun Summer" was framed in the back room of his gallery; black and white photographs of once proud but now decaying mansions pinned to the wall; and brilliant green Irish landscapes, torn from the pages of a magazine, taped to his drafting table.

Back in 1966, when his career and his children were still young, I believe he did his best work. While he had fewer accolades then, he also had fewer pianos, bills and problems. Then, we were all young - and my father was at his innocent best. That's when he invented the witch sisters.

Three witch sisters, born on pieces of scrap-bin mat-board, floated into our childhoods like the wisps of smoke from burning piles of fall leaves - a sweet, unforgettable, and indelible thing.

My father would gather us together and, with his felt tip marker, he'd draw the witch sisters on those scrap mats. Each piece would hold a different part of the story. He'd develop the characters as he drew; funny and heartwarming and sometimes scary.  He was an unwitting Walt Disney before Disney was cool.

Like pumpkin spice and piles of burning fall leaves, the witch sisters evoke strong and wonderful memories. They help me remember my father at his best. Not by painting or writing or public speaking, But just being his most loving, creative, brilliant best - back when the world was smaller and we were all younger. Being a father.

Memories like these make me miss him - sometimes painfully.

But they also make me warm and thankful. My siblings and I will always remember dad's Halloween tradition of the witch sisters. It keeps him with us forever. It helps us see the magical in the mundane - like he's standing next to us as we look across October fields of hay and imagine that we see Indian tee-pees.

Perhaps that's why the faded "Injun Summer*" clipping spent so many years on the wall in his gallery's back room.

When my father passed away, we found a dusty box of mat-board and brown paper that had several witch sisters drawings he'd made. Some were from the 60's. They must have brought him beautiful memories as well.

And so, another Halloween comes.  And with it, the memory of my father in 1966, gathering scrap mats, pocketing his felt tip marker, and heading home under the fall skies and burning leaves.

Thanks Dad. We so miss you.

* John T. McCutcheon's Injun Summer Link

Beautiful Minds

If a super-smart geneticist were to study the genome of my family - our little group of artists, writers, thinkers, dreamers, and reality-stretchers, they might be amazed. Or they might scratch their chins and squint in confusion at the results.

And we'd laugh. We siblings have known this for a long time.

At family gatherings, brother and sister in-laws would huddle separately in a protective, collective quiet. They'd raise eyebrows and spin fingers against their heads. Roll their eyes.

Who cares? We've always known we were right. That we're leaders, communicators and creators. Among us, Indian headdresses all around, no single feathers.

Give us the ball. Get out of the way. We need space. Step aside. For your own good.

In our sometimes churning wake, there are waves. They're kinda cool - but not for everyone. Maybe best chronicled by a professional storm chaser. They are warm and Caribbean - but eminently capable of capsizing the passing sailboat or innocent sea turtle.

It is there, in that synaptic storm, that my mind lives. I am idealistic, determined, disjointed, confusing, clairvoyant, creative and powerful. I can rock your world. Spin you around.

Love you. 

After all, God gave me an amazing three million lines of special source code.

Sometimes, I wonder about finding someone else like me out there. The best I can do is look for someone willing to hide with me under the overpass, in awe of the purple clouds, lightning, and tornadoes. Someone willing to lie in the sand at sunset and wear out my iPhone battery playing music. To look across fall fields and imagine tents and tepees.

Someone who wants to incessantly take iPhone pictures. Love me enough to smell my breath and look into my eyes and see my mind.

Might be tough. These John genes - they're God's overtime work. They're artistic and lyrical. And sometimes puzzling but kinda cool. They're the Yellowstone. The special blue of turquoise that can only be seen staring at Caribbean waters, with the sand between your toes. The Appalachian mountains and their trails and mysteries. The Hudson River and New York City.  Sleepy Hollow.

And they're not for everyone.

Perhaps that's why I'm waiting to find someone on that same ether. Someone who wants to live within storms and sunsets; inside colors and sounds and feelings. With passion, change, and beauty.

Kindness, understanding, love.

As I wait, I'll be on the beach, listening to music. Looking for inspiration. Hoping for purple skies and lightning.

A new pitching mound

To Andrew upon his graduation from Florida State.

Even though no one said it would be easy guiding a boy into manhood, it was - with you.

In many ways, like helping you stay innocent. That was easy - as easy as walking the Toys R Us isles looking for the new batman figure; making sure your kitchen towel cape didn’t fall off when I lifted you to see the new stuff.

Easy like teaching you to throw a safe-rubber baseball when you were little; to toss those wobbly pitches from just a few feet away. Then helping you learn to play in those loose-fitting little league jerseys that hung on your skinny and gangly frame. Always hoping you'd be on the Cubs - even the little league ones.

And then they moved the pitching mound back. I remember getting to the field early with you, before you pitched in your first pony-league game, our voices dimmed by the loud trains running next to the park. We walked that new stretch of grass, to the distant mound and your new outer limits.  You knew you had to learn to throw strikes, throw faster. To use your curveball; really use it. To get stronger, gain weight (aka drink more shakes), play smarter.

And to my amazement, you did.

Last night, watching you graduate, I remembered so many of our times together.  Days we spent in the afternoon sun, swallowed in cut summer grass; you and Tommy looking up, looking for scuffed white balls floating into the blue summer sky. They seemed impossible to catch at that height.  But as they got closer, you found that you could – even if there were a few black eyes and bruises when the wind shifted.

I remembered our days in the basement playing Nerf basketball; when you thought I had played for the Bulls; me on my knees to make it even.  You dunked on the playschool hoop so many times it was reinforced with screws and glue and home-made parts.  It was only Playschool, but even so it seemed transforming. If you could dunk on an ex-Bull when you were six, couldn’t you dream of soaring ten feet and dunking for real? (which I saw you do last week) Or even flying?

Creating that chemistry with you was fun.

Then we drove to college. I see us stopping for Gatorade in Tallahassee, on a sticky summer afternoon. We met your next step in life together. A big campus, a cranky coach, and sacrifices driven by your baseball dreams. After class, you'd ride your bike through Florida summer storms and they'd call you “Lance.” But they didn't know about you – you and me – and what we'd done together. On character, determination and the will to accept challenge. On willing yourself - seeing yourself - soar.

You came to know the adrenaline-sweet feeling of being in the real game.  All of it; on buses and benches and summer sandlots.

Then, in the Legends; you discovered who Andrew really was. You saw yourself as a person and a friend - of character, honesty and integrity. You understood yourself as I’ve always known you. You've just become bigger and better. I have great memories helping you get there. But as I said, you made it easy. So easy.

Over the last year, we've helped each other so many times. Sought to understand our new limits; our new pitching mounds.  And I’m glad I have you with me as I try.

I love you Andrew.  And I'm proud of you.