The songs are intrepid—about travel, strangers rendezvousing, searching for meaning in night skies, love, loss and pondering the complicated web of existence we possess individually, yet share communally.
You get glimpses of your future when you are young—fledging behind things you are drawn to. When I was newly minted teenager, I dug through a box of promotional CDs that labels had sent to my dad’s radio station and found one of my first articulated hints.
Most of the music was quite bad. But one CD, Full Moon Bay’s 2002 CD Back Into The Night, entranced me. I didn’t just hear the music—I could see it. I imagined what it was like for this band to play shows, guessed the relationship between the drummer and the guitarist, and felt pretty confident that these people spent their free time playing guitar on a beach. I felt like these were songs about some previous lifetime that seemed vaguely like my own. More likely, I agreed with the sentiments conveyed in the music on a deep, philosophical level.
The songs are intrepid—about travel, strangers rendezvousing, searching for meaning in night skies, love, loss and pondering the complicated web of existence we possess individually, yet share communally.
The first track of the album sings, “Everyone goes round and round, looking or paradise, you just gotta roll that dice and hope it comes your way / Because when it all comes down the trouble with paradise. Is the closer you get the more it seems to slip away.”
The prose in the lyrics on track 3 is cutting, “You can’t go home again / Because you’re the one who’s waiting now for someone to return,” but track eight returns the balance to unity, “Every heart must find one heart.”
Track four is about meeting a romance in mountains of Spain that give way to the cave of the hills. The musical line-up features an accordion, Spanish guitars, a flute, sax, harmonic and even a singing cockatiel singing about the never ending battle between the dollar and the clock, voices across the water, yesterday’s love, and going back into the night. At fourteen, I was hooked, and still listen to the album.
I listened to it today, and I was thinking about the different stages of the human life, as I climbed the last kilometer up the mountain to El Hobbiton—thinking about how our individual moments add up to create a lifetime which eventually ends.
This morning, when I called my mom and sister to wish them a happy birthday, my mom informed me that my grandma—her mom—would likely not make it through the night. My grandma had been unwell for quite sometime, and without the ability to speak since a stroke several years ago. This morning she is still clinging feebly to life and in a great deal of pain.
Her diet for much of her adult life consisted of candy, cigarettes and coffee; so that she made it into her 80s is quite impressive. I remember most about her was that she was always chuckling about something or other. It seemed daily life for her consisted of constant hilarity.
I last saw her two years ago when my brother Tyler and I made an impromptu trip to Detroit to visit them. We had just paid for a 3-day campsite in a state park in Mississippi. We called our mom to say “hey” and found out that she was not in North Dakota, but visiting her parents in Michigan.
When was the last time we had seen our grandparents, we wondered?
One of us said something like, “If we gunned it we could be there in a day.”
The other said something like, “This might be our last chance to see them?”
It took not long at all for both of us to agree to pull up our stakes, abandoned the campsite we had just paid for and drive a straight 20-hour shot to Michigan. We’d last seen this set of grandparents when I was a teenager.
We spent three days in Michigan and everything else about the route that we took over the next two months stemmed from that stop-off.
Tyler and I played music for her, and during one song she gestured frantically for my grandpa to turn of the TV—an unexpected gesture from her that said what her words no longer could.
Today Tyler is in Colorado, and I am in Guatemala and my grandmother is taking her last breaths in Michigan. Much of my family will understand this loss in the Catholic context. For me I understood that last night on top of a mountain, every single cloud had a unique and brilliant hue. I understand that in the scheme of time we are here for an instant. One decision to pull up our stakes leads to the rest of your life from that point.
I understood when the sunset’s orange turned to dark purple and stars began popping up that the universe is beyond our understanding, and what little we know about it is jostling. I understand that our own existence led to life and life leads to it’s own letting go and that soon my grandmother will be gone here on earth.
Walking down the mountain after dark, I thought about what I knew about my grandmother—the different stages of her life as told by my mother and learned through the times I’d visited her throughout my life. Grandma Julie, you will be missed. The stories and memories we have of you will be cherished and you won’t stop recurring in our thoughts.
