Midlife Meditation

My father's ashes, along with flowers thrown by his grandchildren, sink into the Pacific. 3  For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: 2  a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 3  a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4  a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5  a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6  a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; 7  a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8  a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) It's the time for casting away. When my father died December 29, he set in motion a chain of events that will be pl...

  Thanksgiving? Christmas? 2000-something? Or maybe late 1990s? I'm not sure. It's the only Anderson family dinner shot I have on my computer. From the size of my own kids, and the absence of James and Gail's kids from the table, I think it's probably somewhere around 2000 or 2001. The large bowl of candied yams is a sure sign it's one of the two turkey holidays, though the use of plastic plates makes me think it's probably Christmas. The china has traditionally come out for Thanksgiving, but Christmas is an anything-goes meal as far as dinnerware.   I was thinking all day yesterday of doing a photo essay about the giant meals we have on those two holidays. It's a tradition that probably goes back to 1991, the first holiday that my parents were well-established in McMinnville. There are probably pictures like this one scattered amongst the many branches of the family. My father used to set up a tripod to get everyone in, but the pictures he took--al...

Have you seen the light? Yes, that's James Brown in the academic robe favored by African-American preachers, and he's calling out the question to John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues brothers. It comes in the midst of a stirring rendition by Brown, a church choir, a backup band, and a company acrobatic fan-waving dancers of "The Old Landmark," a gospel standard that inspires the brothers to put their band back together to raise money to save the orphanage in which they were raised. The movie is The Blues Brothers , and it's a shaggy dog of a film stuffed with amazing R&B performances, car chases, celebrity cameos, and occasional blue language. It manages to respectfully poke fun at Catholicism, full gospel Protestantism, neo-Nazism, soul culture, blindness, prison life, government bureaucracy, law enforcement, homelessness, and probably several other politically dangerous topics more successfully than any other Hollywood movie I can think of. See it....

Full disclosure: I have never limboed. But I do know a thing or two about being in limbo. I have often found myself trapped in transition, not knowing what the future holds, desperate for resolution, stuck on a tritone that simply will not resolve. It's the waiting place, the most useless place a human can be, rendered all the more uncomfortable by a hefty dose of anxiety over what's on the other side. Waiting for the test results, waiting for the judge's verdict, waiting for the excrement to hit the ventilator, the other shoe to drop, the phone to ring--it's never pleasant, even when good news may be in the pipeline. When there's a strong chance of bad news, it's far worse. It doesn't even have to be anticipated news that amps up the angst. When I was nine, I broke my right arm in a ridiculous accident involving a badminton bird, a slide, and a garden hose. My parents put my arm in a makeshift sling (which might have been made from my Cub Scout necker...

Friday night, Banks High School held graduation ceremonies outdoors, in the football stadium, for the first time in many years, and all in attendance were very nearly blown away.   I mean that in the literal sense. Friday afternoon saw the winds begin to pick up, and by 6:30, when the band was setting up to play "Pomp and Circumstance," it was becoming an issue. I had had the foresight to buy two bags of clothespins. It was not enough.   There was a great deal of unintentional humor to the proceedings. Aisles and seating areas had been carefully roped off earlier in the day, but when I first went out to the field to set up the keyboard for the choir performance, all the pedestals holding up the ropes had tipped over. They were unweighted. This caused a major scramble on the part of the custodial staff to find ways to anchor the pedestals and prevent further tipping. When the band members first went out with chairs and music stands, many of them took their music as...