In an interview broadcast today, singer John Mellencamp described to NPR’s Terry Gross the inspiration for the song “Longest Days” on his 2008 CD, Life Death Love and Freedom.
He said his grandmother called him Buddy. She lived to 100. Late in life she often asked him to lay in bed with her as she rested. Once, side by side, she asked him to pray with her. Read More
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A writing professor I know often uses time travel as a plot device. His novel about Abraham Lincoln involuntarily appearing in Chicago in the 1950s bring him to life in a unique way. More intriguing is the professor’s unpublished story imagining himself as an adult occupying his boyhood body and mind.
That’s a journey I would gladly take. I already go back in dreams. Why not make it real and less overwrought? Read More
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We could live much longer if we really wanted to. Or maybe we want to but can’t get our act together, individually or collectively, to take the steps that forestall death.
I’ve been pondering longevity since coming across two items recently: a study that shows reducing smog adds an average of five months to lifespans and a blog entry and photo about a typical diet in Japan, where people live an average of four years longer than in the United States. Read More
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I’m busy contemplating how to use the extra one second bestowed upon us at the moment 2008 ends.
The addition of a so-called leap second last happened in 2005, not that anyone noticed. But reading about this latest adjustment, I imagine life shifting into slow motion at 23:59:59. What dramas or epiphanies will burst forth in that precious extra second? Will someone fall in love in 2008 instead of 2009. Will a baby be born in December rather than January? The list of possibilities is, well, endless. Read More
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Who hasn’t wished for a chance to remember their distant past. Not just details but emotions dulled or lost in time. And remembering events so intensely that they feel relived.
Such a chance would be a priceless gift. Call it limited immortality, an oxymoron but accurate description of vividly experiencing one’s mortal life over and over.
Pondering the idea brings forth unbidden a long list of pleasurable events, as if they’re competing for priority. Inevitably they’re followed by a long list of events I’d do anything to forget.
It turns out that the human brain has this capacity, and scientists have identified a handful of people so blessed — or cursed. Much studied is Jill Price, a California woman who recently told the German magazine Der Spiegel: Read More
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My forty-year high school reunion in September didn’t make me feel old. In fact, I felt young again surrounded by my long-lost friends.
It’s always that way when I’m with my two brothers. In a way, we never age no matter how many lies the mirror tells and how far our attitudes diverge. How could it be any other way? We landed in life so close together, a span of twenty-six months to the day, and rooted next to each other in the same ground.
The passage of forty years came to mind tonight when I read of another four-decade anniversary tomorrow: the release of the Beatles’ White Album. (Listen to a fascinating NPR retrospective here.) Countless times my brothers and I listened to every song, cranked up as loud as our parents would tolerate. Whenever I hear “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” I’m transported to David’s room. He had the killer sound system and the most eclectic musical tastes. Read More
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I have a high school friend named Jim. I haven’t seen him in nearly four decades. In fact, none of our other friends have seen him in years. This protracted absence gives Jim a leg up on the rest of us: he’s frozen in our minds as he was back then, young and good-natured and athletic.
People have a way of drifting off after high school and college, not by design, but more like dandelion seeds on a puff of wind. We end up where we do, looking forward and not back. At least until the weight of so many passing years reverses everything, and we try to put the flower back together. Read More
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A few years ago I wrote a lousy short story. The main character, based loosely on me, carried a burden of regret for wrongs committed in his youth. Although decades had passed, he decided to make amends and began a quest for redemption.
Yes, the premise was cliched. But I was writing based on personal experience, and this public acknowledgment of sins felt good, though fiction absolves no guilt. Read More
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Dawn has passed without sleep, and I’m headed back to Portland, crammed into a jetliner thigh-to-thigh with strangers. But I’m elsewhere, drifting through another world, a planet of the previous three days and nights in Central Florida.
With me in this world are dearest friends, friends I’d lost for an unspeakable number of years. The occasion, at least on the surface, is my forty-year high school reunion, which conjures up a stereotypical image of social gatherings not conducive to meaningful conversations. Read More
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The rumors sweeping the Internet are true: I’ve been working out. On my own and with a trainer. Working out a lot.
The motivations are the usual mix of superficial short-term and serious long-term desires. Top of mind is looking good for my forty-year high school reunion next week. So is losing weight I gained this winter after losing it last summer, wanting to fit into something sold on the same rack as skinny young hipster jeans, increased stamina, shocking my doctor by hitting a seemingly unreachable weight goal. I could go on. Read More
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In the examining room, I waited for the dermatologist. Framed on the wall was an information sheet about melanoma.
The doctor entered. Tall, thin, and past retirement age, he shook my hand as one would expect an ex-Marine to shake it. Read More
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It took more than a half-century, but I finally learned why we ended up living on a lake in Central Florida during my childhood. Not one house but three as we moved clockwise around Lake Sybelia in Maitland from the late 1950s to 1970. Read More
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