50 Shades of Pops

I KNOW I SHOULD probably create a playlist of high energy tunes for my morning walk--you know to encourage a brisk pace. This morning though, with the player on Shuffle, the first tune in the random draw was "Crying" by Roy Orbison. As I listened I thought, "Get over it Roy! Behind those dark shades she doesn't know you're crying, and probably doesn't care."

Next up was Patsy Cline's, "Crazy."

What is this playlist trying to tell me? 

There's a new book out that sounds intriguing: Roy G. Biv: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color. Roy G. Biv is a mnemonic device to help us remember the colors of the rainbow. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.

But, (here's an excerpt from the book):

That mnemonic, it turns out, isn’t strictly accurate: “Technically speaking, there aren’t seven distinct colors in the rainbow. But Isaac Newton felt pressured to name seven colors to match the seven tones in Descartes’s musical scale, so he shoe-horned indigo in.”

So how about Black, White and Gray? Well, there's the whole total presence of color / total absence of color thing. But let's not get too technical here. And what about the Shades of Gray? I took a look at Sherwin Williams color selections and found way more than 50. Of course, any of us who grew up with B&W TV know that. And we are very comfortable making sense of it. To this day, I find good B&W photography to be way more compelling than Color.

Well, back to that mournful playlist I started my walk with--I will confess right now that as I tread deeper into this second-coming-of-age, there are times I realize I am crazy (in a lovable way) and I will admit that these days I can get dewy-eyed more often than Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail put together. But then so can a lot of the old guys I know.

So I've decided to own my new shades of emotion and personality, although I will say, I don't necessarily enjoy them all. It was easier being just a guy with emotions about a half-inch deep. Now my shades run deeper and sometimes darker. The problem with having more feelings is they get hurt more often. But I'm finding it's a small price to pay because on the other end, in the brighter shades of gray, I'm more aware of the subtle joys and blessings along the way.

Maybe I should have titled this post: From 5 to 50 and Growing--The Shades of Aging. But who would have clicked to read that?! Better to use the 50 Shades title because they thought it might have something to do with the book.

To me one of the saddest things that happens to us humans as we age is that we try to eliminate all shades of gray. Everything, we think, must be Black or White--our political views, our religion, our world view. So we become more narrow-minded, more dogmatic, and just meaner.

Call me Crazy, but I don't want to be that way.

The color of truth is gray. --― André Gide

Speaking of that book: Yes, I did read it (don't judge me), just the first one (of the three). It was repulsive and a poorly told story. Any book that ends with a girl caught in emotional angst because she is looking forlornly at a half-deflated balloon of a helicopter some self-obsessed wacko gave her, is a poorly told story. They only thing that would have made it more ridiculous is if she had been wearying an air-brushed t-shirt he bought for her at the State Fair. I finished it because I don't tolerate people who criticize books or movies that they have not read or watched in their entirety. And that is not a recommendation to watch the forthcoming movie of the same name or to read the book.

Gray hair is God's graffiti. --Bill Cosby

PS: If I could choose one musician to sit in a coffeeshop and listen to for hours it would be Brandi Carlile. She understands how to paint a picture with music. Watch this video of her singing Patsy's song and notice all of the colors of tone and expression that she shows us.

The Moral Of The Story

THREE TIMES BEFORE, I have written about my favorite movies in posts I call Pops' Flick Picks: The Graduate, Finding Forrester, and Pleasantville. Here's my fourth: Mr. Holland's Opus.

Mr. Holland composed an opus, but not the one he believed he was destined to write. That happens, you know.

Recently I was giving a talk to a group of business managers. I was trying to make a point using a book from The Little Golden Book series called "Scuffy The Tugboat." This little book was read to me many many times as a child. Still, to this day, I read that book and I am still not certain what the moral of the story is. I know it has a moral; children's books just do, but I can't figure it out. Or, maybe I really have figured it out and just don't want to accept its thesis.

If you're not familiar with the story it opens with Scuffy sitting on a shelf in a toy store. He is obsessed with the sense that he was made for bigger and grander things than sitting in a toy shop. So the shop owner takes the little boat home to his son who quickly sets Scuffy to sail in the bathtub. But this too is unsatisfying and unworthy of the calling Scuffy believes is his.

The little boy takes Scuffy to a stream. Scuffy quickly makes his way to wider and deeper waters and ultimately finds himself overwhelmed with rough seas and the heavy traffic of big ships and other things that go bump in the night.

[Spoiler Alert] Fortunately for Scuffy, The man and his little boy find him on the brink of destruction and rescue him. The story ends with Scuffy happily floating in the safe confines of the little boy's bathtub, content with the realization that this is his destiny after all.

So what is the moral of this story? I really want to know. Don't tell me it is: to be content with your circumstances, to quash any temptation to explore beyond the obvious boundaries. I find that very unsatisfying.

Scuffy The Tugboat was written by Gertrude Crampton, who, not surprisingly also wrote Tootle The Train, the painful story of a little train that learned the hard way that you should always stay on the tracks no matter what.

But maybe Mr. Holland's Opus is a Scuffy story. If it is, then maybe I do get it and can accept it as a valid and satisfying plot line for my life. Like, maybe I wasn't built to be in the big waters, but maybe I can have a significant and worthwhile life anyway.

Here's a line from the movie that will help you see why I think it may be a Scuffy story. This is from a character called Gertrude Lang, one of Mr. Holland's students.

I have a feeling that Mr. Holland considers a great part of his own life misspent. Rumor has it he was always working on this symphony of his. And this was going to make him famous, rich, probably both. But Mr. Holland isn't rich and he isn't famous, at least not outside of our little town.

I hope I haven't already given too much away in case you haven't already seen Mr. Holland's Opus.

Maybe what Scuffy and Tootle and Mr. Holland teach us is that we can learn from others and our own experiences. We can also contemplate our future.

"Neuroscience has long recognized that emulation of the future is one of the main businesses intelligent brains invest in. By learning the rules of the world and simulating outcomes in the service of decision making, brains can play out events without the risk and expense of attempting them physically. As the philosopher Karl Popper wrote, simulation of the future allows 'our hypotheses to die in our stead.'" --David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, writing in The New York Times. August 2012.

In other words, we humans can play what-if. Kids do it all the time when they are playing make-believe. What if this... What if that... They are imagining possibilities, creating story lines. If only Scuffy could have contemplated the "what-if" of being a little toy boat in the deep, storm-tossed seas among the big ships, he could have saved himself the horror of reality. Maybe if he had, he would have known: life in the bathtub isn't so bad--metaphorically.

But, with apologies to Gertrude Crampton, I still contend that occasionally we need leave the tracks, color outside the lines, do something that makes our palms sweaty. To use a Mr. Holland analogy, Ms. Crampton would be happy to just play the notes on the page, when really, I believe God intended for us to be musical: so dance, or sing, or play.

Playing music is supposed to be fun. It's about heart, it's about feelings, moving people, and something beautiful, and it's not about notes on a page. I can teach you notes on a page, I can't teach you that other stuff. -- Mr. Holland

Anticipation

You know the Carly Simon song, "Anticipation"? It starts off:

We can never know about the days to come
But we think about them anyway

We, our family, are in the throes of life's most ancient and wonderful states of anticipation. If fact it is known as "Expecting!" It is so universal that when someone says "They're Expecting." You know what they're expecting without any additional information.

I'm sure right now, if she's reading this, our beautiful and very pregnant daughter-in-law is thinking, "What do you mean WE Ke-mo sah-bee!?" She is obviously doing all the heavy lifting, and other stuff I can't even imagine--having never been an expectant mother.

My Anticipation is easier. I just get to sit and imagine being even Pop-sier (Pops x3).

Back in the day, our cloud of Anticipation was darker. Heck we didn't even know what color to paint the nursery, or which wallpaper to hang: the one with rainbow colored pegasus/unicorns, or the little cowboys.

This is not Nora's actual picture. I "borrowed" it for illustration purposes only.

But we know, because of our complete trust in the doctor's reading of an image on a monitor, that this little baby we're expecting any day now, is a girl. She already has a name: Nora Grace. She has two loving parents, and two big sisters who are about to have their world's rocked.

There are some titles that people seek, you know, like: President, Senator, Miss America. Some are bestowed meritoriously: Homecoming queen, Most Likely to Whatever. Some people bring on themselves: Class Clown, Town Drunk, etc.

Then there are those titles that come by virtue of providence, like: POPS. I've been called a lot of things, but the grandest are Son, Husband, Dad, and POPS.

Today has started as most other days, but today, like yesterday, I am preoccupied--with ANTICIPATION.

Nora Grace, this is your POPS. We're ready when you are. 

Life As Story

FOR A WHILE NOW I've been working on a project called, "Storyline." It's the brainchild of Donald Miller. The project is about creating a life-planning process based on the elements of story and was developed combining the principles of screenwriting and storytelling.

I'm a big fan of Donald Miller--for several reasons: one, he is an excellent writer; two, his ideas of looking at our lives as STORY makes a lot of sense to me.

I love bildungsroman. Some of our most timeless and treasured stories are bildungsroman. You know the ones:

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

Bildungsroman are stories where the protagonist "comes of age." They're about maturity, passage, and developing morally and psychologically. This word, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, is a German word meaning "novel of education" or "novel of formation."

For us Baby Boomers, movies like The Graduate, To Kill A Mockingbird and Rebel Without a Cause are examples of this literary genre. Some of my other favorite coming-of-age films include: Dead Poets Society, The Breakfast Club, Stand By Me, and most recently Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.

We all have a personal story, we're living it, and sort of making it up as we go. No doubt you remember a version of your first coming-of-age. Maybe it centered around puberty, or a religious event, or a rite of passage like the new found freedom of a driver's license. Maybe it came through a trial of some kind: losing someone close to you, a loss of innocence--something that required you to grow up fast.

Today there is a state or condition called "teen angst". I don't know if it existed when I was a teen or not. If it did, maybe it didn't have a name. In a way, this "second coming of age", as I like to call this time of impending "retirement", has some of the dread, uncertainty, and anxiety that the first coming of age had.

Quote by Donald Miller. Image from Pinterest.

Back to Donald Miller and this whole life as story point of view--Donald wrote a memoir of sorts called, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life. Here's one of my favorite lines from the book:

“Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”
― Donald Miller

He's right; you know. Recently I found an Airstream that would have been a great fit for us. It was Used, but in great condition at a fair price. I disguised my fear of doing the deal behind a curtain of being wise and discretionary and responsible. A crock of BS, as the kids say. I was just afraid. Not that this is an example of a life-altering moment, but it is real. 

There's so much more I want to say on this topic, but I'm getting close to the "optimum word count for a good blog post." So I'll sign off with final words from Donald Miller from the same book:

“Once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.” ― Donald Miller

P.S.: I highly recommend you watch the movie, Stranger Than Fiction, with Will Ferrell and Dustin Hoffman. It's a great movie about life-as-story.