Feel Good Friday: Let’s Jam

This is probably the most popular banjo song ever recorded.

There are quite a few legends of many fields in this one.  A fun way to pass the time is to try to list the Nashville (and other) royalty in the video.

You. Yes, You

I was born and raised in Nashville, TN.

My mother was raised in Bellevue when it was still rural, and my father grew up in The Nations.

My grandfather moved here from Missouri via Alabama, where he had been a sharecropper. My grandmother adopted Nashville as her home soon after having my father.

My other set of grandparents were born and raised here.

All of my grandparents were dirt poor but devout in their love of God. They took seriously their call to help their fellow man. There is so much about them you do not know.

My dear, sweet wife was raised in the house where I now sit.

Every one of them were (and are) dear souls, who would give you the shirt off their backs if you needed it. To this day, people stop us on the street, literally in tears, thanking my wife for her gentle, loving care of their loved one at the end of their life.

They weren’t and aren’t perfect, but they were nothing like you are describing.

When you say, “Southerners are this, and southerners are that”, especially when you flat out say “southerners are not nice”, you are attacking my family.

Now, I probably deserve it. I have a tendency to be a jackass. But, I promise you, my jackassery has come about in spite of my upbringing, not because of it.

When your broad brush hits my mother, or my wife, we have a quarrel.

I’m asking you nicely to please stop.

Important (Conclusion)

Remember this scene from City Slickers?

 

It endures because it is funny.  When we are young, we laugh at the absurdity of this speech being given to a group of little kids.  When we are older, we nervously, knowingly laugh at what we know all too well to be true.

It’s not the greatest movie ever made about a mid-life crisis (that distinction belongs to The Incredibles), but it is a very good one.  IMHO, Curly’s “One thing” soliloquy is not too far from the truth.

We must view this crazy period in life as comedy, otherwise the themes would be too harsh to bear.  I’ll never forget late one night in the 70’s hearing Kansas’ Dust in the Wind on the radio.  As the guitar faded and Steve Walsh vamped, the DJ’s first words were, “Hey, dudes, lighten up!”

We are all that way.  We’d rather not face the fact that, without some kind of transcendence, the life that we were so in love with in our youth – is meaningless.

Every person has to face this fact when he gets about my age.  I am absolutely convinced that King Solomon was having a mid-life crisis when he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes.

I absolutely LOVE this book.  It speaks to me, at this point in my life, like no other. Yet, it is probably the most passed-over book in the Bible.  On its surface, it’s incredibly depressing (like Billy Crystal’s speech).  Except for a hippy-trippy song by The Byrds, the book remains mostly ignored, even in sermons.  Christians and Jews would much rather present a positive view of life – the kinds found in other portions of the Torah and the Bible.

Yet, I love it for two reasons: it provides a backdrop for our happy ending that appears later, and it holds up a harsh mirror to the belief of people who say that this world and these lives are all there is. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, the youthful, vibrant picture of life they try to sell us is revealed as a lie.  Any meaning they try to assign to this life is revealed as bull.

Solomon helped us get to the point where we could find what’s really important by stripping away what is not important.  The world introduces a lot of noise that must be filtered out before we can get to the truth.

Riches?  Solomon was rich beyond measure, yet when he surveyed it all, he deemed it meaningless.  It could not fill the hole in his heart.  He knew that he would leave it all here when he died, and in the end, it would all be for nothing.  I discovered the same thing.

Pleasure?  Solomon was king – his will was the law of the land. He could do anything he wanted, take anyone he wanted, deny himself nothing.  During a period of his life (probably his young adulthood), he filled his days with the pursuit of pleasure.  He found that it was good at the time, but always left him feeling empty, needing the next fix.  It gave him nothing tangible and of lasting worth.  I discovered the same thing.

Wisdom? Solomon was wiser than any man who had come before.  Yet, although his wisdom mostly prevented him from doing stupid or evil things, it did nothing to change the hearts of his subjects.  They still murdered and stole and lied – he could not “outsmart” it.  He could not fix the world’s woes through education and “awareness”.  Even HE continued to mess up from time to time.  AND – his wisdom showed him the truth: the grave awaits the wise and the ignorant.  Wisdom is nice to have, but it will not save us, nor will it give our lives meaning.  I discovered the same thing.

But there is another theme throughout the book: there is nothing new under the sun.  This view is only possible if we take a step back from our busy lives and take the “longer” view.  If we see the entire sweep of history, even eternity, and if we take out the particular, we can see that the same things happen over and over again, generation to generation.

We usually do not see this, because we are able to convince ourselves that our present concerns are unique and of extreme importance.  If we take a “long” view, we realize how silly we were to get all worked up over things that didn’t really matter in the long run. 

Every generation acts as if it is the first to discover that war is bad and sex is pleasurable.  This tickles me.

It also tickles me how, throughout history, mankind has convinced himself that he has evolved from his savage, ignorant beginnings.

Have you ever considered our behavior concerning global warming? (This is NOT a scientific criticism, I leave that to smarter people than me.  I’m more interested in people’s behavior).  Let’s be clear: it gets hot in the summer.  Tornadoes happen in the spring.  Hurricanes have been plaguing the seas in the late summer since the dawn of time.  Some areas flood, some have drought.

Yet, we are convinced that we are unique, that our times are unique.  We take our secular sages’ and prophets’ word for it and so easily embrace the concept that weather that has been happening since the dawn of time is happening because we have done something wrong and made the mountain god angry.  Oh, we are too sophisticated to call the great force of vengeance we worship a ‘god’, but sociologically, our language and behavior are no different than the ’savages” who quake at the rain and make sacrifices to appease their angry god.

There is a freedom, a kind of peace, in stepping out of the temporal and seeing the longer view.  It allows you to clear the noise and get to what really is important.  You notice things.

When we started this journey, I highlighted the critical issues of our time, and why the 2008 election is the most important election in my lifetime.  Read them again and ponder them, for they are of extreme importance to us all.  As we are reminded often, history will judge us, and our children will never forgive us if we choose unwisely.

The only problem is, those issues aren’t from today, they are from 1972.

Read them again. There is, it would seem, nothing new under the sun.

And, let me tell you, when I think of my father and his advancing years, when I try to earn the right to tell the story of his life, I couldn’t care less how my father voted in the “overwhelmingly important” election of 1972.  I try, but I just don’t care if he voted for Nixon or McGovern.  It really doesn’t matter to me as his son.  It’s just not something I think about.

I think about how he manned up when he became a young father.
I think of how he loved his wife with the intensity of one whose life depends on it.
I think of how he loved John Denver, and the Eagles, and Jim Croce.
I think of how he once literally ran into a burning building to save my brother.
I think of how he never gave up on me, even though I was very strange and hard to love.
I think of how he never quit on life, even though life threw more at him than most people can bear.
I think of how he loved nature (especially the beach), and could never be at peace until he was out of the city.

I remember autumn cookouts and summer trips to the mountains or the beach.  I remember ALL the sporting events he went to, no matter how tired he was.  I remember a love for fried eggs over medium and chocolate covered cherries. I remember how he has never been above a little silliness every now and then.

There is so much more, and my fervent prayer is that we will still have lots more time, and hopefully we will get have enough talks so I can fill in the blanks of his story. 

I might even get around to asking him how he voted in 1972.

In City Slickers, Curly tells Mitch that the secret to life is finding that “one thing” that will make your life meaningful.  I have found it, and that allows me to laugh at the truthfulness in Ecclesiastes without despair.  I’ve made no secret what my one thing is, but that’s a conversation for another time.

But I’d like you to think about what is important, and what is not.  What will your loved ones (and others) think about as you pass to eternity? 

Find that, and hold it like a precious jewel.

Thank you for indulging me in this conversation.

Important (Part 6)

Anyone who has read this blog or my comments anywhere knows that I am absolutely schizophrenic when it comes to wisdom and knowledge.  I have quite the love/hate relationship with the concept of knowledge and education, for its own sake.

One moment I come across as an pompous, know-it-all blowhard.  The next, I’m all Will Rogers, spouting anti-intellectual populism.

But, hey, we don’t all come out of the womb in the form we are now.  Many things have contributed to this strange personality quirk of mine.

Always, always in the back of my mind is the mindset of someone raised in a blue collar family.  I will always have a part of my mind that takes a utilitarian view of education.  One goes to school to learn skills that are applicable for a specific career, along with a few other life skills.  Anything else is just wasting time, the sort of thing rich folks do to keep from getting bored.

The funny thing is, any close examination of Maslow’s hierarchy will tell you that my dad wasn’t too far off from the truth.  I seriously doubt my sharecropper grandfather had too much time or inclination to devote to pondering Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of existentialism.

Yet, once I entered my teen years, I discovered that not only was knowledge for its own sake fun, but that I had inherited my mother’s gift of being an effective communicator.  People were drawn to what I had to say – and I really loved the feeling of that.

So, I became an “intellectual”, as I understood it at the time.  I purged my southern accent.  I joined the forensics and debate teams.  I read all the great works of literature, kept up feverishly with current events, delved into intense study of the Laws of Logic and the great philosophers.  I never allowed myself to lose an intellectual argument (and this was years before the internet!)

I was, in retrospect, an insufferable little snot.  It’s a wonder my dad did not drop kick me across the living room when I would start pontificating at him like I was God’s gift to knowledge.  He let me know one time that he didn’t appreciate my talking down to him; the funny thing is, I had no idea I was doing it.  It was then that I decided to pull back, and attempt to put knowledge and intellect at the proper place in my life. 

I’m still working to find that perfect balance.

Now that I’m getting older “wisdom” has become more important to me than “knowledge”.  I think that any person over 35 has an innate desire to be seen as wise. (Just as any person under 35 – and beyond – has an innate desire to be considered “attractive”).  An I’m not alone.  Read any blog of a person around or above my age; the tone is that of a wise sage pontificating.  It doesn’t matter the subject or the political bent.  We oldsters flash our nuggets of wisdom as wantonly as drunk coeds flash their breasts at Mardi Gras.  And for the same reason. 

My religion places an utmost importance on study.  Without getting into any debates about sola scriptura, let’s just say that my particular flavor of Christianity has as a fundamental tenet that belief HAS to be informed by study of scripture or it is the blind belief that nonbelievers love to caricature.  We have to know what we believe, and why we believe it.

It amazes me how many people who profess belief in Jesus Christ have very little idea what’s in the Bible.  It also amazes me how dirt poor, uneducated people can possess masters-level knowledge in soteriology, biblical exegesis, eschatology, and other high-minded concepts.

Now that I’m a parent, my relationship with knowledge seems to have come full circle.  We have ordered our household so that learning is just something we do every day.  Instead of Nick and MTV, Discovery and the History Channel rule at our house.  We make regular trips to museums (science and art), and it seems like we are constantly looking stuff up on the internet. (This usually starts with “Dad, why is it that..?” or “Dad, where do xxx come from?” – search engines are really overworked at our house)

Most importantly, Lintilla and I view ourselves as our kids’ primary educators.  Their teachers are subcontractors, but we will always be the primary contractors.  So, our kids take the absolute opposite view of education than I did at their age.  Education is not a means to a career, per se, it’s just something that we do.

But, I also want to pass along a sense of perspective to the children.  Knowledge is AN important thing, but it’s not THE important thing.  Education does not make the heart of man any less evil.  For all our advances in science, technology, and “awareness”, mankind still treats itself pretty much the way it did 3000 years ago or more.  In fact, one must always be careful to weigh an intellectual concept against existing moral concepts.  As Vicktor Frankl (psychiatrist and holocaust survivor) once said:

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone. I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment–or, as the Nazi liked to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

This is not to say, obviously, that I think that education makes one evil.  I believe that evil is a subtext of human existence.  It is within us all, and we can’t educate ourselves out of it.

Feel Good Friday – Shake it!

You can’t watch this and not smile.   How I would love to head on down to Ray’s Music Emporium right now!