The Summer of the Fridge

Tomorrow brings an end to the Summer of the Fridge, when I took a multi-colored stack of Post-Its and turned my refrigerator door into a massive mosaic of a to-do list, made up of summertime adventures and the sorts of tasks I keep procrastinating away during the school year. It was a fairly productive idea, to the point where I added more items in early August to keep the momentum going while I still had to take care of my less adventurous chores. Altogether, including both the original tasks and the ones added later, I had some sixty to seventy items on my list.

Here's what it looked like at the start of summer break...

...and here's what it looks like today, on the last day before I report back to school:

As driven as I usually am regarding to-do lists, I never seem to completely finish them off, and instead end up making compromises with myself about why the last few items don't get done. Even though there's nothing remaining on the fridge that requires emergency attention, I do look at those last few lonely notes in the second picture and feel some slight mental bruising; I seem to process my ideas of success and failure in terms of absolutes more than I probably should. But that's a topic for a different post.

It's likely I'll give those last few notes an asterisk and extend my available summer until the day the kids start school, so I can get more done and hate my failings a bit less. It wasn't such a bad summer after all, so why end it on a defeatist note? I did get a lot of things done I'd been wanting to for years, and I had some good times along the way as well. I read some good books, listened to some great music, and had a couple of good weekend extended family trips in July. I watched some great (and not so great) television, got into a habit of long morning walks, and did a remodeling / redecorating / reorganizing of my home office that I've wanted to do for years (even if I was nudged into that pretty strongly when the hard drive on my computer crashed and burned).

I didn't immerse myself in writing as thoroughly as I had last summer, but I did get some good work done on revising a second manuscript some of you may know -- The Ghost of Lake Emily. It's about as different from Following Infinity as I could probably get while staying in the middle grade range, and with any luck those stories will turn out to be my first two published works. Even though I've put a lot of thought and work into the Emily revisions, there wasn't much pressure to get through them quickly, but of course I'm still working on them because when writing is a job, Rule #1 is you show up and do the work. The things I'm working on right now -- restructuring parts of the story, reinventing relationships between characters, even redefining some of the characters, all of that beautifully frustrating and painstaking work that makes other people tell writers they don't understand how we can stick with it -- are all tasks that shouldn't be rushed. And anyway, I decided at some point to pull back just a little and follow my agent's advice from earlier in the year, when she and I talked about all of the waiting going on right now. "Enjoy the lull," she said, "because it will be the last one you have in...forever." I've had over a year to learn how consuming it can be to maintain a balance between two different careers, and since I suspect that's only going to become more pronounced as things progress, I thought enjoying the lull wouldn't be such a bad idea. Still, I suspect that someday I'm going to enjoy NOT having a writing lull even more.

And so ends another summer vacation. I'm going to spare all of us any summative statements or force-fed wisdom about beginning a new school year and all the promises and challenges that come with it, and instead just say I'm vaguely optimistic about it. I'm not happy to see break end, but I'm not completely dreading the idea of going back, either. I'm just hoping to successfully navigate my way through all of the highs and lows of the next ten months, and do some good along the way.

Now there's nothing left for me to do but show up tomorrow morning and start discovering what the next year has in store.

Baby, We Were Born to Run

Any real music fan should be able to make a list of the songs or albums that were the most formative for them. Bruce Springsteen's album "Born to Run" is definitely one of mine. I didn't discover it until it had been around for ten years or so, and catching me right square in the middle of high school made it no small influence on how I came to perceive the world around me. I saw online that today is the 40th anniversary of its release and decided that was reason enough to dig it out and give it a good focused listen. In doing so, I remembered how the album comes together as something greater than the sum of its parts.

SIDE 1

1. THUNDER ROAD
My eyes reflexively burn a little at the sound of the piano/harmonica duet that opens the song. I think the ethos of everything about Bruce's music can be found here: "I'm not perfect, but I'm here and I care about you, and maybe together we can become something special." The song is filled with so much romantic and dramatic imagery. I hear that saxophone come screaming in at the end and I still picture the roads I learned to drive on back in high school, the girls I dated, the unrequited crushes I survived, and the undefined promise of what was waiting for me in the outside world when it was time to move on and leave everything about my hometown behind.

2. TENTH AVENUE FREEZE OUT
I'll admit, this was always kind of a low point on the album for me. Luckily back in the days of vinyl it was easy to read the grooves on the record and pick up the needle at the end of one song to skip over the one you didn't want to hear. This song didn't come to life for me until 1986, when Bruce released a live boxed set that, on vinyl, took five entire records to tell all the stories. This was one of the first songs from that set that rock radio in the Cities would play. Being electrified by the live version of a song I had tepid feelings about was all the convincing I needed to buy that boxed set the day it came out.

3. NIGHT
Maybe it's because of the title, but this song worked best for me in the dark, out driving on those quiet and empty roads surrounding the town where I lived, coming at me from the cassette I'd dubbed from the record album, back when such cassettes would capture every subtle crack, pop, and hiss that you'd hear on the album itself. I never really connected with it on a visceral level the way I had with so many other Bruce songs, but it was great for driving. The most recent live show of his I saw was a few years ago, and he opened it with this. I thought it was a weird choice since I never considered the song a landmark, but I'm sure there were other people at the show who disagreed with me.

4. BACKSTREETS
For me, this is the definitive song about friendship. The opening piano is tender and powerful and full of longing, and builds into an emotional crash. Even though the story in the song tells of very specific things that these characters had done in their time together, I always saw it as wider and more metaphorical. It wasn't just about friendship, but about how powerful a friendship had once been before evolving into a natural end, as so many do. This was the song I referenced when I signed my high school best friend's yearbook at the end of our senior year.

SIDE 2
It's worth mentioning that I feel asleep to Side 2 of "Born to Run" on almost every Friday night of my senior year of high school. Right before bed I'd put it on my cheap drugstore turntable stereo that I thought was awesome, then turned down the volume to the perfect level that would let me hear the music clearly without anyone else in the house knowing it was on.

5. BORN TO RUN
We all know this one. It's as much of a rock and roll National Anthem as there ever was, the kind of song that 70,000 people in a stadium can hear and sing along with. It's always been harder for me to have a personal connection to it since it's such a well-known song, but I still fell for the imagery that spins through it. Not to mention this has one of rock music immortal lines: "I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight, in an everlasting kiss." I had to take a class on reading and analyzing poetry as a part of my English minor, and I gave up on the old fart of a professor when the lyrics to "Born to Run" came up in the text and he dismissed them as not worthy of inclusion. It was a formative moment for me since that was the day when song lyrics became more important in my world than poetry ever would be.

6. SHE'S THE ONE
This song is responsible for one of the four greatest moments of my life. It was May of 1988 at the Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota during the Tunnel of Love Express Tour. While the E Street band played, I stood dancing in the nosebleed seats letting this sonic freight train permeate my being. I swear there was a moment when I closed my eyes to focus only on the song, and in doing so I nearly saw the face of God.

7. MEETING ACROSS THE RIVER
One of the most narrative songs Bruce ever wrote, and a real left turn when compared to the rest of the album. Quiet in tone and mostly driven by piano, nearly every phrase is punctuated by a trumpet sounding like it's being played by someone sitting out on their fire escape at night half a block away. This song was a big influence on me in a playwriting class I took. One assignment was to create a scene in which one character tried to get another to leave a room, when the second character really didn't want to. I thought of this song and put my two characters in the middle of a criminal escapade much like what's alluded to here.

8. JUNGLELAND
More of a monument than a song. The first four minutes would be enough to stand on its own as great, but then Clarence comes in with one of the most powerful, fluid, and evocative sax solos ever recorded. Seeing him play it live made him seem superhuman. Hearing it reminds me how he's gone now, and how important his playing was to me as I was coming of age. The quiet ending that follows the solo was one of the first songs I burned into my musical DNA where the quiet between the notes and the interchange in dynamics was just as important as the notes themselves.

If you know these songs, you probably recognize what I had to say about them. If you don't? Well, you've had 40 years to catch up. Maybe it's time.

The Changing of the Guard, and Beyond

Tonight is Jon Stewart's final episode of "The Daily Show." I was only a casual viewer for most of his run; I watch the local evening news out of habit, which is on at the same time, and usually I'm lucky if I can even stay awake all the way through that. I was still aware of the cultural touchstones both Jon Stewart and the show had become, using comedy to help make the ridicule and outrage of the day's news slightly more palatable.

I started watching more regularly out of curiosity last summer when John Oliver came in as a substitute host (the man was Professor Ian Duncan on “Community,” after all). He was on long enough to get me into the habit of recording the show and watching the next day, which I continued once Jon Stewart came back. I didn’t watch every episode, but it was good to know I had the choice if there was an interesting or entertaining guest scheduled, or a news story had become significant enough to demand he addressed it. In all of the media coverage leading up to his final show, I’ve noticed the same few points keep getting made: 1) During his hosting tenure, he changed the way news is presented and what the public expects from it. 2) “The Daily Show” was the primary news source for a surprising number of people, and they considered Jon Stewart to be as much of a trusted journalist as a comedian. 3) Once he leaves the show, there will be a huge void left behind. 

First off, I’ll point out that people who rely on one source for all of their news are selling themselves incredibly short, whether that source is the daily paper or print magazines or websites or books or local or national news broadcasts or talk radio or a half-hour program on Comedy Central. To those people concerned about who they can trust to deliver the real news, I’d say it’s possible that broadening your horizons wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if you’re really concerned about this.

I don’t deny that for hardcore fans of the show, this departure will represent a seismic shift in their lives. Using late night television as an example, all of the hosting and program changes that have occurred recently have made it unrecognizable from what it had been even five years ago. For something that can easily become a reliable part of a comfortable routine, that’s a lot to take in.

Big changes like this are always happening in our lives, though. Performers will leave our favorite TV shows, or the shows themselves will get cancelled. Bands will break up or announce farewell tours. Friends or neighbors move away. As I write this, I should be days away from getting my “Welcome Back” letter from school to begin a new year. There have been more years than not when we’ve had surprise changes in our school staff or the student population happen over the summer, to say nothing of the changes that we knew were coming at the end of the previous year. Most of the relationships we have in life, whether they are with people or even just ideas, are eventually going to end or become redefined in some way.

When that happens, we move on. We adapt, because we have to. Life continues to change, and we rarely have any control over when or how that happens. 

But change doesn’t always represent an end. Sometimes it’s a new beginning emerging out of nowhere, or just a different direction presenting itself. Sometimes these changes are for the better, and never would have occurred if they didn’t have the end of something else to bring them on.

Maybe the best way to accept the changes we need to experience is to find a renewed appreciation for what we still have. If we are feeling displaced about something coming to an end, or feeling tentative about a new beginning, it can help to remember what we have in life that keeps us grounded and secure. Finding something new doesn’t necessarily mean replacing what’s gone. It might even give us something new to care about just as much. If a change leaves a hole in our lives, it’s our job to fill it. 

As for “The Daily Show,” I’ll watch Jon Stewart’s final episode tonight. I’m sure it’ll be great entertainment, and I’m very curious to see what happens next in his career. I think the new guy taking over has an uphill battle in front of him, and I’m not all that sure it’s going to result in something I’ll find interesting. I'll give him a try, but I don't have high hopes right now.

If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just find something new.