Little Bit Of The Past

Yesterday I was all sorts of behind. I woke late. It had snowed. I needed to shave, shower, write Morning Pages, dress, shovel, pack lunch, eat breakfast, and get to work. No way could I get it all done and still drive my daughter to school and myself to work on time. Damn it.

My wife rescued me by taking our daughter to school. I paused Morning Pages halfway and shoveled the snow, shaved, showered, threw some lunch together, ate a bit of toast, and walked to work. Fifteen minutes early, I finished the last Morning Page and a half. No harm, no foul, but I knew I had to get up earlier, if for no other reason, then to feel better.

Last night, after Syracuse Women's Basketball in the Dome, we returned home to an inch or snow of new snow. Despite the late hour, I shoveled to save having so much snow in the morning. I considered shaving and showering to get them out of the way, but my daughter was in the shower and I was too tired.

This morning, after a couple snoozes, I got up earlier. I wrote all three Morning Pages, shoveled off a dusting on the driveway and sidewalk, shaved and showered, dressed for work, made lunch and toasted bread. By seven I was ready, but my daughter doesn't need to go until 7:30. Which sent me back to a little bit of the past.

I'm typing in the living room while side three of Genesis' Seconds Out spins on the turntable just like it did most mornings while I was in high school. Side three is comprised of one twenty-four minute song, "Supper's Ready." Each morning I got up at least twenty-four minutes early to listen to that song. It was a comfort before high school, which I thought of as a kind of prison. I'd sit in my room alone with the music playing and...well, I don't even know. I'd just sit and listen. That was good. It was enough.

This morning is a nod to that past. I no longer go to school. The last ten years of teaching were far worse than the years I spent as a student. After dropping off my daughter, I'll go to the community center and it isn't just that I don't mind, it's that I kind of can't wait. I'm happy.

Today is Dad's birthday. He would have been 81 and last night would have gone with us to the Syracuse Women's Basketball game. He would have been happy about my new job. And this morning he would be up early to watch the plow guys do his driveway, have his coffee, and start the day. I'm in the past enough this morning that he's here with me just a little.

Being up early, going back to the past, and Dad's birthday are happy things for me. I doubt it's the same for my mother and brother who wake and remember in their own ways. Me, I'm up early, Seconds Out is into the "flute" solo just before "the gods of Magog," it's Dad's birthday, and soon I'm off to a job I love. All that and I've spent twenty minutes typing this. What a day.

You should see the smile on my face and hear this album. Both of them out of the past and into the morning. Both of them just right.

Brooding, Past and Future

Like another writer I enjoy and you should read, I've been brooding.

I looked back at last year's Morning Pages for October 30 to see where I have come from. I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's first album Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and thinking he couldn't have known Born To Run was in him. He was likely anxious just getting started let alone becoming one of the biggest acts in rock and roll. That led to me thinking about how I can't know where I'll be next year and that sent me to my October 30, 2018 Morning Pages where I found this:

I'm cracking up little by little. This is the phrased I used in a letter to Jerry: cracking up. I remember a special ed. teacher at F-M who was brilliant but every few years cracked up and went out on medical leave for months or a year. I feel as if I'm on the road to a crack up. It worries me....

I have my department meeting Thursday and am reminding myself to shut up. There's no winning at these things and so many ways to lose. I imagine the obligatory "celebrations" icebreaker, each of us having to say something wonderful about school. At my turn, I imagine trying to pass but being pressed by the admin until I say, "I celebrate that we're done with two months of the year and I haven't killed myself yet." I smile thinking of the reaction that would get....

I am listing all the things I need to do next. My hand is clenching the pen again. I take a deep breath and try again to relax. Let it go. Move a sixteenth of an inch away from cracking up. I won't crack up. I just can't.

No way could I have known then that this morning I'll walk to work at a new job that isn't teaching, at which I'm appreciated by all my colleagues including the people in charge. I couldn't have known I would make it through that last school year by deciding in January that I would quit in June.

There also no real way of knowing what next October 30 will look like. I don't even know what the rest of today will be but, I'm closer to Born To Run than Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J..

And get this: since Born To Run in 1975 Springsteen hit the peak of popularity with 1984's Born In The U.S.A., the peak of artistry with Tunnel Of Love in 1987, and the peak of mastery with Western Stars this year. Even he doesn't know what his October 30, 2019 will be. He just keeps writing and recording.

Me, I'll keep writing and posting and we'll see where we get to, Bruce and me.

Clear Behind, Work Ahead

I got a message that an old email account of mine had been used to send spam. Well, that's disconcerting. It's an account through an organization I'm still part of but I no longer use that address. I logged in, changed the password, then looked through what had been sent. Russian spam, God love those little bastards. Scrolling past those I saw messages from the past showing all the ways in which I used to be logged into the web. It got me working.

Years ago I had accounts on so many things I can no longer remember a tenth of them. Many of the sites are defunct or have been largely forgotten. One, of which I was an early subscriber, had a couple million members then but gets fewer than a thousand hits today. I still have the account. Finding all this was like that moment when the closet is so full it won't shut. I started clearing, removing the breached email account from my online presence, learning what trails I have left behind.

The process is tedious but I don't mind tedious sometimes. It reminds me of a summer I rooted out the grape vine in our backyard, cutting, digging, clipping, pulling, ripping, and carrying brush to the curb. That summer I needed a project. I sweat and swore at it for hours at a time over a week or two and when it was done I smiled. Two years later the whole thing was back as if I had done nothing because there's no getting rid of grape vine without lethal doses of roundup or napalm. I'll never clean up my online presence either. The roots go too deep and have spread. Still, it's a useful exercise.

For some reason the work got me down. The hacked account, when I first created it, was going to be my way forward, my way out of a job I'm still in. It was to connect me with bigger, better things. It did that, but I got involved with idiocy and foolishness which became a total mess and near disaster. These kept me from doing my best work, from believing in myself, and from making good choices. Cleaning out the old online roots could have felt empowering as if I was starting anew but I felt depressed over mistakes I made, opportunities I missed, and the feeling that I won't ever get where I want to go. A couple hours into pruning and pulling internet roots, I took my depression to bed and sleep. I dreamed of being lost in a house the size of a shopping mall filled with people I don't want to know. I kept trying to get away but was called back again, again, and again while the lights in the mall/house grew dimmer and darker.

It snowed hard that night and I woke to eight inches of heavy snow in the driveway and on the sidewalks. I made coffee, took that and my pen to the nook to write Morning Pages, and found myself having an idea for the future. I wrote it on a post-it noteand finished Morning Pages. The idea still percolating, I pulled on boots, coat, gloves, and wool hat, walked out to the garage, pushed the button for the door, and grabbed the shovel. Before the door had opened all the way I dug into the snow and counted "one." It was nine degrees with a stiff wind and snow still falling. "Two," I counted as I threw the next shovel of snow up and over the wall.

I imagined a clear driveway but it takes a lot of shoveling and the snow was still coming. One hundred strokes in I had a section cleared to the blacktop. "But there's so much to go," I thought and began figuring how many shovels of snow it would all take. I stopped halfway through the figuring and looked back at the area I had cleared. It was already well dusted with snow. "I will never be done," I said in a Charlie Brown voice. A thought came to me and when I said again, "I will never be done," the tone was different. I've cleared snow out of that driveway for eighteen years. I pushed the shovel in and threw snow up over the wall. "One hundred one," I said into the wind and snow. "One hundred two," I said throwing another.

It took 941 shovels-full to clear the driveway and all the sidewalks. I took a break to pet the big black dog who is the neighborhood mayor and speak to his owner. I took another to say good morning to my wife and our smaller black dog as they went for a walk/run. I took several short breaks to recall my father clearing snow when I was a child and checking on me clearing snow from the parking lot of his funeral home when I was in school. I imagined him in the driveway, me telling him to just talk and not worry about helping me shovel. I kept counting each full shovel of snow as I shifted it up onto the banks.

When I finished the sidewalks I put the shovel on the wall of the garage and took down the scraper. An inch of new snow lay where I had begun shoveling an hour before. I scraped back down to blacktop then stood in the open garage to consider what I had done.

The snow was coming down and would cover the driveway and sidewalks. In two hours I would shovel again but the snow would be lighter than the overnight accumulation. "I will never be done," I said again looking up into the infinite grey.

This spring the grapevine will come back. I may rip it out again. I could use that kind of project, something long-term, difficult, and with no hope of being completely finished.

I may try to clean up my online profile some more, deleting old accounts, unsubscribing from more and more clutter. There will remain fragments of me out there and every so often some cretin will hack in and spam people. That's just one way in which the world works.

Looking over my shoulder I see the stuff of my past: mistakes, projects that didn't work out as I hoped, the continuing misery of my job. But I also see that I clear down to the blacktop in places, make piles of brush at the curb, and delet some of the detritus of my online past. I nod twice at that view over my shoulder, turn around, dig the shovel in and resume counting as I push on through whatever comes down, clearing a wide path to wherever it is I'm going.