Let’s Not Get Carried Away (or we just might)

                                             You’re the blessed,

                                             We’re the spiders from Mars…

                                                      —David Bowie, Hang on to Yourself

I have the habit (or more of an inclination) to look for and then find the connectivity in things—especially among the things that happen to me and for me. I have enough evidence to convince myself that absolutely everything happens for good reason; and better yet, absolutely everything happens the way it happens for even better ones.

Our European lifestyle is in some ways better and in at least one huge way worse (insert grandchildren here) than our lifestyle in America. It might be safer to just say the lifestyle is different. Let me explain. In one big way it’s better for us because no longer is television our daily domestic soundtrack. As much as I would welcome that, Dutch television is impossible to understand and although there is nothing inherently wrong with the BBC, let’s just say that small doses suffice. In its place I have substituted a combination of Facebook, news apps, 100! Puzzle, and the business end of the pen I used to write this. OK, OK there’s work and travel and plenty of bike rides and bus and metro rides and long daggone walks to get anywhere, but let’s just say the lifestyle is different.

I spend a whole lot more time just thinking. I’m serious about that, but I must admit that I’m all over the place, really. With the focus of a kitten trying to catch a laser light I seem to go from one thing to the next, but repeatedly and consistently I seem always to look for the connectedness of everything.

Like a magnificent spider web, I want to see how everything, absolutely everything, is interconnected and supportive of everything else. And just like pulling at the strands of a real spider’s web, I’ve convinced myself that damaging one strand doesn’t necessarily destroy the integrity of its entirety. It certainly affects it, yeah, but by the same token, the “damage” becomes part of the design going forward.

All that to say this: I think what happens matters less than the knowledge that everything, no matter what, is connected; and as importantly, everything contributes.

 

Recently Gwaz and I visited the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam to attend a traveling exhibit dedicated to the singer, Amy Winehouse. Although her self-destructive lifestyle, addiction, and death were conspicuously absent, it was impossible to ignore the impetus for such an exhibit to begin with. Surely, I wasn’t the only person there who thought what a shame her death was. In fact, only the oddest among us would be the one who didn’t.

As I walked along the exhibit looking at her stuff—dresses, shoes, record albums, primary school tie and jumper (what the Brits call a sweater) I thought of a day in 2012 when I interrupted our son, Jesse sitting alone in his dimly lit cellar, apparently doing nothing more than listening.  The same guy who can quote chapter and verse the particulars of popular music from rock and roll to hip-hop, can name the original members of NWA, and teaches his two-year old daughter the significance of Metallica, was listening to Amy’s pure jazz. We agreed then as we certainly would have last week what a shame it was that she is gone. What I didn’t know then was that that very moment would return to me years later.

It’s as if I have trained myself to reach for the connections, to look for them, to make sure I realize them. Later that day but right on cue, (don’t tell me thoughts don’t fly) Jesse sent me a vintage recording of Duane Allman and Boz Scaggs. Jesse sends me music and references to musicians all the time. He doesn’t ever explain, but I never need to know why. I can always tell the reference, and no matter what the context it is as if to remind me to appreciate what we have instead of what we lost. And, always I want to see the connection to what has come before.

This one wasn’t even a stretch.

Thanks to Bowie, I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. (Not my own so much, although as Ruthie used to say, there are only two things you can’t avoid and the other one is taxes.) On the day I learned that Bowie had died, I was sitting at my desk at school in the early morning. By the end of the day students were asking me if I had heard. I wonder if they will remember that day like I remember a September school day in 1970 when I learned that Jimi Hendrix was dead, or Janis Joplin, or Jim Morrison, or the sound of Howard Cosell’s voice on Monday Night Football December 8, 1980 when he delivered devastating, unimaginable news.

Listening to “Sky Dog” and thinking about Amy made it all come flooding back. Like so many others, Allman died too soon in 1971, and as I sat there thinking, naturally focusing on what was lost and who we’ve lost including Maurice White, Paul Kantner, Glenn Frey, Lemmy Kilmister, BB King, Allen Toussaint, Ben E. King, Chris Squire, and of course, Bowie, I almost couldn’t help but visualize my own magnificent spider web, constructed in ineffably equal parts—sustained by the acceptance of loss and gratitude for the contributions that endure.