Category: Paul Simon

Looking for What’s New

Published on by geriatric pilgrim10 Comments

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Besides dealing with a decaying body and a deteriorating mind, one of my biggest challenges these days is to keep from living in the past. (And I’m sure the two struggles are connected: of course, I want to recall when I could leap tall buildings in a single bound.) It’s so tempting to spend my days reminiscing with old classmates via email or Facebook, watching “American Bandstand” on YouTube, and replaying 65-year-old high school basketball games.

This last month has been especially challenging. May began at the history center in the town in which I grew up with a program that my oldest friend (going back to the first grade) and I spent the winter planning: “Yarmouth [Maine, for those of you reading this in Singapore and elsewhere], 1955-1962: Times of Change.” We wound up with probably thirty people there who’d grown up in town during those years, bathing in the warm waters of nostalgia, as we talked to newer residents about how Yarmouth changed during that time from a low-income community of shops and small factories to a bedroom-by-the-sea for urban lawyers, doctors, and bankers. A town we kids roamed at will because everyone looked after us—where the local telephone operator would call my classmate Barbara’s house at 3:30 in the afternoon (because she knew Barbara got out of school at 2:30 and would stop at the drug store for a coke, so that’s when she’d get home) to tell Barbara that her mother would be late and that she should turn the oven on 350° and put the roast in at 4:00. (Who needed cell phones?)

Later in the month, as my brother and sister and I cleaned off stones and planted impatiens in our family cemetery plot for Memorial Day, we swapped memories of Mom and Dad and our grandparents. (Amazing how different our recollections are!) Later that week, I went with my wife, Mary Lee, to her 55th college reunion, and for three days listened to other people’s stories about their pasts. Throw in a dream in which I ran into my ex-wife—who died eight years ago—dressed in a white karate gi (still trying to work out the symbolism there), and I’m starting to sink beneath these waves of nostalgia.

I need to get out and open my eyes. Stop looking at what’s behind me and start looking at what’s around me—what’s new. I decide to check out this year’s garden. Besides, I need to put in my tomato seedlings.

It’s a beautiful June morning and the world is new. The apple blossoms and rhododendrons are in full bloom, the air smells of lilacs, and the breeze is fresh. The world is spring green: the grass hasn’t yellowed, the leaves aren’t chewed, and the caterpillars haven’t yet built their ugly tents in the trees.

I put my seedlings and watering can and trowel in the car, drive up and park on the power line road between our community garden (which I wrote about a few years ago: https://geriatricpilgrim.com/?s=Up+to+the+Gahden) and a wooded swamp, home to all kinds of birds, many of whom are singing their ever-loving hearts out.

I had no idea how many birds there are here until I got one of those apps this year for my phone that identifies birds by their songs. So, I check it: cardinal—yes, I know their pulsating whistles; song sparrow—makes sense, I see all kinds of them; gold finch and chickadee—ditto. But what’s a great crested fly-catcher? And a red-eyed vireo? They’re new, at least to me. Cool. 

Turning to the garden, I think of the beginning of baseball season, when, no matter how poor a team’s prospects, there’s always hope for a championship year. 

This year, I’ve got three raised beds, and—God willing; I haven’t planted it yet—a small pumpkin patch. The garlic I put in last fall is up, as are the peas which I planted on May 1st. I decided this year to stake them with some of the branches that came down from last winter’s storms—the first time I’ve ever tried that, and it seems to be working: the peas are grabbing the branches with gusto. In another bed, I’ve got the usual two kale plants which will hold us until November, but for the first time, I’m trying a couple of eggplants and a purple pepper to see what happens. I’ve also planted bush beans for the first time in years. (Mainly because last year, I almost killed myself stringing pole beans, and vowed never again.)

 I wave to Karen down the way who’s working on her bee garden. She’s also building a new compost bin, for which I need to thank her. 

But first, let’s get those tomato seedlings in. 

The sun is warm. I take off my outer shirt and begin raking the bed where I’m going to transplant my tomatoes. I love the smell of the fresh dirt (apparently, it triggers the release of serotonin in the brain—at least that’s what I read somewhere) which makes me want to sing. And because the other night I watched a music documentary on Paul Simon, I serenade the birds with “50 Ways to Leave your Lover”—

            You just slip out the back, Jack

  Make a new plan, Stan

            You don’t need to be coy, Roy

            Just get yourself free—

The really neat thing about the documentary was it focused on Simon’s newest album of songs, many, if not all of them, as I recall, coming to him in a dream. And if at the age of what, 83?, he can still be creating new work, even though I guess he’s now deaf in one ear, then I, at 81, can, too, despite my various diminishments.

I dig six holes and put a little of Karen’s compost in each one. I find myself slipping again into the past: the summers in high school I used to work in a garden and the big garden I had during my first marriage. Cut it out! I think, and then decide, No, let’s use those memories as compost, fertilizer to help me grow.

Which would be more inspiring if my back didn’t already hurt from this minimal exercise. From my other garden bed, I grab my new kneeler and bench combination, which I bought this spring, and kneel on it to put the tomato seedlings into the dirt and the compost, which gets my hands dirty and the rest of me feeling clean. Then, I put collars that I’ve made from plastic medicine cups around the seedlings to protect them from cutworms, and, using the metal arms of the bench to get myself off my knees, rise to get my tomato cages from last year. Finally, I give my little darlings a drink to get them on their merry way.

Feeling accomplished, I sit down on the new iron bench with the “Welcome” sign that someone—probably Doug, who, along with Karen oversees our community garden—has donated. I think about how I still rely on community as much as I did when I was a kid all those centuries ago. 

Looking up, I follow an exhaust vapor trail in the blue sky until I see the sun flash on a plane, high in the sky, probably starting its descent into Boston. I imagine flying to new countries and seeing new vistas and new people.

But right now, right here, there are plenty of new things going on, thank you very much.

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A Musical Pilgrimage

Published on by geriatric pilgrim2 Comments

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It’s Saturday, January 28, 1956, and I’m twelve years old sitting comfortably with my family watching “The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show” on TV. Tonight, however, instead of the usual big band number, a young singer with the strange name of Elvis Presley comes on stage in a black shirt and white tie. He’s got shiny hair, sideburns, and a wise-ass smirk on his face. Beating on a white guitar, he half-moans, half-yells, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” and wiggles his hips.

“Good God! What the hell is that?” says my father.

I love it.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a blog by Paul Cannon, an Anglican priest in Australia, called “Songs Lift my Soul,” (http://pvcann.com/2018/04/15/songs-lift-my-soul/). That same week, two of my Facebook friends posted the names of their ten favorite musical albums. I started thinking about the importance of music to my earthly pilgrimage and wondering just what it is that makes music so important to so many of us.

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In high school, I worshipped Elvis and his disciples: Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Fats Domino, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ricky Nelson, Brenda Lee, Wanda Jackson, The Everly Brothers, and Ray Charles. In college I listened to the jazz of Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, and George Shearing, as well as the folk songs of Bob  Dylan, Joan Baez, and Odetta. Rock ‘n roll, jazz, and folk music tapped into my longing for romance and freedom—my need to rebel against the small- town Maine culture I’d grown up in—while at the same time remaining safely wrapped in a security blanket of likeminded peers. In other words, I could be independent and dependent at the same time.

But almost overnight, it seems now, my love of music went from being about the promise of the future to nostalgia for the past. Perhaps because I’m just a little too old to be a Baby Boomer or because growing up in an alcoholic family made me diffident and fearful, I, for all intents and purposes, opted out of the rebellious 60s, choosing the security of marriage and a steady teaching job. For me the Beatles were about how much they reminded me of the rhythm and blues of early Elvis. I never cared for their psychedelic stuff, but I did like the rawness of the last albums, which, along with what became known in the 70s as Outlaw Music—Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Jerry Reed—had that sense of romance and rebellion I remembered from my teenage years.

When I think of the music from the 80s and 90s, I think of my daughter Laurie. I listened to her tapes of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, and Joan Armatrading not only with my ears, but hers—heard the promise, the passion for change. Laurie was also a self-proclaimed “flower child,” and after I’d divorced and remarried, her interest in the Grateful Dead, Pete Seeger, and the electric Bob Dylan made me feel as if I had finally entered the 60s.

When Laurie died in 1988, everything changed, including my musical tastes. I became obsessed with the requiems of Mozart, Brahms, Verdi, and Britten. I saw how grief can be given a structure, and I later used some of that structure for my novel, Requiem in Stones. My interest in spirituality led me to Elvis’s gospel music and the songs of Leonard Cohen, who along with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon continue to guide me as I age.

I also became more interested in playing music. In my early high school years, even as I’d followed Elvis, I’d also played trombone in a Dixieland band “The Ivy Leaguers.” Later in high school, I’d swapped my trombone for a guitar because of the Kingston Trio, who introduced me to folk songs. I became a member of the “The Fish Factory Trio”:

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During my first teaching job in Woodstock, Vermont, I played guitar and sang Ian and Sylvia songs with “The Faculty Three.” After Laurie’s death I took up the banjo (see https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2016/07/25/joy-and-the-banjo/), the instrument of black slaves and impoverished whites, a sound of sorrow and longing, yet at the same time, joy and gutsiness.

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One reason I don’t think I could exist without music is that both listening to and playing music let me escape for a time what Hamlet called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Or, put another way, music takes me out of what some of the writers I read call my “small,” or “false” self, leaving behind those anxieties to which I’m usually addicted. At the same time, I actually become more myself. Playing in an old-time string band, I am one of a group of musicians, all playing the same song, and yet, my part is individual; in fact, without the others playing their parts, my part makes no sense. I learn that I am the most authentic me only in relationship to others—what Courage to Change: One Day at a Time in AlAnon, calls “unity in diversity.”

And it’s this synthesis that helps me better understand that while spirituality is discovered in solitude, it is fulfilled in community. “Union differentiates,” wrote priest, philosopher, and paleologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We find our true “personhood,” he said, only by uniting with others.

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But I wonder if music’s almost universal appeal doesn’t go even deeper. As I was writing this blog, I decided to take a break and go for a walk in the woods behind my house. Perhaps because of what I’d been writing, I found myself aware of the music around me—the birds’ various songs; the wind through the trees. I thought of the music from some of my pilgrimages through the years: the Sanctus of sheep bleating at sunset on the island of Iona in Scotland, the dies irae of coyotes’ wailing in Arizona, and the Kyrie eleison of rain and wind through the branches of trees outside my hermitage at Emery House in Massachusetts.

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Feeling my feet tramping through the leaves, I thought of how I have always been drawn to the rhythms of music (which is why I like the later Paul Simon more than the earlier Paul Simon), and how music connects us—well, me at least—to the earth through its tempos: the ebb and flow of tides, the pulsating whistle of the cardinal, the percussion of rain on the roof. In contemplative prayer, I feel the rhythm of my breathing, which sometimes becomes part of a much larger breathing, almost as if someone or something is breathing in me.

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 These days I’m often found, as my wife says, “down the rabbit hole” of You Tube. I look at old videos of my early rock ‘n roll idols—Oh, hey, here’s Fats Domino singing with Ricky Nelson!—reliving my life’s ups and downs. I watch clips from old-time music festivals and artists like John Hartford and Dom Flemons, slowing the videos down as I try to learn “new” old-time tunes. And then, I might watch a lecture by Richard Rohr, Thomas Keating, or Cynthia Bourgeault on spirituality.

They aren’t as different from one other as you might think.

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