Category: melancholy

Voice from the past

So I’ve been lightly reading the kerfuffle and conversation surrounding the new Nike ad featured Tiger Woods, with an overlay of the voice of his father, Earl Woods, taken from an interview in 1994.

Here’s the ad, if you haven’t already seen it:

Of the ad, Tiger has said: “…I think any son who has lost a father and who meant so much in their life, I think they would understand the spot.”

Hmm.

I’m not a son, but I’ve lost a father and I have to say the ad makes me very uncomfortable. I’m not sure I do understand the spot.

While it might be “…very apropos. I think that’s what my dad would say,” the context of an advertising spot, intended to sell Nike gear, seems…a little wrong.

I’ve no doubt Tiger might have turned to his dad for guidance during the fallout from his recent troubles. But would his dad have chosen that forum to have that conversation with his son? I think not.

I find the ad very powerful and I think it’s a very public reckoning for Tiger. But I still gotta say…it makes me uncomfortable. It just doesn’t feel respectful to the memory of his dad. Just my .02

By the by, hearing your father’s voice from the past can be an eerie thing. I recently found a video of my dad giving a presentation. It was filmed about five years before his passing. The Good Man and I watched it, and I found it difficult and a bit disturbing. And oddly, in some ways, comforting.

I’ve no plans yet to use it in a marketing campaign. I’ll keep you posted on that…..

We all have to remember in our own way

A tree stands in the median on I-25, north of Las Cruces, not quite to Radium Springs.

It’s a scrubby little tree, maybe a mesquite or a juniper. You know, the kind of hardy tree you see out there in the New Mexico desert. Something tenacious.

This particular tree stands out because it’s festooned with tinsel and garland.

It’s been that way for several years. I’ve seen it, driven past it several times, actually.

The first time I saw it, the time of year wasn’t much past Christmas, so I figured it was a leftover holiday decoration.

But when I saw it again a few years later, I realized it wasn’t just leftover holiday decorations, but something more serious. I knew it was a roadside shrine often found in our fair New Mexico.

The roadside shrine is a memorial located where someone has lost their life out there on the roads. It’s a pretty common sight in New Mexico.

It’s a tradition I grew up with and so it’s never occurred to me to question it. I find outside the borders of my homestate, it’s questioned. A lot.

Questions of taste and decency, actually. Whether it’s appropriate, or not, to put one’s grief so garishly on display.

See, I think we in our American culture have really weird and uptight ideas about death and dying. Ok, it’s probably because I grew up in the cultures of New Mexico that I feel that way.

But I’ve always really appreciated the Hispanic and Latino cultures celebrating and remembering their loved ones who have moved on. I appreciate the ability to show grief openly without remorse or embarrassment.

Dia de los Muertos offrendas and roadside shrines are simply the outward display of deeply held cultural beliefs. Beliefs such as that the dead have moved on to another world, but a world that is not so far away from our own.

A woman is comforted, perhaps, by knowing that her child, while not in her arms, is not that far away. While she remembers with a keening loss the child who was taken away, she can still bake bread and place sweets on an offrenda, and it helps her cope.

A mourning wife can drive to the spot where her husband met his end, and remember him. She refreshes the shiny bits of paper, and can feel her husband not so far away.

I think this is healthy, personally, and I don’t find it to be weird. I find it to be beautiful.

Those roadside shrines are called descansos. They aren’t just tacky plastic crosses and brightly shining tinsel. For the family that constructed the shrine, they are an essential part of the grieving process.

The garlanded tree located in I-25 highway median is a descanso to honor the memory of a child.

The shrine in the photo at the end of this post honors two kids who rolled their ATV by the irrigation banks on the Bosque in Los Lunas.

When someone you truly love dies, the grief never goes away. It tends to ebb and flow, welling up sometimes, overwhelming. Other times, the volume is turned down and you can almost, but not quite, forget.

I think we all have to find our own way of grieving.

No one can say who is right or wrong.

Source: Las Cruces Sun News

Heartbroke no more

There’s this famous quote from this guy named Bart Giamatti. He was a baseball commissioner and had a bit of character.

Ol’ Bart was also a writer. He liked to put down in words what he felt about the game of baseball.

He was a true fan and had a lot to say.

At the end of every baseball season, one of his quotes from a work entitled “The Green Fields of the Mind” is trotted out and poured over by the faithful, including me.

The piece begins “It breaks your heart. It’s designed to break your heart.”

Bart’s talking about how baseball begins all fresh and new and sparkly, stays with you over the course of 162 games, and gives you a story arc that includes Spring, Summer, AND Fall and then goes away abruptly.

Finds you when it is warm, leaves you when it is wet and cold.

Sort of a fair weather friend, that.

And every October, I get a little down. The World Series ends, baseball isn’t on the radio anymore and I have to actually decide what to watch on TV instead of having it decided for me.

No longer do I worry over a pitcher’s arm or that catcher’s bum knee or why the hell that guy took that bad route to get to a routine fly ball.

Baseball leaves a big empty that cannot be refilled.

Like a whirlwind romance that fills my days with daydreams and my nights with passion and I get to thinking I could never live without it.

And then it leaves me.

But weirdly, baseball is a fickle lover.

Because come March, baseball finds it’s way back to my arms.

Yesterday, because I could feel the return on the wind, I engaged in my annual viewing of “Bull Durham.” It’s a preparatory event. An ablution. A ritual cleansing to prepare me for the return.

This morning I will have either “61*” or “The Natural” playing in the background while I work, to continue my readiness.

And then, today, at noon, or 12:05 actually, I will once again hear Duane Kuiper say “Giants baseball is on the radio.”

While it may only be a Spring Training game, some harmless flirtation and not the real thing yet, I will listen. I might even cry when I hear Jon Miller‘s voice (it’s happened before).

I will hear how Bengie Molina may or may not have lost weight. I will hear how our multi-million dollar Cy Young winning, dope smoking kid has fared in the off season. I will listen for details on the new kids and assessments on the old kids and I will find that yawning chasm inside of me will begin to quiet again.

Because today, my love has returned to me.

It broke my heart, but I will forgive and forget. I will give myself with reckless abandon, not caring that October looms somewhere out there. No, today I will pretend that it will never leave me again.

God I love baseball.

Best Laid Plans

Or something like that.

I’d meant to do a round up post on my thoughts and experiences from spending Thursday afternoon at MacWorld 2010.

This, the first year without the presence of Apple at the show.

But I pretty much summed it up on Twitter:

“Steve kicked the baby bird outta the nest and it ain’t flying. At all.”

The air is out of the show. I have been going to MacWorld shows as a feature of my employment since 1995. I’ve seen a lot of ’em.

I’m used to the buzz in the air all around Moscone Center. Even in Apple’s down years, there was a lot of energy in San Francisco surrounding the show.

It was the wondering, the excitement, the anticipation. What will be announced? Can I lay my hands on an iPhone (no, they just twirled in a tantalizing fashion in a glass case with security guards), what accessories can I buy. What cool 3rd party products will I see?

There was no buzz. There was no “wow” product at the show. There was no life.

The surrounding streets were eerily calm. The San Francisco flagship Apple store, located within walking distance of the show, was no more busy than an average day.

Even the people running the booths at the expo were lacking energy.

What was once one of the most hotly anticipated shows in the tech geek world is now nothing more than a limp echo of what it once was.

So that’s that.

End of an era, I suppose.

Blame it on the rain…

So under deeply dark gray skies and a relentless rain, I drove this morning down highway 101.

I had on the local country station because that’s the kind of music I’m listening to these days.

That fairly dated song by Tim McGraw “Live Like You Were Dying” came on.

You know the one, goes something like this:

“I went sky diving/I went rocky mountain climbing/I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter/And I gave forgiveness I’d been denying
Some day, I hope you get the chance/To live like you were dyin’.”

This song always did bug me. Dunno, I’m not the hugest Tim McGraw fan anyway.

But back in 2004, I really got a whole other view. I can’t hear the song without remembering.

I have this very dear friend, let’s call her Jane (it’s her Nom de Bebida).

Jane is about 90 pounds soaking wet and bouncy like a golden retriever. She is intensely athletic, too. I mean, despite being tiny, her body is finely hewn with long muscles and power. In other words, the exact opposite of my own rig. Which may be why we get along so well.

I once quipped that she has spin class for breakfast, power yoga for lunch and windsurfing for dinner.

And it’s true. That’s an actual day from her life.

Back in 2004 she went on a windsurfing trip to an island with a name I can’t recall. I believe it is part of the Canary Islands.

While there, she caught a particularly nasty parasite.

The side effects of this hitchhiker looked an awful lot like meningitis, meaning very painful headaches as the lining of the brain swells, utter fatigue, and more.

She went into the hospital and the doctors could not figure out what the heck was wrong with her.

For weeks she suffered. Huge doses of painkillers, doctors trying everything and still she didn’t improve.

At one point, they were unsure if they were going to be able to help her. Meaning…they weren’t sure if she would survive. They had a long talk with her boyfriend about options.

Finally after what must have felt like forever to our Janie girl, someone figured out the problem. With some meds and her own body’s immune system, everything kicked into gear and she started to improve, but recovery was very slow.

Once she came home from the hospital, she was told to rest. Rest, ha! You tell a golden retriever to rest? Are you kidding?

But she did rest as much as she could.

When she started to go a little stir crazy, I’d go get her and we’d go for short trips out to lunch or something. She’d fatigue so fast it was frightening to see.

Toward the end of summer of that year, Tim McGraw came to the Shoreline for a concert. Jane wanted to go, so I piled a lot of blankets and her tiny body into the Jeep and took her to the show. We sat on the lawn.

When the big finale came on and McGraw sang his top of the charts song, the crowd stood swaying and sang along. Janie and I sat on the ground and listened.

The first chorus rang out into the night air and my very down to earth, very blunt friend looked at me and said, “I don’t like that song.”

“Yeah, I don’t like it much either,” I replied. Then Jane startled me.

“I don’t want to live like I am dying. I want to live like I am living,” Jane said, pretty emphatically. “I’ve tried dying. I don’t like it.”

And I hugged her real tight that night, because she was right. I didn’t like her living so close to dying either.

So now whenever I hear that damn song, I remember my Janie girl demanding that she wanted to live like she was living!

By the way, just this year, at the age of 43, that girl got pregnant (naturally) with her first child and gave birth to the most delicate and beautiful baby girl.

Now if that ain’t livin’ like you wanna live, I don’t know what is.

And I smiled to remember my girl. She’s a ray of light on a rainy day.
_____

I believe this sudden serious turn on the blog is probably a surprise after the past several posts.

It came as sort of a surprise to me, too, when I wrote it in my head this morning.

Blame it on my melancholy mood and the relentless winter rain.

(iPhone photo taken moments ago)