We're # 2 - We Try Harder!

It's the 2nd of January in the second decade of the third millennium since Christ shook the pillars of Heaven & Earth by audaciously embracing the human condition.

No resolutions - just plans to embrace our changing human condition and to interact with it in increasingly hopeful ways.

We moved Steven to Moose Jaw yesterday for the last time. In 4 months he'll graduate and burn his "school furniture". I hope he keeps one or two pieces. Susie and I have a stack of purloined N.A.D.P. (Northern Alberta Dairy Pool) plastic milk crates that once stood as the foundation to the bed we loved on and slept in. These tough plastic boxes that proclaim their allegiance to their owner - "Property of N.A.D.P" - with enduring words embossed on their sides, have moved our meager sticks and stones from Jasper, to Edmonton (and around that Town) to Saskatchewan and our current Flatland Home. They predate our vows, our children, our current careers and remind us of our humble beginnings.

Occasionally I ruminate on how our illegal possession of these items will be dealt with in ultimate terms.

"Now Brian," the Lord rumbled, "about those milk crates."

"Doh!"

But we can't recompense their owners - the N.A.D.P. is long gone, either defunct or absorbed by another corporate entity - so we're stuck with them and their dubious provenance. I console myself with the thought that their rightful owners never made the type of deep, emotional investment in them that we (or most likely only I) have. My practical wife might blush at the pixels I've squandered on such mundane items, but so often it is the mundane, the utterly pedestrian, the commonplace that marks and holds the connection we have to the historical and the profound.

You can't say Stonehenge is just a bunch of rocks - even if that is just what it is.

So why did I use a title that was the corporate slogan of Avis Car Rentals in the '70s? Because, the two days of 2010 have served to remind me that we are not first, or primary, or most favored. We are average, second string, among the masses. But we TRY!

We are all growing, learning and reaching forward towards a future that will likely turn out to be something quite other than we imagine - and we are so like so many others who do the same. And within that trying is the genius and glory of being human and living.

From humble beginnings including a bed laid upon purloined milk crates to a home that has raised three young men and launched them into the world with their own meager beginnings to tell their own stories of struggle and strife, triumph and truth, we are standing on the cusp of the next chapter in the "great adventure". It ain't on the front pages or burnin' up the blogsphere - but it's a ride we are enjoying.

Hang on! When you try harder you sometimes go faster!

Shalom

Pretty Woman

This is my wonderful wife, Susie, several hundred feet in the air on the side of Sulfur Mountain in Banff as we ascended to the peak in one of the cozy gondolas. This is most definitely not Susie's preferred from of travel. Heights, roller coasters, Ferris wheels, gravity drops, even some merry-go-rounds are off limits. I, on the other hand, am a g-force junkie (or used to be). I now content myself with pulling mild g's in our Chevy.

But this was a great day. And Susie embraced the moment. And I love her for that (among so many other reasons). It's now officially my favorite picture of her. And that smile - I've been seeing that smile for over 30 years.

Yes. I'm lucky. Very, very lucky.

Autumnal Dance

I have always loved Autumn best.

One friend/mentor/teacher summed it up perfectly saying, "It's that delicious feeling of impending doom."

Northerners get it. I lived in Northern Alberta. Pretty way north. Autumn, like spring, was nearly - but not quite - instant. Palpable and ephemeral. As soon as the first hard frost happened Mom & Dad would plan our annual "leaf drive". It was an afternoon excursion into the hills and valleys (coolies) of the Peace Country in northern Alberta. A constantly undulating low-level flight that shifted from golden-gray harvested fields to riotously glowing stands of poplar, birch, willow and aspen shot through with the eternal green of conifers grown black-green with summer sun.

The trees either stood in tight copses on hills and along windbreaks or else filled the steep-sided ravines and coolies. The gravel roads we traveled would pitch and weave through this landscape as we "ooed" and "ahhed" when each new splash of defiant color hove into view. The Sun, now becoming perpetually low in the sky, would dazzle our eyes and make them water through our gleeful grins. Moments of peace, joy, unity and love in our family now flash frozen in my memory and gently cooled by the passage of time.

No music accompanied these trips - "AM radio only, please" in my parent's frugal cars. Just the soundtrack of gravel crunching and rapping under our car and our endless exclamations and comments.

"Oh, look there!"

"Nice reds!"

"It's a sea of gold."

We will go out for our new "leaf drive" soon. Our "version 1.2" of this family tradition incorporated music. I'd usually try to choose evocative favorites. We'd still comment - like we did on those "Christmas Light" drives, too. "Leaf drives" are better. We'd bask in awe of the handiwork of God, reminded of the gentle, powerful, creative and wise hand that shapes everything we experience. Even the agnostic and the atheist must respond with some sense of wonder, I suspect, when faced with such naked beauty and divine radiance.

This year will be different though, perhaps it's now "version 1.3". No children in the backseat. No warm family babble before, during or after. Like the leaves drifting from the trees, our children are dancing ever farther from our reach.

The delicious feeling of impending doom rises.

I will program some music for our drive though. Some companions are constant. Surely some Jack Semple from his wonderful instrumental album "Qu'Appelle" - one place we will surely drive to and through.

New Dala will be played from their summer 2009 release "Everyone Is Someone". Their fourth original CD and my second acquisition - better than the last one, which was better than most anything else I've heard in a very long time.

I'll choose some Mark Knopfler from his wide catalog and especially his new release "Get Lucky".

And there will be new and old favorites too. Some Joshua Radin, some Willie Nile, some Jerry Proppe, some Dixie Chicks, some Ian Hunter, some Emmylou Harris, some Robert Plant with Alison Krauss, some Jon Bauer, a smidgen of Tinted Windows and some John Fogerty.

And we'll dance the Autumnal Dance in a brand-new old-fashioned way.

Why don't you make your own playlist and join us? Can't you feel it rising - that feeling? Don't you want to dance too?

Shalom