What are the measurements of your life? Are they measured by progeny? Are they a measurement of style? Is the measurement the result of an intellectual contribution? Is happiness an indicator of your measurements? Is life to be measured at all? Where does one find the correct measuring stick?
Many turn to religion and philosophy when seeking feedback on their lives. Measuring is after all a form of feedback that is based on a widely accepted graph. The old workman’s saw is “measure twice and cut once.” I am searching for a method of measurement. I have little idea of what it will be.
I can eliminate some obvious candidates. Having never biologically fathered a child, I can remove that aspect of things. I have made attempts at being remembered, but if someone asked me why, I would be hard pressed to come up with an answer. I tell myself that art lives forever, but I think that is because I know that I will not. I am increasingly aware of my mortality and so I look for a way to measure my life.
How does one go about this task? Why is it undertaken? What satisfaction exists in the answers that you find? Does it change anything outside of your own perception of who you have been and who you are?
Perhaps your own perception is enough but it does not feel as if it will be enough for me. My writing is an exploration and I am looking for more. Jackson Browne wrote and sang, “I’m holding out my only candle but it’s so little light to find my way.”
I want to take measurement of my life and I don’t know how to do it. My wife says that this is because I am dense and I do not disagree, but even the dense need answers. When these answers are memories, one knows that you are close to living in a past tense.
The temptation is to list accomplishments. I was a teacher and I helped people. I think that I am quite proud of that. I am a good husband. I look for beauty in the world. I have learned to prefer gentle as opposed to harsh. It doesn’t feel like enough. I have poured my soul into my books and songs. It still does not feel like enough. One might ask if anything would feel like enough and I have no answer. I do not feel as if I have done enough.
I ask myself why I need to measure anything. Is it my sense of competition? I would be humiliated to think that is what it is. I know that what I seek is a deeper understanding. I do not know if it is there or if I have the ability to grasp it. My angels are older. Sometimes a new angel flashes her wings in front of my eyes, not unlike temptation. I know that my needs have changed. I have learned that time changes needs.
This process would have been called in the past “taking stock.” But I am unsure as to how to measure, how to count stock. And so I hold out my only candle.
Answers come in eye dropper portions. Preferring gentle to harsh is one. Maintaining gentle while others are drawn to harsh is an argument with my nature. I am only up to the challenge sometimes. One of my favorite words is sometimes, and now it seems to haunt me. Do the allure of previous passions haunt us with regularity? Does this regularity make them any more surmountable?
In his sermon, The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life, Martin King preached that the words given to a creed were far less important than the deeds that one accomplished in service of this creed. I don’t know how to measure the power of my deeds, if, in fact, they had any power at all.
How is power defined? How is it best used? What are the measuring sticks that I should use to guide me?
I have so many questions and so few answers. I guess that the answers that I do have will have to be sufficient. Still holding out a candle-

Lyrics of Living

Music was always a huge part of my life, but I thought that I would only be an appreciator. My Mom loved good, popular music. We listened to the hi-fi as much as we watched television. I grew up on Billie Holiday, Joe Williams, Tony Bennet, Frank Sinatra, Roberta Sherwood, Count Basie, and the magnificent Judy Garland, always my mom’s emotional favorite. Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald were a soundtrack of life for us. Perry Como and Bing Crosby as well, although then I did not understand that they were all crooners. I thought that word just meant singer. I did not understand that it referred to a particular type of singing.
The first time I heard my generation’s music was the Everly Brothers. My dad worked on juke boxes. When I went to work with him, my job was to slide the inserts inside the jacket that eventually appeared on the box and told you the name of the song and who was playing. I would earn copies and so I always had a prodigious collection of what was then called 45’s.
My Dad taught me about Harry James and Glenn Miller. The night that he married my mom, they went to see Harry James play. My Dad and mom were both credible dancers. My Dad had this fluidity of moving. It was like that in sports and games for him as well. Then he got this little organ. It taught you how to play in a simplified way and was a fad in the late 1950’s. Pretty much like everything else that required eye-hand coordination and rhythm, he was a natural at it.
I, of course, was clumsy. Making my fingers work in conjunction with my ears was a challenge. But I did have this history of passion for music. My Mom offered piano lessons. His name was Frankie Melton and he ran a music shop on Summer Avenue. He was very short. I did not know what the word dwarf meant in real life, only from cartoons and children’s books. But I suppose Mr. Melton was a dwarf.
He taught piano and while learning piano, he taught the student how to read music. I was very enthusiastic, but there was a problem. We could not afford a piano and I did not live with my father.
I tried finding a place to play, but there wasn’t one that I could afford. Once a week Frankie would let me practice on a piano in the back of his shop. I relished those times, but it wasn’t enough repetition for me to learn. Once I rolled out toilet paper and carefully painted in all the keys. My first usage caused irreparable rips. And so it was decided that I would get an accordion. We could afford that rental.
It was not a piano. I was an asthmatic child and the sound of the organ was similar to me to the sound of my wheezing. I hated it. I did learn to admire its durability. No matter how many times I accidentally dropped it or kicked it, the instrument was indestructible.
There followed brief encounters with a coronet, which was not the saxophone I wanted. It was advised that because of the asthma, that would not be a good idea. I played a recorder and then I quit. I was a listener.
There came the day that the music died. My mother married a man who considered all music noise and he liked quiet. The hi-fi was gone. There was no radio. The only music was the radio in the car and the music-hater controlled that as well: the day the music died. I became separated because of my love of music. It was no longer something that I heard around the house. The silence was oppresive.
Music was not noise. To even entertain that thought betrayed my mom and dad. Music was beautiful and inspirational and I felt robbed. The worst part was the feeling that there was nothing to be done about it.
Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and The Four Seasons changed that for me. Then there were The Beach Boys and The Beatles. I listened and because I had a foundation of allowing music into my heart, I felt. The feeling required a rejection of all that I knew about music. Big Band was slick and I wanted something else. Frank Sinatra was singing some “ring a ding” crap and I needed something else.
My dad teased me about Elvis and I felt stung. He told me that it was awful music. I rebelled and listened to it more. My mom would no longer talk about music and just said, “Joe doesn’t like it.” I hated him for not liking it.
The influence of music on my life is profound. It has shaped me in many ways. I wanted my writing to sound like jazz. I needed my prayers to sound like blues. I wanted my insights to sound like folk and, after Dylan, to sound like rock. Once I could drive, music was a constant companion again. It was a place where it was not noise. All those artists of my childhood were pushed away in favor of my youth. That was a mistake that many of us made.
Raw trumped style because of sincerity. Later, I found myself telling students that poetry was about your ability to use the language to express emotion, not about emotion itself. I didn’t feel that way about music then.
In 1966, Frank Sinatra released “It Was a Very Good Year.” The Loving Spoonfuls released “What a Day for a Daydream” and I loved them both. This strained at my sense of taste. How could I love them both? They represented such vastly different things and yet I sang the Sinatra song in my room and listened to John Sabastian in the locker room. It was a conflict of tradition and new experience that I settled decidedly in favor of new experience. I didn’t understand that my tradition would just take a back seat and wait. I did not know that tradition was ingrained in me.
I had two friends: Frank and Lanny. Frank gave me his Martin guitar to play and Lanny taught me about Lighten Hopkins and Phil Ochs, and so many others. I learned that music was message. And then there was Tom and Nancy.
She could play and to borrow from Jackson Browne, “that girl could sing.” Nancy gave me a guitar. It was a little warped but I loved it because she had given it to me. She had moved on to a new guitar and played in coffee houses and still wanted me as her lover. Oh that girl could sing. And she knew picking rhythms. I asked her to teach me “Don’t Think Twice, it’s Alright.”
The song was far too complex and she listened over and over as I slaughtered it. Finally, she asked that I never play it for her again. Undeterred, I kept on slamming it out without the correct rhythm and off key.
I’m not sure when I began to sing off-key. I don’t think that it happened until after I decided that vocals should include sincere passion. With emotion trumping style, I pressed on. When I was a very little boy, I sang for my school. It was a song that went, “There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy…” I was on kay then, but that was before the music died and before Elvis and before so much.
I had been led to believe that learning guitar came with blisters that would eventually become callouses. This isn’t quite true. It is difficult, at first, to press hard enough on the strings to get a clean note, but you can feel the note. It reverberates though your body and affects your voice. I could feel the notes. That changed everything. I could always listen but now I could feel the music. I had forgotten what it was like to feel a note. Then the memory rushed back in like an epiphany. It was something new that was not really new but that I had forgotten. Hands on keys and a chord that reverberated up, a rhythm that became part of you, joined with you and connected you to something greater. Writing can be like that too, but that came much later.
Right around the same time as Nancy, I met Tom. We sat in his room as he played his Fender Stratocaster acoustically. The soft riffs intoxicated me. He had the ability to become part of the song. I practiced harder on the old guitar that Nancy had given to me. I only knew chords and sometimes I didn’t know their names. I still don’t. I find configurations that feel right. I mostly do it by trial and error. This makes it hard for anyone else to play with me. Because it did not sound good at the start, I shied away from playing in front of other people.
The connective power of music is its language. Its levels of communication range from the intellectual to the basic instinctual rhythms that rarely use words to form meaning. Hearing and feeling are different. Music has little smell but does conjure aromas. It is elusive, here and then gone. Music is an angel with a temperament like angels have, here and then gone. The music can be summoned but not the accompanying angel.
I have been playing guitar on and off ever since. Sometimes I sit at a piano and those old memories come back dimly. I did learn to use the harmonica but not well. I never did master the single note technique. What I did find that I was pretty good at was music lyrics.
I would write them and then compose the music to match, but at that point my “music” did not have a life of its own. I played the guitar so that I would have something to do with my lyrics. About then, I became enamored with the music of Bob Dylan. My love for his music has endured. When I was a DJ at my local college, I once played Desolation Row three times in a row, but then someone came to the station and knocked on the door and asked me to please stop because it was depressing the hell out of everyone. I had difficulty understanding this but I did play another song. I think it was Mr. Tambourine Man.
It took me a while to like music that I hadn’t listened to often. There were exceptions like Simon and Garfunkel or Jackson Browne. When I first heard Bruce Springsteen, I labeled him a Dylan wanna be and dismissed him. Tom kept encouraging me to go back and listen again. During those years, Tom was responsible for introducing me to more music than anyone. We used to go to the City and hear concerts. The most memorable in retrospect was Elton John’s American debut. He opened for Leon Russell at the Fillmore East.

But I also got to hear John Mayall and Taj Mahal and groups that most people didn’t know about. In those days people openly smoked joints in the audience. Tom arranged to have a concert at our school which was a two year community college. I don’t really know how he did it but he managed to get Carlos Santana and BB King. BB was chosen to fulfill a dream of our friend Mario and his group the Psychotic Blues Band which actually got to open for BB.
That night at the Fillmore, we told Tom and Noreen that I had asked Nancy to marry me and that she had accepted my proposal. In those days, my friend Noreen found Nancy exotic. I found her warm and wonderful without having any idea of what it took to make a marriage work. We parted six months later.
In my mind, whenever I hear the phrase “that girl could sing,” it will always conjure an image of Nancy. Then I got lost and she went into news radio. That was how that song really ended. Even today we are distant friends and that feels so right, so good, so much like feint music.
So for all these years I have played and listened. I feel like a priest of music- a priest a long time in the ordaining. Sometimes I am very alone in my music. I know that I must have faith. I am not sure where my faith will lead.
About ten years ago, my wife gave me a great birthday present: a day in a recording studio. I played and sang and my music was recorded. I split the day into halves in order to get maximum impact. This resulted in the recording of six songs. They were songs that a person could listen to. They were songs that made me proud. Tom came and played on some of them. Then I played at a number of open mics.
The audiences were young but I seemed able to win them over. So, even though I am not playing right now, I view music as a performing and recorded art. I need to hear it on most days. The days when I do not are days not spent especially well.
I worship at the altar of music ever grateful. As Leonard Cohen wrote, “I’ll stand right here before the Lord of Song with nothing on my breath but Hallelujah.” I have nothing but praise for Gary Mielo who taught me about Jazz. I am eternally grateful to all those who have been gatekeepers and allowed me into the gardens of music.
Music is the language of my soul. I think Longfellow wrote something like that. There was a time when I could play, there is nothing more to ask for. I managed to touch music. What else is there to be had?
The Bill Evans recording of “Suicide is Painless” is part of my spirit. “Sketches of Spain” joins it, sometimes. I sometimes hear the songs that I wrote but it never feels right to share them.
The most popular of my songs is called “My New Sneakers” It makes people feel good to hear it. I wrote it with Tom about his daughter KT. She was just a very little girl, four or five. She got this new pair of sneakers and her mom brought her home and deposited her in those sneakers. They were Fire Engine Red. Tom composed the music and I worked the words.
I have been told that children with reading difficulties sing this song with ease, and they smile as they do. I feel humbled by this. I created a combination of words that went with Tom’s music and that brought joy and a fluid sense of things to other people. In my heart I know that this is what makes me an artist, a musician. I feel blessed by the Lord of Song.
Discovering a seminal chord is like finding a world. My first was to slide the A-minor down to the 5th and 6th fret. No one has told me what this chord is but I know that it rings true. It sings of beauty and promise. It can be tinged with hope and sadness. It is a versatile chord.
It occurs to me that I know people very much in the same way that I know music. I consider myself a lunatic who has somehow managed to evade detection. I have been conditioned to believe that anyone who puts up with my lunacy gets carte blanche. We just have these configurations between us. They are like the chords whose names I don’t know.
I love music but sometimes I don’t know how it works. I love people very much in the same way. Some of them become resonant chords that stay with me for a lifetime. Some wander off to the allure of better melodies.
Music is intertwined with people for me. It is that most rare form of communication shared by feelings. It is one of the reasons that I maintain a belief in the eternal possibility.
I enjoy playing for people now. They no longer flee the discordant din. I adore the gifts of music and those who have given them to me. My Martin guitar is in the basement. I’m not playing these days. If I could pray, one prayer would be that playing music would come back to me. But each day I listen.

.

Settling in and dental work are similar. Things get changed. Areas of weakness are bolstered. It creates a temporary mess. The work that you knew, or should have known, needed to be done has stepped front and center. No longer a choice: there are fractures that need fixing, there is infection that needs to be rooted out. You want to make your new home right. At the same time, you know that your mouth must be made right as well.
So, you make appointments and order replacement parts. You make decisions about the ordering of the process. But the reality sits there, in your mouth and all around you. And then you wait. These things do not happen on your schedule and this is quickly made evident. Perhaps you have developed fungus that needs remediation, but the workman says that it will be 17 days before he can get there. He comes highly recommended and getting rid of the fungus is a priority and so you wait. One day you feel a crack when you bite down on something as innocuous as bread. When you call for a dentist appointment, you are told that the dentist has his own life and can see you in a week. And so you wait.
One strategy is to try to make the wait time productive, but this must be done without infringing on the work that is upcoming. So you try to order replacement parts that you will need after your structure has been bolstered. You try to avoid doing further damage to yourself and change your diet. Thoughts occur: perhaps it is better to do nothing at all, perhaps you should allow yourself to just live as you have been living and then deal with the consequences. The temptation to do this or not do this is almost equally great. How does one spend the waiting time?

I tried working as far away from the infected areas as I could. I tried maintaining a positive attitude about my mouth. Perhaps it all just required a little bit of cementing. Even though you know this is not the case, you tell yourself that as you wait.

My visits to the dentist are hardly ordinary. I drive to the heart of the inner city where Michael and I were both raised. He’s given more back that I have. He established his practice in a warzone and yet he did good for the people there.
“Kenny, how the fuck are you? You crazy lunatic, look at you!”
“My mouth hurts, Michael. I don’t know why only where.”
“Let’s take a look.”
I came to him thirty-five years ago and was terrified because dentists had always hurt me. Michael changed all that. He grew trust between us. We shared history, which was Newark. Michael brought me back to Newark every time. He did things that other dentists did not understand, and so I always came back to Michael.
I writhed in the seat of this man who never hurt me and was for decades was loathe to hurt anyone. “I can’t do this to you anymore. I can make the pain stop for a while but you need a specialist who does nothing but root canals. My hands are arthritic, I don’t have the strength.”
It hurt so much but the idea of anyone else working on my teeth was terrifying. I listened quietly as he outlined my options. “It used to be that I had to assign five percent of root canals to specialists, now its thirty percent. My hands aren’t strong enough. I can recommend a specialist.”
The specialist was a disaster. I had never worn a dental block in my life and found it difficult bear not swallowing and so each time he took his instruments out of my mouth, I managed a painful swallow. Two visits of ninety minutes each. The tooth looks beautiful and that was this dentist’s only concern. It ached for a week and then it passed from my attention.
Aches that pass away and leave us improved are parts of the bargain of aging. I should have said before, settling in is a product of ageing as is dental work. I am learning to accept limitations in the name of their common sense and because my uncommon sense no longer seems to be effective although I have a quiet prayer that I will investigate it again.
Curved thermo-plated glass is incredibly expensive and we needed a lot of it. There had been mold and leakage and I wondered if it was best to repair mold and leakage of the spirit in the same way that you try to revive a room. I have often seen rooms as entities.
But sometimes I get these visions of how a room would thrive and blossom and I feel it so strongly with this sun room. My plants are so healthy here and are displaying wonderfully colored hibiscus flowers, seven or eight a day. I see the graduations of light and how it will give variety to different flora. I hear the music of the room and I am settling in.
At the next visit with Michael, he told me that I had multiple fractures that would eventually need to come out. One was critical, but Michael was retiring, he has personal health issues and has been doing this long enough. I said, “Who does your teeth?” And he sent me to his nephew.
He looks like Michael. He was gentle like Michael. He was casual. He was proficient. I felt at home. It is a form of settling into change. And so an instinctual bond of trust occurred. The extraction wasn’t easy. It never is with a fractured tooth. And because it was an eye tooth, the root was very deep. It would take months for the bone to heal and resettle.
Settling in puts new stressors on things that may have grown accustomed to being used sparingly. The seal on a toilet begins to leak because its frequency of use increases. A sliding glass door becomes unhinged. Pumps and pipes, circuits and nerves-
The first week after the extraction was sore. Then it became sore to the touch. I wondered why I needed to keep touching it when I knew that it was still sore. The temporary seemed slightly unstable. The soreness extended almost up to my nose.
I longed to have city water and city sewers again. We’ve lived with a private well and septic tank for two decades, and it was always an underlying concern. My first water bill was $535.00. I stared in total disbelief. I called the city offices confident that they would be in error. They were not.
The first question that the clerk asked was “Do you have any toilets that have been sticking and just seem to keep running until you jiggle the latch?” I said yes. She said, “That’s costs you one gallon a minute. That is why your bill is so high.” Settling in comes as an educating process. There are many surprises that delight during settling in, but this wasn’t one.
I am counting the days until the temporary bridge is removed. My new dentist told me that he’d used permanent cement and that the bridge would have to be chipped away. The next temporary replacement will be more fragile, but that will only be for two weeks.
It is not unlike having back ordered glass. Weeks that you do not understand the need for pass. You both long for and dread the ensuing confusion that will predate the permanent fix. This is very much like settling in.
Doubts are engendered. Is this the way that it will always be? Is improvement no longer really possible? Has it come down to trying to maintain and finding that is no easy effort?
Only some of our rooms feel settled and that is always subject to change. If the change is viewed in a negative context, it will cause more damage than if it is not. Some are decidedly unsettled and await those final adjustments that make settling possible.
Will the permanent bridge be stable? When will the other extractions come? Will I have the strength to persevere or will I just give up? Doubts are nagging questions after all.
I now meet young men much stronger than myself. I know that I can’t keep up. This is a troubling aspect of settling in. To what are you settling in? How do you now measure progress?
Resources alleviate concern. Knowing that you have the means to replenish your expenditures makes things easier, but not without concern. How many more shocks before your mouth truly crumbles? How many more debts before you exhaust your reserves? One comforts oneself with math. Arithmetic is not emotional; only its response to it can be that way.
Settling in and dental work, maybe always ongoing. Tom Petty sings that “the waiting is the hardest part.” It leads me to believe that he has dealt with contractors. They are temporary and unreliable kind of friends, pseudo friends I guess. It’s worse if you or your spouse is related to them. There is the expectation of preferential treatment and the disappointment when it does not exist. The waiting tests your patience and frustration levels.
Eventually, I’m learning that settling in and dental work are similar. They are in need of husbandry. Today I sat in the solarium and listened to rain on glass. I saw the copper top bar that I have been refinishing. My little family is intrigued by this place. There will be more dental work but not until next week. Settling in and dental work, ongoing.

Moving

Why do we move? Perhaps by investigating the process, we will learn about the nature of moving. Climate causes a need for movement. Things dry up or move away. Sometimes movement is a form of tracking; pursuit in the form of a quest. We move towards comfort and beauty, but beauty is changeable and comfort has an appetite and so maybe moving follows a flickering compass.
After striving towards a regular and somewhat ritualistic way of life, I now need to move. The act of embracing change is harder when you are comfortable. Days drift into one after another and seasons change and yet you remain resolved and stable, but then you aren’t. I think that it is called a tipping point. You realize that your grasp is untenable and envision a future laced with dismay. So, you decide to move.
Maybe the catalyst is a whim that carries you like a current. Maybe the allure of floating downstream becomes an overwhelming desire. Sometimes it is just inevitable. You’ve known for a while that it was in your future and then all of a sudden, your future is now.
Logistics can grow complicated. What was here before can affect what is here next. Something buried that you never really knew about or something hidden away in some attic wall- Those things that you have ignored reappear.
One tries to tidy up the present but who knows what about history needs cleaning? History plays more of a role in moving than one ever imagines. Sometimes trees are to be envied. They refuse to move. Part of me wants to be a tree.
What happens if you love a place and it loves you back? Can it manipulate you into not leaving? I think that my home may be doing that. I think my place wants me to stay. There are relationships here that are evidence of the existence of magic. Fate may very well be a form of magic and one of the elements of moving. It may be easier to detach to a future than it is from a past.
The decision to move had been urged for years but it was finally mine. Activities that once brought me joy were being contracted out, paid for. I used to mow my lawns and walk my property with a feeling of self-discovery. For a while now I have paid a man to come and ride over my lawns and keep them in shape. I parse out work that I once did amid a sense of triumph, but is now a painful effort.
I miss the crevices and dips that I learned from mowing. My home always surprised me. There was new growth and here was something I thought gone but come back in some other form, maybe even something new created from something that was. The outcroppings of rocks were like emerging ideas. I paid them respect once they gained notice. They were like something pushing up through the ground. They seemed like life.
I have such warm memories of mowing, walking my gardens and cutting the grass with Keats resetting to guide each new pass of the mower, back the perfect distance each time. Our eyes meeting with love as I passed, both of us eager and faithful. And I would complete the pass and he would move back the perfect amount for the next pass. I gained strength and gloried in those moments. But now it is kind of a ghost. Perhaps that is one more testimonial in favor of moving. My wonderful dog Keats is only with me in spirit as I move from the only home that he evert knew. Perhaps where is less important than if. Perhaps that is just the order of things.
Regulations create roadblocks. A roof that has never leaked but is about to leak- A septic system that has never been a problem but is about to be a problem- A well that is deep and wonderful, but no longer meets code- These are things that urge you to both stay and go. I want to fix my home but not be buried in the repair. I need to leave my home but want as small a part of me ripped away as possible. Moving from something that you love is not a joyful act.
And then the very effort may weigh on you, the mover. Perhaps your back gives out or your knees crumble and you can’t manage what you have planned. Perhaps you wonder if you should even try. Are relationships with people that different from relationships with places?
In your memory, the place remains and so does the person, but is either true? Does anything truly remain or is it all just memory? Is memory a place to remain?
I look out my windows each day as if I will never see that way again. I think that this is an accurate view. The sadness is overwhelmed by the joy memory delivers. Perhaps these memories mean that I am not as obsessed with a future as I once was. Perhaps that seems unhealthy, but it is true.
This was real. This was true. We were real inside of it but it may have had its time and ties. This may be the way of life.
What do we leave when we move and what do we carry with us to the new place? We don’t always leave what we expect to leave or carry with us what we need to move on. It’s a hit or miss game. We are blindfolded and tempted to throw darts. Sometimes the temptation comes from the place itself. Sometimes it is only us.
Bob Dylan wrote: “I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand”

So, it turns out that my roof that has never leaked, needs to be replaced. Ok, I contribute half and the buyers do as well. Then, it turns out that my septic system does not meet code. Ok, that costs twenty thousand dollars and I am convinced that if I say that I won’t fix it that they will pull out. That’s what I say. “I won’t fix it.” The buyers say, “OK, we still want the house. We’ll do the repairs.” I’m flabbergasted and impressed. I mean what can you say to that? And so I am moving, we are moving.

The question becomes where you will make a new home and why you have selected that place and how much influence the pressure that you are now moving has exerted upon your choice. There are time constraints. They exist everywhere. They are one of the causes of moving.

There was this house owned by a gentle but sad woman. Something had been taken away from her and left her damaged. She needed to leave a place that she had once loved but could no longer love. It had become a place that pointed out her shortcomings and they increased her damage. She had been trying to move for a year and had been unable to do it.

Some transactions are deemed “short sales,” which is a way to avoid bankruptcy and still sell a place when the selling price is less than the mortgage. In this case the bank has to agree and, as is their process, agreement is an arduous task that proceeds on their timetable.

We loved the potential of this new house and made an offer. The bank did not respond. We waited and then we bolted. We found another house and came to an agreement, but inspection revealed that there was asbestos and some structural weaknesses. These were chilling discoveries and we pulled out. We looked at other places but one day our agent said that we might wish to go back to look at the sad woman’s home and we did.

And so we renewed our offer. We’d first gone there in December. It snowed the night before and the woman, who had shoveled and salted the driveway, led us into a tile floor entry that stretched back to a solarium. Off to the right, through a nicely crafted wooden and glass door, was a pretty standard ranch with a finished basement and a hardwood attic. It had a ring of beauty to it. It was so very different from where we had come that comparisons would not be likely or natural.

Timing was critical. We had sold our home. They gave us a check. We were given 30 days to leave and halfway through that time, we had not secured a new destination. Where do you put your things? What does it cost you to be without them? What does it cost them to be without you?

Do you resign yourself to the death of the two hibiscus that you have lived with for the last seven years? How would you kill them? Would it be neglect or cold or a combination of that coupled with deprivation of light and water? Perhaps the new owners would take them in as orphans. Perhaps you could put things in storage and have a shot term rental. Perhaps you could rent a room in a pets friendly motel. These things can occupy your mind and there is an endless procession of them when you are moving. It makes me marvel at the nomads who were always on the move.

I’m glad that I am moving before my gardens start to come up. They need to seduce someone else into tending and shaping them.

My new solarium will need repair. A sixty foot almost dead maple tree must come down without crushing my house or the large above ground pool that sits in the back year. Mold must be remediated. Electricity must be repaired and I am feeling strangely at home with all of it.
Moving day is an event. You prepare for it and when you have a large amount of things, you designate what you will have moved and what you will move yourself.
Most of our furniture are older pieces that I have refinished. They are heavy mahogany or ash or maple or oak. We are told that we may leave soft objects in the drawers. I wonder about what constitutes a soft object. Is it merely a matter of weight and density?
We wrapped some of our art in bubble-plastic and blankets. We held it all together with a thick, highly adhesive, clear tape. The largest pieces were crated and insured. The movers hit a stride that would last for almost ten hours. They wrapped, they lifted and carried. It was a normal day for them. There was a hierarchy on their team of three. It was a respectful organization of labor. They relied on my direction, not from any sense of expertise but because I was the customer. They were like guides who would take me wherever I wished to go. They were basically indifferent to my choices as long as they did not inhibit their task.
That first night there were boxes everywhere. There was a bed set up and there was a kitchen table. Nothing else was working yet. Val and I considered pulling out for the night. Stella was staying with our daughter, it would not have been hard. We got as far as the driveway, and then it felt as if we were rejecting our first world problem in favor of convenience. We went back inside and just talked until we fell asleep.
The next day we felt closer to our new home. The next day we felt closer. It’s going like that. There are expenses and inconveniences but they come with a promise of something new. Don’t they always?
There was this maple tree in the backyard. It was dying and mostly dead. It was sixty feet tall and would fall on us when it came down, maybe in a year and maybe in ten and maybe next week. It pained me to see it that way and so we took it down.
The tree was rooted in a place where a house and a fence and an above ground pool had sprouted up around it. The challenge was to bring it down without damage. They were a team of five. They were all from Peru. They worked with one man aloft with spikes on his feet and a chain saw. The men on the ground used pulleys on ropes and then the carted the felled branches to a wood chipper. They worked flawlessly. I sat in the solarium and watched and felt like I was becoming more a part of my new home. Was this addition by subtraction?

During the move, I lost all of my rings. There were four that I chiefly loved. A wedding band, that Val and I had created, a ring in the design of a yin yang symbol that was made from melted gold and saved diamonds from people long gone but part of my heritage. A chessboard ring that Val gave me one year and the silver ring that my daughter gave to me on the day that I adopted her. They were gone. They were not to be found.
At first I was told not to worry, they would turn up. After a couple more days, suspicion was raised about the movers. I called the company and made sure that I was just saying that I did not have them and that maybe they had slipped out of some box somewhere. They were sympathetic but could not help.
At night I dreamt about the days when I received them. The memories were vivid. My friend Tom had been telling me that we cannot be owned by our possessions and I came to a sad acceptance that he was correct. Maybe it was my old home claiming a part of me. Maybe it was my carelessness for not having hand carried them. I was saddened but age has taught me about the price of moving. I mocked myself thinking that at least I didn’t have to decide to whom I wished to bequeath them.
One day they were just there in a little box which was so unassuming that no one bothered to open it. I made the joyful calls to the movers. I held Valerie tight. There was a price to pay for moving but at least it wasn’t a hurtful toll. Maybe the rings were deciding whether or not to come back. Maybe I needed to reconsider their value to me, just as I had been foolish enough to think of any place as mine.
Last Sunday we went back to our old home, now empty and being prepared for new partners. There was a silence between us, like lovers who had decided to move on.

What happens to a person of faith who can no longer pray? Does it relegate those innermost desires to hopes and wishes? Is that truly a relegation?
I desire so many things but I cannot pray for them. It is like prayer has disappeared from my active vocabulary, no longer in my lexicon. But what replaces it?
I think that a while back, I traded in religion for art. My faith shifted. My mythology was altered. There was as much loss as there was empowerment.
Perhaps prayers should be sung out like hopes into the night. Perhaps they might attract the attention of some natural or unnatural force. Maybe I am just feeling bad that Leonard Cohen has died. His songs were prayers. Were they prayers that could be answered? Are mine? For what do I pray? When I say pray, do I really mean beg?
There are prayers that do not beg. Some implore and some offer bargains. Some make threats and some make promises. How strange to do that silently and internally. It is a bargain that only you know that you’ve made, just you and the eternal whatever that may or may not exist and may or may not care.
Prayer is a choice to believe. Pure prayer is not an obligation but I am not sure what it is. Part of me wants prayer to have power, like those studies that say that people who are prayed for do remarkably better, but how do we know that the others were not prayed for? More privately…In my understanding of prayer, public prayer should not have more power, which means more preferential treatment than private prayer does.
Some may say that the more prayer the more power, but I do not see the advantage in numbers. Prayer is not an election. Prayer must be, if it is at all, a deep expression of a sincerity that is as pure as the person praying can possibly manage, and then some. Prayer must elevate.

What is the difference between prayer and good thoughts? Does the invocation of some superior being have more of an effect than the general well wishes that can emanate from a human being, or perhaps another creature?

The whole idea of some divine being is suspect, but perhaps that belief is not essential to prayer. What is it about me that wants to pray? Is it simply a need to not feel as helpless as a situation might leave you feeling? Perhaps the role of prayer is to combat despair.
There were the prayers of my youth. The Lord’s Prayer is one. The Hail Mary never did it for me. The 23rd Psalm was and can still be like a prayer. When the burden of creating the words is lifted, perhaps the people who are praying are more able to let their spirits soar and become active. Perhaps we just mumble old strings of words.
Suppose prayer an incantation that elicits an almost involuntary response, “and also with you.”
The incantation of prayer seldom works with me these days. I am not sure if it is just less than I can do or a weaker version of the incantation. I’m not even sure if that matters.
The strength of prayer lives on shifting sands, if your mind stays active. One struggles to stand and prays to fly. Is it a struggle without benefit?
There are differences between silent and vocalized prayer that I am not sure about. Silence includes a reverence but the spoken word contains power. Is that what prayer is, a balance between reverence and power?
I have seen written prayers slid between the rocks of a sacred wall. Photography isn’t allowed. Perhaps the signals of prayers should not be captured.
Can a burning candle extend the life of a prayer? Is it the nature of a prayer to wish its life extended? If prayer is a message, after it has been delivered: mission complete. Is that the nature of prayer? But if prayer is a plea? In the words of Bonnie Raitt:
And if I could pray, my prayer would never end
But if you want me to beg, I’ll fall down on my knees
Asking for you to come back, I’d be pleading for you to come back
Begging for you to come back to me
In this case a candle may have power and reverence.
Prayers can bring comfort. My wife prays to deceased relatives in times of opportunity and tragedy. She prays for intercession into the affairs of this world. She trusts the spirit of those to whom she prays. I just get sad if I think of those who are no longer here at these times and wish that they were. There is a fundamental difference. You can wish for things that are impossible, but can you pray for them? I find it difficult to accept that departed spirits have not truly departed. Does that mean that there is nowhere else to go?
Some prayers are unanswered, is it because of their nature, or is it just biology? That would mean that prayers that are not good for us, or are maybe just out of their time, aren’t answered. I wonder if I have been a prayer out of time? Am I out of time or as Bonnie would sing, “scared to run out of time.” Do prayers have fears? Are they themselves alive?

Sometimes I feel like an unanswered prayer. But I think that the lack of answer is really my responsibility. I cannot be impossible and expect to be answered. On the perimeters of prayer, we find their nature in their limitations. At least it seems that way. If prayers are truly miracles then I am mistaken.