Seeing Ellen DeGeneres in the car with Jerry Seinfeld reminded me of when I gave her a ride in the mid-1980s, early in her career.
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It was a long time ago. I was 19, and M was 25. We worked together and played music together. At my dad’s funeral, I played guitar, and she sang.
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Photo by kavram
It’s funny what a little introspection and journal-keeping will do to awaken memories and echoes of insights and breakthroughs from the past. Not long ago, I found myself digging out a song that spoke to me the last time I spent this much time looking inward.
It’s from the band Orleans, and it’s titled “The Path.” The song comes from the band’s 1976 album “Waking and Dreaming,” the LP that gave the world the song “Still the One.” You can sample a short section of “The Path” by clicking on the link above.
(I’ve caught a lot of grief over the years for liking Orleans. For one thing, some have designated the album cover of “Waking and Dreaming” to be one of the worst ever, something you can easily read and see in detail with a quick Google search. Also, they’re from the ’70s, which is routinely regarded as a lost decade musically. But, every now and then, their songs contained wonderful nuggets of wisdom, or at least something thought-provoking. A World Literature class I had in high school was a de facto philosophy class at times, and much more than that, and our teacher encouraged us to bring in music with lyrics that spoke to themes we discussed in class. “Waking and Dreaming” was one of my take-to-class LPs. But enough of the disclaimer: I do get teased for enjoying Orleans, and I’m OK with that. If it’s a guilty pleasure, I don’t feel all that guilty about it.)
Image by Fine Art
They say the young question everything, and there’s enough anecdotal evidence to support that contention, but I find the longer I live the more questions I ask — of myself, and of the world.
Just now I was thinking about baseball. A friend of mine is a serious fan who knows the new statistics and the old. He loves good stories. He delves deeply into the game’s metrics and seems to understand the math and the poetry behind it.
Another friend just loves the game, and he doesn’t want to have to think about it too much. So I found myself pondering whether the world of baseball fans has more of the former or the latter. I felt the need to quickly answer that for myself, as if I could not leave it hanging like a curveball waiting to be hit out of the park.
Then, I heard myself think, “I don’t know.”
And I felt how liberating an admission it was, and is. It’s okay to not have the answer to everything. It really is.