We All Shine On

Some Birthday Meanderings and Promises to Keep

Quite understandably, as I begin my 57th orbit around the Sun, I've given a fair amount of thought to the fleeting nature of, well, everything. But really, how amazing is it to think that our greatest strength is our impermanence. It's all made up, time.

I can still hear my mom's voice singing to Hey Jude on the transistor radio atop the fridge. I can feel the oil soap on my hands and smell the grease as I joined my dad at the sink after he came home from work. How the ground shook watching Columbia lift off for the first time, and then how my soul died a little watching her burn up. Crying the first time I saw Paul McCartney sing Yesterday, and the first time I gazed at the Grand Canyon, or finished “A Tale of Two Cities,” or held my first book in my hands, or held my daughter, or held Meena as we watched the moon rise over Everest.

And all the pain, and the music, and the crashing, out-of-control joys. The chicken feet and the momos and the tofu and the grilled hot dogs with hot sauce in a park in Philadelphia with the Ben Franklin Bridge sparkling behind a stage upon which Max Roach attacked his drums like a savage. The pure chaos of India spinning me into delirium, the raw, brilliant blindness of a Kansas sunset, cabbage straight out of the dirt and the London Bridge in Arizona.

I touched Stonehenge back when you were able to do that, and I touched the tree under which Buddha was born.

I've lost too many to name. I've dined with fools and laughed at graves.

Time isn't lost, it's absorbed, it is what I am today.

And just yesterday, as I tried to engage my daughter in small talk while her face was buried in a book, she turned to me and said, “Daddy please, can’t you see I’m reading.”

What a ride.

We have places to be and things to do!

I’m off of social media for a few days, as I do every year around this time. But I wanted to pop in here to say thanks for becoming my new little family, in this new little place. Back last week when I asked you all what you wanted me to focus on here, the prevailing suggestions tended to hue toward libraries, weird travel and, of course, my daughter. Many, many of you got it in your head that I should write about ketchup-dipped grasshoppers. Well, the ketchup part will happen anyway.

Going forward, we’ll drop an essay a week, on Tuesdays mostly but sometimes a housekeeping note like this on Sundays. We’ll move to a subscription option once we reach a few dozen more subscribers. And of course, I’ll keep my Buy Me A Cup of Coffee donation button (see below) active, mainly because, goodness, you have all really kept me caffeinated and that’s one of my favorite things! So thank you for that!

And so we roll on with this newsletter, with books and words, with family, with rocks and mountains and fossils - we roll on with dancing in our socks with Little Bean and discovering comic books and filling our pockets with stones. There’s more behind me, now, than what’s in front of me, but my goodness there’s still a lot in front of me. And I can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Until then, I'll play some music for my daughter. Hey Jude. And I'll sing it to her, and a generation will reset and we'll all spin out of control together.