Willie Nelson turned 87 yesterday. I’ll turn 69 in August.
I’m too old for heroes, I suppose.
I’ve met a lot of very famous and admirable people but aside from my dad I’ve only had two heroes, Willie Mays was my first. That was 60 years ago.
“It’s been so long now, but it seems now it was only yesterday.”
Heroes are always bigger in persona than in person. Their legend precedes them. When you meet them in real life they can be disappointingly ordinary.
“Gee ain’t funny, how time just slips away.”
Willie Nelson did not disappoint. He was short and sweet and purely ordinary Willie.
I was starstruck, literally speechless. Carolann had to do my talking for me. I said not a word.
“How’m I doin’? Oh, I guess that I’m doin’ fine.”
My wife asked Willie if he’d be willing to talk with me on the phone the next morning on my radio show.
(“Radio show?” I heard Willie think. “This guy can’t even talk.”)
Willie bailed us both out. He told her he’d be sleeping in the back of his bus headed for Colorado when I was on the air. He was so nice. He smiled at me like Willie Nelson.
“I gotta go now. I guess I’ll see you around.”
Willie seems immortal but every year at the end of April I get worried. I don’t want to lose him.
I find myself wanting to write but having nothing to say.
This COVID-19 business has dominated our every thought and action for the past five or six weeks. Most of us are even having COVID-19 dreams. Some of us are really stressed. Others think its nonsense.
I’m trying to remain vigilant, patient, optimistic.
My daughter-in-law shared this gem from a Russian writer on Facebook this morning. It says everything.
Wise words from Grandma
Grandma once gave me a tip:
Picture by Tasha Burgess Tudor, illustrator of children’s books. (1915-2008)
During difficult times, you move forward in small steps.
Do what you have to do, but little by bit.
Don’t think about the future, not even what might happen tomorrow.
Wash the dishes.
Take off the dust.
Write a letter.
Make some soup.
Do you see?
You are moving forward step by step.
Take a step and stop.
Get some rest.
Compliment yourself.
Take another step.
Then another one.
You won’t notice, but your steps will grow bigger and bigger.
And time will come when you can think about the future without crying.
The whole world is gripped with fear. COVID-19 is killing people, overwhelming health care systems and forcing the global economy to its knees.
As I write this we’re all being told to stay home, wash our hands constantly and don’t touch our faces. We’re told to stay at least six feet apart lest Armageddon takes us all, one hapless victim at a time.
Mass media reports are hysterical.
What if this is a Grand Plan? What if God is hitting the reset button and putting us back on the right path?
If you don’t believe in a supreme being that’s fine. I’m not sure I do, either, but hear me out.
Whether this crisis is real or manipulated as some believe, whether or not the threat to human life is real or overblown it is undeniably real in the changes it has brought to all of our ordinary lives.
People are staying home. Families are forced to spend time together, to play games and to remember – or learn for the first time – what it means to be a family.
There are more people walking the streets of our neighborhoods than ever before. They’re staying safe but being brave, acting cheerful and neighborly. I’ve gotten waves and smiles from people on our street I’ve never seen before. Social media is giving us glimpses of families and friends engaged in happy play in the safety of their own homes.
Kids have never had it so good. Not since I was s child in the 1950s.
Our dogs have never known such loving attention and companionship as they do now, the kind of love they’ve always given us.
We’re home. We’re fearful but we’re learning to rediscover our humanity and the meaning of life on our own terms.
Even the terrorists are setting aside their fratricidal tactics to ensure their own safety. ISIS recently told their own death squads to hunker down. Think of it, people who willingly blow themselves up to take innocent lives are suddenly fearful of their own mortality.
Change is in the air, all around the world. It’s a terrifying time to be sure. But what if it’s just meant to be, for our own good?
The New Testament describes Armageddon as both a place and a revelation of events that many deem to foretell the end of the world.
What if it’s really a new beginning?
Believe what you will of the existence of God and Revelations. I don’t know what to believe. That stuff is over my head. But I do see something resulting from this pandemic, real or imagined, that is more hopeful than we might have ever dreamed possible.
We’re setting aside our petty differences, putting careers on the back burner and finally finding time for each other.
This may be much more than a silver lining around a dark cloud. It just might put us back on a path we lost a generation or two ago.
Family, friends; do unto others.
For now at least, love, decency and kindness seem to be in vogue.
I embrace it and look forward to a better, happier world when this is all behind us.
What do you think? Leave your thoughts with me, here.
I read this story on Fox News a couple of days ago:
A couple married for nearly 50 years had just enjoyed a cocktail on their deck, where they talked about their inevitable deaths.
As they walked back inside their Vermont home, a piece of ice fell off the roof and fatally struck 73-year-old Linda Freedman Scharrenberg in the back of the head, according to the couple’s daughter, Jodine Meyers.
In the porch conversation, Meyers said her father told his wife he didn’t know how he could live without her.
Sometimes coincidence borders on creepy. And if you think about it for more than a moment it can make you question your disbelief in fate.
Another news story I recall telling on the radio many years ago was about a man fishing at a lake while his family was preparing a picnic table nearby. He hooked a very small perch and it made him laugh. Lifting the tiny fish still on his line above his head he called to his wife and kids, “Hey, look at this whopper!” As she grabbed for her camera the guy looked up at the sunfish dangling on the line over his head, throwing back his head in laughter.
The fish wiggled off the hook, fell into the man’s open mouth and lodged in his throat suffocating him.
Sometimes even God can make clumsy work of things left until the last minute.
This is a picture of the sales department in the radio station where I work. I kick myself for thinking it’s kind of sad. Who am I to judge?
I’ve never worked in a cubicle. I guess the idea is to give employees their own private space within the much larger hive of many worker bees.
They make their cubicles as personal as they can, dressing them up with lots of pictures of people and places they love, of children’s artwork, toys, awards and memorabilia.
They decorate their private spaces with silly and serious memes, of rapturous photos of vacation memories and maybe-someday dreams.
They post inspirational words that remind them of who they once were and hopefully can still be away from all of this.
I don’t work in a cubicle but I do live in a box, a house that looks nearly identical to all the rest of the homes on our street and the next several streets over in every direction.
Like the worker bees my dozens of nameless neighbors and I dress up the insides of our otherwise identical private spaces to declare our individuality, our uniqueness and to remember who we are.
Still, we really are workers bees in a hive.
I guess it just shows how we all work together to form a productive, efficient society to the benefit of all. I guess.
But the sales department cubicles still make me sad.
Have you ever stopped to think about what you want your final words to be? Neither have I but I’m thinking about it now.
Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones at Kirk Douglas’ funeral. –Photo by Us Weekly
I was surprised to learn this morning that Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York currently running for president, was apparently the final thought that crossed Kirk Douglas’ mind before he died last week at the age of 103.
According to this morning’s New York Post, Kirk’s son, actor Michael Douglas, told Bloomberg supporters, “I don’t know if he was pulling my leg or not but one of the last (things) that he said in the hospital when he saw me, he asked me to lean over close to him and I leaned over close to him and he said, ‘Mike can get it done’.
The Bloomberg volunteers went wild.
Excuse my skepticism but really? The man’s final thought was about presidential politics? He’s 103, on his death bed, and his lasting legacy statement was a campaign endorsement?
Kirk Douglas as Spartacus
If I was his son, and let’s be frank here, Michael Douglas is 75 and he could follow his father into the Hollywood Forever Cemetery any minute now, I would be devastated.
Why didn’t he tell me how wonderful I am in movies?
Why didn’t he say he just say he loved me?
I’m thinking it was a misunderstanding. It’s more likely that Kirk Douglas, in his weakened condition, thought someone had asked him who should deliver his eulogy and he gave the obvious answer, his famous son, Michael.
“Mike can get it done.”
Or maybe that’s not at all what he said. I interviewed Kirk Douglas a few years after his stroke. He was very kind and gracious but his speech was severely affected and he was hard to understand.
He may have just said, “I’d like a cookie, please.”
Anyway, this got me thinking about my final words. If I could plan ahead to say something memorable, something adorable, pithy, brief and quotable on my death bed, what would it be?
You know me. I’d want to do something funny like bolt upright in wide-eyed amazement and say something that seemed to come to me in a blinding flash of revelation: “Death! Yes but no! There is no death! I get it now, the true meaning of life is…………..!”
And then I’d plop back into my pillow, eyes closed, never to open again.
The reality is I’d probably just tell whoever was near me how much I love my family, how I’ve lived a life filled with love and laughter. I’d just say I’m happy.
That would be nice.
You know what would really be a pisser, though?
What if you thought of exactly the right words and practiced until you were able to express them with the skill of a classical Shakespearean actor, the perfect words uttered in perfect understated sincerity (I’d try to channel Peter O’Toole). Then you smile wistfully, a blessed child about to return home; a small tear would trickle down one cheek.
Your family would sigh and sniff; a muffled sob, hugs all around.
They’d take turns squeezing your hand and kissing your forehead.
Then twenty minutes later you wake up and realize, “Shit. Now I have to think of something else to say.”
A few years ago I lost my dearest friend in the world to lung cancer. Her name was Sharmayne. I went to visit with her before she died and what struck me wasn’t so much the terrible suffering she endured as the realization that dying is an unimaginably lonely thing to do.
This was Sharmayne’s last journey and she told me it was one she had to take by herself.
Sharmayne and I loved each other though we didn’t share political views.
You can see where this is going, right?
I used to work with Rush Limbaugh. We were also friends who spent time together away from work. We never discussed politics away from the radio station. I didn’t always agree with him but it didn’t matter to either of us. We enjoyed each other’s company.
Social media being what it is the reaction to Rush’s late-stage lung cancer diagnosis was predictable. The haters are tweeting, “Good. I hope you die sooner rather than later.”
I wish one of those people would say that to my face.
Look me in the eye and tell me you hope my friend will die soon.
They never would, of course. Life in cyberspace has no rules or morals, no conscience or personal responsibility.
I know Rush and I can tell you this for sure: hate rolls off of him like water from a duck. You’re not hurting him, you’re callousing your own heart.
You can hate his politics or even the man himself but when you wish death on a person you need to explore your own soul. You really do.
PS. Sharmayne and Rush were great friends, too. They were as politically far apart as they could be but whenever they got together they were laughing like hell over who knows what. They touched each other’s hearts.
Thirty-some years ago during the Urban Cowboy craze of the 1980s, Lu Posada, a dear friend I met at the Yellow Rose, a now defunct Northern California honky tonk, told me, “Cowboy hats are like hemorrhoids. Eventually every asshole gets one.”
Blogs are like that. They were a fad a few years ago, every asshole had one. Like cowboy hats they seem to be going away. I’m sorry to see them go.
Personal blogs allow everyone in the world a chance to put on a hat, share their thoughts and make a statement for anyone who takes the time to read them. Some are whimsical, some are serious or weird, just like the people who write them. I love them all. They give me insights into the lives and perspectives of people I’ve never known.
I don’t remember when Anita Garner and I decided to start this blog. It was more than fifteen years ago but less than twenty, I think. I do know that both of us wanted to leave something of ourselves for our children and theirs. We’re sending them loving postcards from our daily lives.
Together we’ve written five or six hundred posts, snapshots of the moment that we hope will explain who we are or were, how we lived, what we felt about things and why.
I wish my parents and theirs could have done this. They’re all gone now. As I get old I realize how little I really knew them. That bothers me more every year.
We all want to feel that our lives mattered. We want to leave footprints in the sand.
Photo by Genevieve Dallaire on Unsplash
You should start a blog or a journal. Leave your footprints in written words and have conversations with your kids and grandkids. It will make you feel good immediately knowing it might eventually make them happy to know more about you when you’re gone.
Anita Garner
And, in case you’ve never seen our front page here it is, linked below; it explains how Anita and I met and how a long friendship has turned into our shared desire to inform, entertain and leave evidence of meaning to our existence.
PS, a disclaimer: Anita hasn’t read this post before I published it. That’s how we roll. She may have an entirely different perspective. I still wear cowboys hats. I’d be shocked if she ever did.
Click on that link to our blog frontpage above and dig into our our thoughts. You might find them interesting. I hope so.
If you have a favorite blog or two please tell us about them.
My special friend and blogging partner, Anita Garner, just posted an insightful piece called The Way You Make Me Feel. You should read it. It will make you think.
When I was young I was quick to judge others for their attitudes, words and actions. I was young, strong, handsome, wise and cocky.
The only part of that I have left is wise and I’m less sure about that the more I learn about life and myself every day.
Many years ago my adult son asked about my relationship with his mother from whom I had been divorced since he was four.
“I can’t see what you and Mom could have ever had in common,” he said.
“You didn’t know us when we were seventeen,” I answered. “We had a lot in common. We were in love but we grew up in different directions.”
As I am dragged kicking and screaming into my golden years I find great peace in learning that we are all still growing up in directions we never would have expected.
I’m still a flawed mortal, I do pass judgments on others but these days it’s usually judgments on social media squawks from people I don’t know and will never meet. We all need to identify the idiots in the world, right?
But, I’m deeply satisfied with myself these days for having been relieved of the burden of critical introspection in realizing that I have no way nor reason to judge the paths others have chosen or the perspectives and opinions they’ve developed along the way.
I’m interested in your life but I can’t share the millions of moments that have shaped the person you are right now.
We’ll both be different the next time we meet. I can’t wait.
I don’t remember when I first realized that I was never going to be special. I don’t mean as a person. I’m a good guy and I’m proud of that but when we’re very young we imagine a world of glory and achievements just waiting for us to arrive and pick them up as fate has arranged.
As kids we’re told we can be anything we want to be. It’s a lovely lie.
I wanted to be a major league baseball star. I daydreamed about it for years and played the game joyously. I was decent. I could hit the ball a mile but was a terrible runner and chasing down a fly ball in the outfield was always an adventure. At some point I suddenly understood that hitting World Series winning home runs would always remain in my imagination because I could never be good enough to play center field for the Giants.
The seed of doubt was planted in me early, fifteen or sixteen, maybe. Once they take root doubt seeds spread like dandelions.
I wanted to be a professional actor and as a young adult some pretty knowledgeable people told me I was good enough to study hard, get better and succeed. I’m still not sure what stopped me from trying. Fear of failure, I guess. Though, my wife, the lovely and feisty Carolann Conley-Williams, says I actually fear success. It’s an interesting possibility.
And that’s where I am now: 68 years old, most of my futures behind me and sometimes still wondering why I’ve carried self doubt with me through a lifetime.
I’ve had a very good radio career. I’ve worked morning shows in major markets and learned my craft as well as anyone in the business. I say that with expert objectivity. I’m very good but I’m not great.
I can write but I don’t. I want to but I don’t burn for it. Writers always say they write for their own satisfaction but I think that’s a nifty bit of self deception. What’s the point in writing if lots of other people don’t read your work and love it?
Writing is hard, lonely work fraught with doubt.
Contrary to what I had always assumed I began to learn that doubt can be a comforting friend. He requires nothing more of you than acceptance.
My old friend, Doubt.
I describe myself in social media as, “Happy husband, proud dad and grandpa, unrepentant underachiever.” I wrote it to be charmingly humble but it has suddenly dawned on me that it’s true.
I am an underachiever in one sense but I love my life, every bit of it. I wouldn’t change a thing. Not one instant.
Pushing 70 I’m beginning to understand that finding glory in one’s ordinariness can be a deeply satisfying thing.
My old friend, Doubt, brought me here.
Pictures courtesy of the free online photo share source, Unsplash.com.
Willie Nelson did not disappoint. He was short and sweet and purely ordinary Willie.
