Pouring Music From a Cup

“Trust the wait Embrace the uncertainty. Enjoy the beauty of becoming. When nothing is certain, anything is possible” A friend sent this to me recently. A few days later, another came. It was a beautiful photograph of a pink and lavender sunrise layered upon the rolling ocean, reminiscent of the glorious dawns I was privileged to see when I was a boy with my father camping and fishing on the barrier islands off the coast of Virginia. Written in black scroll across the waking sky:   What if I fall? Oh, but my dear, what if you fly? But I won’t fly. I never fly. Like Icarus, I yearn to fly; more times than I can count I have tried to fly. Yet, upon my memory, always the result has been disappointment and discouragement. Even when I felt I was destined- called -damn near dragged by caroling angels to the high alter to be anointed with glittering, gossamer wings, I have fallen. Fallen short. Fallen out of favor. Fallen in spirit.   Still, inspired by the s...

My younger son, who is not yet fourteen, is a walking encyclopedia of baseball knowledge. He idly watches Youtube videos of playoff games, World Series games, landmark games, championship games- you name it -into the wee hours of the night when he should be sleeping. During the baseball season he wears the rest of us out watching the MLB channel and will give up a steak dinner at Outback and a stop at Caravel Ice Cream if it means he'll miss the first three innings of a Rangers game.       Just for fun one day I asked him who won game three of the 1986 American League Championship Series, and he not only told me who won the game (I couldn't have even told you which two teams were in the series if you'd put a machete to my throat), he told me the starting pitchers, the game situation when the winning hit was struck, who made the hit, and where the ball was hit. Impressed but thinking he had just gotten lucky, I tried him again. Game four of the 1970 World Se...

I have always been restless. When I am Here , There looks better. When I am There , Somewhere Else calls my name. When I have This , I want That . When I look in the mirror or at photographs of myself, I am always disappointed. I remember the past and dream of the world and love and life as I wish they could be. I am a romantic and a spiritual sojourner, the lonely one in the corner in a crowded room. It is my great failing: I am a wanderer traveling west against the spin of a world that rotates east. Note to self:  She lived in Paradise, where the streets and stores and neighborhoods all looked the same. To a little girl with dark curly hair and crooked teeth, beauty was another girl, another place. She dreamed about the other side of childhood and pretended to be there. On the playground and in the classroom the kids teased her because they were not able to understand, because they couldn’t see beyond the day around them. Some of them sat with her at lunc...

          As far back as I can remember I have felt different from everyone else. I don’t mean to say I thought I was better than everyone else, only that I was destined for something out of the ordinary—some insight or experience or talent that would set me apart from the people around me. I saw things no one else saw, as if there were colors and textures to the air that were right there in plain view, but no one else could see them. Yet, there they were, as obvious as pillars holding up the ceiling. It could be something out among the stars, a feeling inside that we would, all of us, one day, get the chance to flit among the galaxies and know everything. Or it could have been the coarseness of Long John Silver’s beard—the exact length and glisten on each spiky hair of his cheek—as my classmates struggled to envision the basest details of Treasure Island. More often, it was an intuit, a sure knowing that someday I would set myself apart from everyone...

        From time to time when I was in junior and senior high school, we used to take interest surveys and aptitude tests, presumably to help us discover what we would likely be when we grew up. You know the kind I mean: a swollen packet of multiple answer statements and questions designed to help you uncover your hidden strengths and interests and, in turn, your true calling in life. The survey would ask you to answer Yes or No or require you to decide between Strongly Agree, Agree, Somewhat Agree , have No Opinion, Disagree, Somewhat Disagree , or Strongly Disagree with such penetrating queries as "Do you enjoy presenting yourself publicly, playing roles, showing off?" "I prefer to work with others," "Do you enjoy thinking up or seeking new solutions to problems?" "I prefer to follow guidelines precisely and meet strict standards of accuracy," "I like to write," and "I like to work with numbers." Many of the stat...

      Next month, after playing Sunderland, Manchester and the Isle of Wight, Bruce Springsteen heads for London, England, as his European "Wrecking Ball" tour continues. The show happens a week before the most aggressively corporate Olympics Games ever staged take place, and on the centenary of the birth of Woody Guthrie, the father of American folk protest.      Why is it always Springsteen, and at this level of stadium rock and record sales, only Springsteen, who expresses rage against the political sharks, investment vultures, and war hawks– those thieving, oil-stealing, money laundering, drug peddling, arms dealing, tax evading criminals —who have stolen the very hearts and futures of the middle class, Machiavelli-style, and aimed their poison-tipped arrows at the middle class workers themselves? Where are the singers and students who should be stirring the already muddy waters and agitating the weary masses to rail against the very inquisi...