Thoughtful - Some Things Are Not All That Funny

He might be somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty years old. He is tall and lean and weathered and black, and he looks like he is right at home under the Virginia sun. He has been standing in line for two hours, with his equally weathered wife at his side, and he is still less than half way through the line. He is calmly and happily waiting for his turn to vote.

The television reporter asks him how he feels, and a shy smile lights up his face as he opens his mouth to speak. But then his voice catches in his throat, and he has to cough and clear his throat and wipe the corner of his eye before he can answer. He looks at his wife, and says, "I never thought I'd see this day."

I'm walking to work and a conservatively dressed white man in his sixties stops me to hand me a "Don't Forget To Vote" door hanger. His haircut, polished shoes and wool jacket say "lawyer," or maybe "accountant." The logo on the door hanger he gives me says, "Barack Obama."

The teenaged boy sits in a green resin chair across the stage from me, on the other side of a circle of nine teenaged boys in green resin chairs. The stage lights of the otherwise empty theater bathe us all in a warm glow, here in this maximum-security juvenile detention facility.

His name is "Dallas." His blue shirt means that he is "transitional," getting toward the end of his sentence. If all goes well and his judge agrees, he could be out in a few weeks or months, tackling the next challenge in his journey back into our world. 

I first met Dallas more than two years ago, in one of the first incarnations of the roots music-writing programs that have come to be known as Lost Voices. We were sitting on this same stage, in these same chairs. He wore a yellow shirt then, signifying among other things that he was going to remain locked up for the foreseeable future.

My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary on Saturday. We've
been married thirty-three years; that's twelve thousand and forty-five
days. Actually, twelve thousand and fifty-three, if I've managed to
calculate the leap years right.

This means that my wife has had to listen to me singing the first verse
(the only part I know) of Bob Dylan's "Buckets of Rain" something like
seventy-two thousand, three hundred and eighteen times, a feat of
endurance that some experts feel ranks right up there with surviving
the Spanish Inquisition or a Neil Diamond concert. Personally, I think
I at least partially broke her spirit sometime in the mid-eighties.

Father's Day is coming up. It is one of my favorite holidays, mostly because "dad" is by far the coolest job I've ever had. It is also a little bit sad for me, because my own dad died when I was a sophomore in college.

My dad was ancient. After all, he had patches of gray hair at his temples, and he was not even remotely able to understand the things that were really important in my world. He was a big, strong, clever, funny guy, and I really admired him. But in my eyes he was also pretty much over-the-hill.

He was forty-six years old, exactly ten years younger than I am right now.

I think about this quite a bit, and I have to admit that it confuses me. Am I really a whole decade more over-the-hill than my dad was? There are days when I really think so, especially when I accidentally catch a good look at myself in a full-length mirror.

It's a lot more likely, though, that what we're really talking about is the view through the eyes of a twenty-year-old who knew everything there was to know, and who fully intended to live and stay young forever.

Many years ago, when I was a creative director in the advertising business, my team had the opportunity to create the theme for a new restaurant. We wanted it to be sports-oriented, but we were trying for something a little bit different from the standard hot-wings-and-a-pitcher-while-you-watch-the-game sports bar.

It was a Friday when I discovered that our client was about to buy a pre-fabricated family bar/restaurant package, apparently a fairly standard 1980's BenniFriApplChiligans menu with a clever assortment of antique wagon wheels and pitchforks to hang on the wall. I had somehow managed to  convince them to give me one week to show them a better concept.

I knew that it would take my artists, turbocharged as they were with Snickers bars and Mountain Dew, every bit of five days to create the artwork I would need for the client pitch. This meant that I had the weekend to come up with some sort of idea.