coming down post-wedding

It's been a long year and a month of planning, containing, shaping, disagreeing, hoping, worrying, envisioning and most of all buying. The wedding was eight days ago. It was worth it. It was beautiful, incredibly fun and exciting, and perfect in almost every way. At least I thought so, and the bride thought so, so anyone who thought differently can take a flying slide down their own aisle.

But the side effects are a bit daunting. It is almost like being underwater I am so drained of energy, or motivation, and even now, countless conversations recounting little vignettes of sweetness or fun later, it grows boring. I don't want to see the pictures anymore. It is like a good movie viewed too many times that becomes banal or trivial. So I just want the feeling, the glow, to exist as a chimera, a golden token to return to after it is almost forgotten.

And I never want to buy anything again.

Bridges to the Monumental

The bridge over the Urubamba inspires me this morning. A claptrap of boards and rickety iron rails crosses a torrent of latte colored water and huge boulders and begins the switchbacks that climb the mountain to Machu Picchu. On the Aguas Caliente side is a small grotto with a statute of the Virgin Mary surrounded by bouquets of varying degrees of decay. When the bus crosses the boards clatter and jump. The water is terrifyingly close. One would not survive long, torn down the current into the rocks.

Are all transitions to the monumental so precarious?

It seems that most do not recognize this bridge as anything of note. My family did not even notice the grotto. Chided me for worrying about spilling into the river. Ahead lay the real attraction. Later, when we returned, we got the cheap thrill of hanging out over in the river in the last row of the bus as it did it's turnaround for yet another trip to the citadel, but we were always safe. Hanging for our moment above the rushing water we could feel the thrill just beyond our reach.

It strikes me that one should pay more note to the process of getting somewhere. This is what an explorer might have done, noting landmarks for the safe return. Nowadays, the hard parts are done for us, and the bus follows its well worn path. But that bridge, those monuments, the offerings to the lords of our fate, are to remind us:

Pay attention to the path.

The Odds

I heard this thing on NPR yesterday that I wanted to share.

Apparently the game on Sunday between the Chargers and the Steelers will go down in history as the first NFL game to have the final score 11-10. The stats guy was explaining that this was a very rare score for football, but had happened twice in college football. So they calculated the odds as being 13,000 to 1 of any game ending in that score. Then they tried to find something else with those odds to compare it to.

It turns out that the odds of having a hole-in-one in any round of golf are 13,000 to 1.

On Saturday at Aunt Rita's funeral her son Tom gave the eulogy, pointing out Rita's biggest accomplishment: She had three holes-in-one in her lifetime of playing golf.

Golf is pretty big in this side of our family. The Beaupres have owned a golf course, Plum Brook, which was designed by my great grandfather and his brother, Francis and Michael Beaupre, since the early part of the 20th century. (Gramma Hoot worked in the kitchen of the clubhouse during World War II when it looked like the business was going to go under. She probably thought cooking for her brood was a piece of cake after that.) Anyway, Rita, the youngest daughter, must have gotten a lot of chances to improve her odds on getting a hole-in-one. Malcolm Gladwell has a new book pointing out that the success at doing something improves with the numbers.

I was pretty impressed by my Aunt's golf prowess. And I was looking for ice-breakers for luncheon conversation on this cold day. I asked my Uncle Bill, who has been pretty sick getting chemo/radiation for bladder cancer. He'd never had a hole-in-one, and he could not remember why he quit playing golf. Your shoulder, reminded Aunt Laurie. Uncle John was disgusted with himself that he'd never had one, and he is the big talented golfer of his brothers. I knew my Dad had not had a hole-in-one.

So I got wondering about Rita's boys. My cousin Ron, who is closest to my age, was the unbelievable golfer of the family. He won so many amateur golf tournaments that there was talk of him fulfilling a family fantasy and going pro, though he did not. I asked him in line for the buffet about how he and his brothers did with the holes-in-one. He'd had two, and his brother Ted, one, but his wife had three. As we went down the buffet line, she explained that she had not been a golfer when he married her, but she figured she'd have to learn if she was to have any hope of seeing her husband on the weekends. He'd taught her for awhile until it looked like divorce was imminent and then she got another golf club pro to help. She also teased Ron for his reaction to her third. "He didn't say congratulations, or good for you, or how'd you do it. He said: 'Now you have one more than me!'" Ron explained his wife's prowess by saying she had the right job for golf; she's a teacher. "She had her summers off!" he protested.

Gladwell's new book points out the 10,000 hour rule: The idea that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve the mastery of something. Apparently in golf, it takes a little more: 13,000 games. I thought it an amazing coincidence to have heard about these odds in the casual living of my life. And it has gotten me thinking about the significance. (Did God have a plan in determining the outcome of the football game that held up the 60 MInutes with Obama's first post-election interview on Sunday? A plan that directly correlated to the previous day's Beaupre family funeral discussion?)

So to you my lovlies, I would like to point out one tiny insight: that each and every hour that goes into you doing the things that matter to your life's dreams is just one more chit in beating the odds.

Wilco day

No sun coming up. Ashy gray at the fringes of the landscape. Decay is the theme.

Except for the inward picture where joy blooms, anticipation quickens the blood, and the movement of the day is a glorious train towards the date with my greatest mood elevator. The transformative power of music is my last great hope for unlocking emotion. Senses fail, but music awakens.

I can't wait for those boys and their thrilling rock cascades.

Autumn Depths

They say that middle age is the autumn of our lives. Today I feel it. The sickening frustration with every long held issue. The lack of olfactory stimulus weighs more heavily since I glimpsed that Paris of feeling last weekend on a prednisone high. Of course, the comedown may also be responsible for this sinking into the negative. I could have been dead by now. Or blinded by the sinus surgery. Or addicted to pain pills. Instead I have what I have to carry forward. But today these are burdens, not attributes. Stranger still hot flashes have returned. Oh the adrenal gland, are you the pit of all that makes me. And is that what Autumn is for: appreciating these undertones of life, the long ignored shade cast all around us, when all we have wanted was the sun.

Summer Endings

The heat is gone. The memories drift into that sepia tone that softens every rough spot. The baseball season is winding down. Only one game of that glut of tickets that once sprinkled our calendars with the promise of hot dogs and a chance to raise our voices at the ol' ballgame.

For me it means organizing the scrims and dabblings into something that might resemble a chapter or a story. And wonder which one of these holds the art.

Summer's sweetness waiting to be bottled. And could its music last forever?

shortest night of the year

Maybe I've got it all wrong. But it seems to me the shortest night is what it's all about. Not as much time to obsess and worry. Less time to feel fitfully awake and out of place. The rest of the world celebrates the sun, and i celebrate it's briefer break from our reality. Night when all the husbands seem like idiots, and all the accomplishments seem like child's play and every action has an equal and opposite dread.