Alexandersmap

    Category: Lifestyle

    • If I Should Fall Behind

      Wedding songs are funny things. A lot of them are grand and lovely things indeed. Others are glimpses of look what we found! blissful young love. I cherish some of these songs and cringe at others. Such is the optimism of the wedding song. It captures a moment in a relationship that can be challenging to sustain over a lifetime.

      For me, at 25 years into a relationship and almost 24 years into our marriage, our choice of wedding song still resonates as a guide for marriage over the long haul. I first heard it on the radio driving around in the Amherst, Massachusetts area where I was working as a rowing coach. I’d started dating Kris, who lived closer to Boston, earlier in 1994 and we both knew early on that this was the one. I still remember the moment when I latched onto the lyric There ‘neath the oak’s bough soon we will be wed and focused on the rest of the song intently. This was before Shazam so I wrote down what I Bruce Springsteen and some of the lyrics to try to find it later. I wish I still had that scrap of paper. Technically I was still married to someone else and the divorce wasn’t yet finalized. The betrayal, embarrassment and shock of that divorce were still fresh in my mind as they surely were for Bruce Springsteen when he wrote these words:

      We said we’d walk together baby come what may
      That come the twilight should we lose our way
      If as we’re walking a hand should slip free
      I’ll wait for you
      And should I fall behind
      Wait for me

      We swore we’d travel darlin’ side by side
      We’d help each other stay in stride
      But each lover’s steps fall so differently
      But I’ll wait for you
      And if I should fall behind
      Wait for me

      Now everyone dreams of love lasting and true
      Oh, but you and I know what this world can do
      So let’s make our steps clear that the other may see
      I’ll wait for you
      And if I should fall behind
      Wait for me

      Now there’s a beautiful river in the valley ahead
      There ‘neath the oak’s bough soon we will be wed
      Should we lose each other in the shadow of the evening trees
      I’ll wait for you
      Should I fall behind
      Wait for me
      Darlin’ I’ll wait for you
      Should I fall behind
      Wait for me

      Yeah, I’ll wait for you
      Should I fall behind
      Wait for me
      I’ll wait for you
      Should I fall behind
      Wait for me

      These lyrics aren’t young love idealism, it’s hard-earned realism with a commitment to making it work. Springsteen wrote this song for Patti Scialfa after living through his own divorce, and the place he was in at the writing of the song was very similar to where I was when I first heard it. I’m not in that place now, but the funny thing about If I Should Fall Behind is that it grows with you like an old friend and mentor, offering guidance in the down moments and a warm embrace in the good moments.

      I’m not sure what the next 25 years will bring, but I’m optimistic about the future. The ebb and flow of life together offers challenges and opportunities alike. You and I know what this world can do, so let’s make our steps clear that the other may see. I’ll wait for you, and if I should fall behind, please wait for me.

    • Two Views

      This morning I had the opportunity to sail on Fayaway from the Merrimack River to (almost) Isle of Shoals. Lucky to have Chris and Kelly local a bit longer than expected. These days are truly bonus days. This stretch of coastline looks complete different than it did 300 years ago, but looks exactly the same in two ways.

      The ridge line is largely as it was in 1719, save for a few water towers breaking through. But just below is a continuous line of beach houses, hotels and condos. And below that, on this beautiful July day, was a similar continuous string of people occupying their own square of beach sand. No, the similarities end at the tree line.

      But turn 180 degrees and the view is as it’s been for millennia. The Atlantic Ocean guards what has always been from humanity’s constant change. two views offer different perspectives on the last three centuries. Thankfully the Atlantic is resilient in the face of human impact. I do love the view east. May it always be this way.

    • Part of the Eternal

      “Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” – Seneca. On The Shortness of Life

      I was listening to a podcast interview with Elizabeth Gilbert where she discussed the death of a woman she had a relationship with, and the words she heard from another writer friend, Ann Patchett, who told her:

      “[Your loved one] belongs to the eternal now, and someday soon you will too.  And that’s true for all of us.  You have an infinite amount of time to belong to the eternal with her.  But you only have this tiny bit of time to have this experience as a human being on Earth.  Don’t lose it by trying to merge with her now.  Merge with this, what’s here, the people who are here, what’s in front of you.  The weird, strange, heartbreaking thing of being mortal.  Do that….  This moment of being human is not to be wasted.” – Elizabeth Gilbert/Ann Patchett

      I write about death.  Not because I’m in a hurry to get there, mind you, but because it’s a reality for all of us, and embracing stoicism means embracing the concept of Memento Mori; remembering that we all must die.  By acknowledging that you set yourself up to make the most of the time you have here.  The alternative is to deny that it will ever happen and not make the most of your time.  Seems a waste, really, to not get every bit of marrow out of the bone.  Take the highlighter out and brighten up the daily pages.

      “We ought to hear at least one little song everyday, read a poem, see a first-rate painting, and if possible speak a few sensible words.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      Being part of the eternal, the infinite other that we’re all heading towards, makes me focus more on living.  I think I’d like to make a run to 100 and put that eternity thing off as long as possible.  I have a lot of people to reconnect with whenever I get there. Then too, if this side offers a brief window of time to experience living, isn’t it essential to play your cards with some enthusiasm?  It’s Friday once again.  Another string of days has passed.  Surely we owe it to our eternal selves to make the most of this day ahead.  The infinite might just nod its approval.

    • 37 Miles

      I’m currently 37 miles from my first appointment in Boston. At the moment Waze tells me it will take me 69 minutes to reach my destination. In reality it’ll be closer to 90 minutes because it makes little sense to arrive at an appointment 90 minutes early, but it’s unacceptable to arrive 5 minutes late. Such is the mental math of a commuter to Boston. If there’s a benefit to my career it’s not having to do this every day. No such mental math occurs in a trip to Maine or Vermont. But Boston, well, that’s a different story. I choose to avoid peak traffic times whenever possible. Today it’s not possible.

      “… the few that make it to the top of their ambition through a thousand indignities realize at the end it’s only for an inscription on their tombstone” – Seneca

      As I write the predicted commute has inched up another ten minutes. Best to get on my way soon… but then I hear a couple of hot air balloons flying nearby and walked out to see where they’re heading. They often land on our street because the power lines are underground here. But it looks like they’re heading to another neighborhood this time. The brief interruption was welcome as it broke my focus on incremental time units for a 37 mile drive. It’s funny what we focus on, and how unimportant most of it turns out to be in the end. But we also have means to an end to consider, and so it’s time to get moving once again.

    • It’s in the Blood

      I’ve been told by the American Red Cross that I’ve donated more than 3 gallons of blood in my lifetime.  That’s both a lot and nowhere near what some people donate.  Considering the average man has 12 pints of blood, that equates to roughly two guy’s worth of A negative blood that’s come out of me and into other folks.  Lately I usually donate “Power Red”, which seem to be particularly helpful because I’m donating 2x the needed red blood cells.  In the process of donating they separate what they need and return the rest along with some saline solution.  It takes a bit longer but nothing too crazy.  Apparently not everyone can donate them, so since I can I do.

      At one point in my life I tried donating platelets, and did it maybe 4 or 5 times.  But the amount of time needed to donate was prohibitive for me, particularly when they closed the place right down the street from me and centralized platelet donations in select locations (Manchester, New Hampshire or Boston, Danvers and Dedham, Massachusetts that surely are convenient for a lot of people but not me.  If there’s a national emergency declared and platelets are urgently needed then call me up – otherwise take my Power Reds and I’ll see you in a few months.

      There’s really nothing to donating blood or Power Reds.  I know there are many people who can’t donate for health reasons or because of lifestyle choices like living in a certain foreign country for more than five years.  Donated blood has a shelf life of 42 days.  Apparently only 37% of the population can donate, and only 10% do it annually.  I’m somewhere in the 3 to 4 times per year range.  So I may not be perfect, but I do bleed and clot well, and have been told I have “good veins”, so I donate when I can.  Perhaps I’ve saved a life or two as the campaigns say, or maybe not and just made it a little easier to save a life.  Either way I’m all in.  How about you?

    • Crows Never Forget a Face

      Sunday morning, while writing yesterday’s blog post, I observed a murder of crows, or four of them anyway, fly into the trees in my yard and start communicating with each other in that caw caw way.  Like a biker gang walking into a Friendly’s, the other birds in the vicinity grew very quiet when the crows announced they were crashing the party.

      The crows split up, with one flying behind me to a tall tree in the front of the house.  Two of them remained on a branch on an oak tree deeper into the woods.  And the fourth ran point and flew onto a branch of an oak tree that reached out over the lawn in the backyard.  I saw right away what he was doing.  There was a birds nest on the branch and he bounced over to it, cawing all the time, head bending side to side as he inspected the nest.  The pair of crows in the woods observed and cawed their feedback.  When point crow reached the nest he started pulling it apart and dropping bits of straw down to the ground, digging into the nest looking for chicks or eggs to eat.  After a couple of minutes he determined there was nothing there worth eating and he flew off, with his mates joining him.

      Crows are both fascinating and annoying creatures.  Like [most] humans, they’re highly intelligent and social, and they’re omnivores.  Crows are symbolic of death in mythology, like vultures, but they’re really just opportunistic hunters and gatherers.  You see them all the time bouncing over to roadkill, but they’re smart enough to gauge the speed of the car coming at them and avoid becoming roadkill themselves.  I read that if a crow is killed, other crows will gather around it to determine what killed it, and then like a lynch mob go after the killer.  Crows apparently never forget a face, so if you go out and chase away a murder of crows or throw rocks at them they’ll mark you as a dangerous character.  Given what they do to crow killers I’d say be on your best behavior with them!  With an average lifespan of 7 – 8 years, they have plenty of time to develop a plan to deal with you.

      There are apparently 30 different species of crows out there, ranging from magpies to ravens.  I know that the crows flying about in the woods of New Hampshire are smaller than the crows flying around on Buzzards Bay, but share similar hunting and communication traits.  I can admire crows but still wish that they’d shut up when I’m trying to sleep in when I’m on the Cape.  They aren’t just bigger down there, they’re also louder and early risers.  Maybe they’re trying to tell me something:  Caw! Get up!  Caw!  Life is short!  Caw!  There’s so much you can do with this day.  Thanks for the reminder.  Best get on with it.

    • Honing a Curious Mind

      I’ve been trying to figure out who is singing in the neighborhood for the last six weeks. I make a point of being outdoors whenever possible in the early morning (New Hampshire summers are very short after all). Some singers are obvious, others are more evasively unfamiliar to me. I regret that my education never included identifying birdsong. But as with many things I’ve made it a point of my adult learning path. I’m currently in the 101 level birdsong classes.

      I tried an app that analyzes bird song, but the bluebirds always sing at the same time as this character and tend to confuse the analytics. It keeps think its a mockingbird when I can hear the differences clearly. Eventually I came to the conclusion that this was a Brown Thrasher. In the process of figuring that out I’ve come to learn the songs of another half dozen birds I’ve heard in the background music but never took the time to learn about. I’m far from an expert on any of this, but the path is more vibrant.

      In the last 18 months I’ve learned about or reacquainted myself with local and world history, stoicism, transcendentalism, world religions, the power of habits, physiology, native trees, horticulture, birds, bugs, the environment and other diverse (eclectic?) side paths on the route from here to, well, there. Side paths lead to other side paths and before you know it maybe you’ve accumulated something meaningful in the old brain. You can’t write about what you don’t know about, and this cajoles me from tangential interest to deeper learning about topics. As a side benefit I’ve become better at writing too… you’ll see it eventually.

      “The discipline of sharing something daily is priceless.” – Seth Godin

    • The Friday Crawl

      Driving south I saw the traffic going northbound. It basically ran for ten or twelve miles, opened up for a short spell, and then clogged again for a few miles. This is one of those moments where I can’t just say good thing I’m not going north. Once I’m done with a lunch meeting I’ll be merging right into that traffic going back to where I came from.

      It’s summer in New England, and the traffic is relentless. Tourists heading to Maine, New Hampshire, or Canada join the normal commuter weekend head-starters. It’s a recipe for frustration if you let it get to you. Today I’ll put on some favorite music and crawl along with the rest of them. No use putting it off any longer, it won’t get better anytime soon. My Friday crawl is about to begin.

    • Karma’s Gonna Get You

      This morning I was inspecting the grapes, which seem to be thriving this year, when I felt  a familiar stinging sensation on my hand.  Looking down quickly I saw the reason, I’d grabbed the fence right at the spot where a hornet had built a nest in the cavity made by the U-shaped metal top rail.  And there was the hornet flying about still annoyed with me.

      Wasps and hornets offer value to the garden, hunting pests that would otherwise damage your plants.  But they also tend to build nests in places inconvenient to humans trying to live in the same space.  I’ve seen a couple of other hornet nests in the fence but this one was a surprise for me.  Unfortunately it’s right next to the gate to the backyard and a safety concern, so I’ll have to spray this one.  I don’t mind coexisting with hornets but not when they endanger my family and guests.  They aren’t my favorite neighbors but they are a sign of a healthy ecosystem.  In a year when the bee population seems to be lower in my garden, I’ll take any positive I can find.

      That said, I view this entire incident as karma, as last night I finally got around to destroying a nest of yellow jackets in my grill.  They built a nest the size of a Nerf football right behind the propane tank.  That would qualify as unacceptable risk for me and anyone else that uses the grill or opens the cabinet door for the grill brush.  Nope, they had to go.  And karma came in the form of a sting this morning.  As I type this the sting still throbs a bit to remind me that it’s best to look carefully before grabbing hold of anything.  Another lesson from the garden…

    • Design Elements

      This morning our backyard is filled with bluebird song. There are 3 to 5 of them up in the trees, flying about and announcing to the world that this is an extraordinary morning. Other birds – cardinals, robins and the like, are playing the rhythm section in the background. Lead guitar is firmly with the bluebirds. And of course it’s by design – keep filling the feeder, put up the birdhouse and they reward you with song. The opposite is true as well. I stopped filling the other feeders in May and the cardinals, jays and finches have receded into the background. This immediately prompts thoughts of the Cherokee story about the two wolves for me (which wolf wins? The one you feed), but in a slightly different way.

      We all design our lives to attract what we desire into it. The work we do, the people we surround ourselves with, the habits we form, and the media we consume are all design elements that move us forward on the path or set us off course.  And design doesn’t equal results.  Sometimes the bluebirds fill the yard with song, sometimes the timing is off or they’re filling someone else’s yard.  My neighbor on the other side of the fence gets the same bluebird song without earning a bit of it (Then again he’s not outside to hear it anyway).  You keep doing the right things and eventually you build the life you’ve wanted for yourself.  And sometimes the rewards you’ve earned benefit others.  I planted daffodil bulbs on the corner of our street with the main street.  Those daffodils rewarded thousands of people driving by, though the majority of those people barely noticed them at all.  I build playlists and fill the house with music with the same intent, and perhaps the same result.  I’ve built an itinerary for Scotland in the fall that I’m especially excited about.  Hopefully the results surpass the design.

      I tend to fill social media with pictures of the kids, the garden, places I’ve travelled to and  generally the positive things about plodding through this life together.  Plenty of people use the same platform for negativity or to point out things they’re angry about, to cry for attention, or to somehow teach the rest of the world that they were right all along about something or other.  Who knows which of us is right, but I do know that’s not for me.  Whenever I post something I’m angry about I feel like I’ve taken a step back in my own development, so I try to filter it out before it lands.  Abraham Lincoln had a drawer full of angry letters to his generals and other people that he never sent.  I’m trying my best to use social media the same way.  What moves us all forward?

      My morning was filled with bluebirds and hummingbirds and the sound of thousands of drops of water hitting the ground as the tree leaves shake off the overnight rain in the breeze.  My evening will be filled with celebration and music and friendship.  In between I’ll so the work that must be done to enable all of that.  Yard work and cooking and building playlists and touching base with family and friends.  In general being actively engaged with life…  and the life you want.  You never know if the bluebirds will come, but you do what you can to attract them anyway.