by Fitz | Apr 9, 2016 | Essays, Journal
A lot of things in life fall short of the mark, but thoughtfulness has never let me down. For some forty years I have faithfully kept journals of the wanderings of my mind—most of which is lost in some way or another, but the effect hangs on like a sailor clinging to a piece of flotsam: it proves to me that I am real and not lost; it creates substance out of what might otherwise be ephemeral ether lost to the vagaries of procrastinated time. In the meandering evolution of my words set to page is left a lingering mark etched into a marble wall of time that can never be sandblasted clean.
Simple reminders that I am what I am.
It is almost frightening to know that who I am is freighted with an urgency to continually change what I am. The irony is in how tightly I must shut my eyes to see clearly into myself. Stripped bare I am a meagre and skeletal portrait of a man—a shaky scaffold of dreams and desires connected inextricably to the pulsing aorta of reality.
Life. Ineffable life.
But it can not be any other way.
I am doomed and emboldened to speak the voice that barks and sings, laments and praises, and shouts and drones the inexcusable and intransigent me in glorious triumph and ignominious defeat. I need to see my reflection in stark contrasts: I need a barometric gauge to sense and measure the depth of the coming storms or easy weather. I need to know when to set anchor or set sail.
And all I have is words to guide me.
Words and love are all that is real to me, but it is only words that I question. I do not question my love or unequivocal devotion to Denise or our children or the eclectic diaspora of extended family. I only struggle with the constructs I create. I question my words because they are not created for me—they are created for you; hence, they are weighted by all that preys upon me: vanity, desire and a mania for a purposeful and meaningful life—the very stating of which is almost an anathema, a self-aggrandizing denial and abnegation of human empathy!
Stripped of words I can only utter and respond to what is palpably real and connected to me. I protect my own in spite of all else. Viciously so. And that is good and right and is built into me, and it is unerringly built into me by the hands of a creator beyond my understanding, enough so that I question my reflection on any still waters I see. Beyond faith. Beyond the myopia of circumstance. Beyond anything we share. I am left with words.
It simply is.
I write because I know no other way, but I have no illusions that my path is leading to a greater source. I am constantly humbled by the misdirections I follow. I am less of a guide than a foot soldier commandeered to go foot-first into the minefields of a greater field laced with weed and flower. My solace is that I am still alive—that somehow I have navigated well enough to be where I am—safe, secure, and almost retired into a golden age. I covet my joy like a child his or her inheritance of perpetual splendor. I cannot count or measure my blessings; I can only pass them on.
So I close my eyes at night and expect an infinite dawn.
And so can you.
by Fitz | Mar 18, 2016 | Essays, Journal
I wonder why Trump is not flipping me out? I wonder if there is some bigoted, ignorant and right-wing element that lurks inside this folk-singing, poem writing, neo-socialist shell of mine.
Maybe it is not that hard for me to make the empathetic reach to feel at least some of the heartbeat of angst, alienation, and pissed-offedness of a broader than we think sub-segment of society that is—or at least feels it is— being intellectually belittled by the righteous arrogance and condemnations of people who know better, who are not white trash racists and who occupy a moral high ground that they preach from with smug self-aggrandizement.
Yes! Trump is a horrible choice for president. He is, to my mind at least, a pompous, opportunistic ass who is rife with contradictions and simplistic approaches to befuddling issues, BUT there is no denying he is also a populist voice who provides an outlet—and now a platform—for those who don’t feel represented by the political establishments (left and right) or the omnipresent media and who don’t feel heard in this present moiled and muddied times.
We will not win over the votes of “Trump Nation” by a constant drumbeat of belittling diatribes that only serve to fortify the “wall” they are building around themselves. All of us are prey to misguided ideologies, and I am convinced that Trump’s ideology is especially misguided, even dangerous, but in the end, we are an amazing country of many voices, many points of view and a thoughtfulness that is often astounding. We are, however, sorry listeners whose first instinct is to tribalize into competing factions.
There is no reason to panic. Trump is not going to derail our nation, even if he wins the nomination or even if he wins the presidency. Life, democracy and our nation will move ahead, and perhaps even be better and stronger for it. This a time for dialogue with each other—and dialogue needs ears that hear, and hearts that feel and try to understand, not simply mouths that roar.
This is an opportunity for the greatness of democracy to act in an enlightened, passionate and compassionate way and to look at our own personal flaws and biases as deeply as we look at those of our perceived enemies , who are, in reality our brothers and sisters—a family joined at the hips in this noble experiment that is America.
And we should never turn our backs to family…
by Fitz | Dec 25, 2015 | Essays, Journal
I am not sure what Christmas really is anymore. I am almost afraid to think of what Christians are going through in the lands of the original Christian faith. By dint of place and time, I grew up in the Catholic faith, and try as I might, I can’t ever escape the roots of my Christian faith—though I am never absolutely convinced it is faith. It is, however, my means to a more spiritual life. I cannot kneel down in a church and not feel humbled by my “humanness.” It is the only place where I am completely contrite and real and searching.
I would love for more certainty. I would love for my faith to rule out all others, if only to be sure of my way through the Skyllian straits of life where every decision is based on uncertainty. I live within the weakness and greyer shades of heart and intellect mixed with an enduring hope that God works beyond the limits of my understanding—for what I know is always overshadowed by what I do not know. It is my restless soul– a battle that does not rage, but simmers beneath my surface, and what simmers is an overflowing broth of searching and acceptance.
A true God could expect nothing less.
My kids—all seven of them—gathered on couches and chairs around the TV last night and watched “Elf” together. I stood (yes, stood) watching them sprawled amongst each other laughing and simply being the family they are and was astonished that they are the fruit of mine and Denise’s creation. I did not need a re-reading of Genesis or a prayerful recollection of the Gospel of Mathew to know that we are more than bits of atoms and amino acids. I did not need anything more than the tears that streamed out of the depth of a magnificent and overwhelming grace and gratitude to accept the paradigm of a continued rebirthing of life and purpose.
The paltry presents under our tree are simply seeds—reminders of an enduring commitment to what we started as a family some twenty or more years ago, a nano second and molecule of time, that makes everything—everything!—as real and palpable as faith can be. It is our faith, in all of its myopic and blessed beauty! It is not a refutation of other faiths or a stubborn clinging to tradition; it is just who we are and what we aspire to be embedded in the culture of our lives—an instrument of God playing out a unique and enduring song that we sing with whomever is close at hand, regardless of the chorus we sing with. It is our collective soul that sings and rings of possibility—and within that myriad of possibilities are those chances we can’t afford to let slip by.
But they do slip by.
The animosity of righteousness blurs the boundary of our universal human decency, and so the quest to be right overrules the common sense of enlightened acceptance of differences. Here it is a fairly benign bigotry and self-centric claims of higher understanding above a more common ignorance—though it seldom really is. In the Holy land it is a bitter dogfight won or lost in brutality, subjugation and indifference to the human cost. We drop bombs and calculate in the cruel calculus of war what is acceptable loss. The warring factions in the Middle East brings a closer look at an equal depravity that seemingly knows no bounds.
Watching “Elf,” a Hollywood movie by any measure, I was struck by the ending. Nothing survives without a common song sung in common spirit and a belief in the unbelievable. The “reality” of Santa Claus in our home is never a point of discussion. There is no finite point of belief or disbelief. There is no age for our children that demarcates the real from the unreal. Santa is not a bringer of toys. He is the clarion song of reason in a world that is losing its reason. In the panoply of faith, Santa is an adjunct of Christian faith enacted in an enduring way, and while manipulated, distorted and blasphemed by commercialism, he still retains a power that we cling to because we have to believe and any diminishing of that faith diminishes the promise of a humane humanity.
Perhaps Santa is showing us that the giving of gifts supersedes the receiving of gifts, and all any of us can do is to give what we are able to give, and the larger that circle of giving, the larger the effect on the world. There is no true resolution in the dropping of bombs, the massacres of people of a particular faith or self-styled recitations of myopic arrogance. Herds of people are culled from the planet by the innocuous circumstances of fate.
Christmas is an action more than a belief. It is not just some enduring tradition perpetuated by ignorance. It is a stoppage in time, a resetting of the clock to a more infinite time, one that only God seems to understand, and if we don’t stop, the current reality will not stop and the tailspins of history will spiral in devolution and degradation in a return to a baseness that deflates and kills the promise of free will, which, in the end, is all we really have.
If you do not believe in Christmas, at least believe in the promise.
It is a reasonable start…
by Fitz | Dec 17, 2015 | Essays, Journal
I realized that in all my years of writing and journal keeping, I seldom, if ever, write about “The Inn,” which is and has been, the biggest and most enduring constant in my life for the past thirty plus years. Every Thursday night I load up my car, truck, bus or whatever I happen to be driving at the time with my guitar, amps and broken-down paraphernalia of a small-potato folksinger, and I head to The Colonial Inn in Concord MA and take up my stool in the corner of the Village Forge Pub, and I start to sing–sometimes non-stop for several hours and sometimes with long and friendly breaks thrown in to meet up with old friends or let someone else on stage–almost always some musician with better chops than mine. I can honestly say that have never had a bad night. I’ve had tough nights with indifferent crowds, no crowds or loud crowds, but something always happens to “redeem the night,” and I never drive home feeling eternity has in any sense been wounded by the night.
It is that redemption that gives me the energy, no matter what my energy really is. Music does not soothe the soul–it energizes life and gives a deeper substance that is as real as any seed planted in a welcome soil.
That soil is you, whoever “you” are.
You might be an old high school buddy who laughs and wonders when the hell I ever started playing guitar. You might be some snowbound or life-bound traveler spending a night at the inn. You might be a business- man or woman pouring over spreadsheets in the corner. You might be a friend or group of friends celebrating life or mourning a death or just reconnecting. You might be a lonely drunk or a bitter drunk or just a drunk searching for a better elixir to get you through the life you have or have created. You might be a family out for a burger and chicken fingers and a round of sodas. You might be my wife Denise who sees and senses and knows everything that is me. You might be one of my kids getting on stage to give the old man a break, or one of my students finally getting the courage to sing to a crowd. You might be the bartender: Joe, Subhas, Leslie, Garret, Nick or Patti and my only crowd.
In every case “you” make “me” possible. And, for the most part, I have stopped arguing with myself, and maybe that is why people keep coming by.
Some years ago a reporter from The Boston Globe asked me what I like to sing, and in a moment of profundity, I responded, “Anything that I know that someone wants to hear.” I have butchered many a song on stage, not because I do not know the song, but because I want to know the song; I want to give it a try, and I learned long ago that if I only sing what I know well, I would have a very short set-list. I’ve learned in the magical process of learning, butchering and relearning that my sets are a constantly evolving paradigm–a flow that emerges in a new way in each moment. Each night is a new night and a new way of seeing the world in front of me. I am blessed by the solipsism of a small bar in my hometown of Concord. It is, for those few hours, my universe, and I am pulled by the gravity of tradition to just keep singing.
Everything simply falls in place.
When I started back in the winter of 1983, I had dreams that this was only a beginning–a way to lay a foundation beneath a singer/songwriter destined for some broader fame. Now I am happy to settle for a larger fame, one that my youth could never dream. Tonight my stage will be as large as it ever was or needs to be. Seth and Hatrack might show–two of my oldest and best friends–and we will settle in with me in a crowded corner. Tom Sheppard might come by with his big bass. Keith might lug in his drum kit. You might even be there.
We will meet new people. We’ll sing and laugh and play and experiment and never imagine defaming the night with a list of songs. The true and palpable magic just happens.
It is a damn fine universe, and all I really need.
by Fitz | Dec 13, 2015 | Essays, Journal
I woke up today with chores on my mind. My buddy Josh LoPresti lent me his woodsplitter, and I had dreams of a mindless day splitting wood and heaving it into a pile for my kids to stack along the fence. But the dryer was broken, and it needed to be fixed. Margret’s brakes were completely shot and needed to be replaced–something EJ is good at tackling with his inimitable genius. Still, I kept my woodsplitting dream alive. I went out and realized I should move the dry wood to the porch and so loaded two truckloads and heaved them in a pile on the back deck and finally got cracking with the splitter.
About five logs into my joy EJ walked out back and said the bolts on the rotor were nigh about impossible to loosen, so I drove to Tom Cumming’s house for some advice and a bigger wrench–one that would give us some better leverage on the bolt. Tom does not know the word “no” or the phrase “it can’t be done.”
Still, it wouldn’t budge. But then Rex stopped by and convinced me not to try and put a cord on the dryer Billy Cooper donated to me yesterday–as good as that dryer was. “We can fix the one you have–but first, let’s get those bolts off.”
“Not to worry, Rex,” I told him. “I can always call Sal Angelone and Andy Bloch just sent me a novel-length description of what to do, and if I looked perplexed enough, my neighbor Tom will mosey over and probably do it for me…and if worse comes to worse, I’ll call Sal–the master of all things mechanical.”
Rex’s solution, arrived at after a slew of colorful language that had EJ and I smiling, was to simply turn the steering wheel so that the wrench handle would be outside the wheel well, and damn him, the extra purchase gave us the leverage we needed.
Then Rex tackled the dryer–a dryer that cost way too much and was only a year and a half old–six months past its warranty from Home Depot. More colorful language mixed in with “It is the f…ing motor, something is stuck in there!” Sure enough, after taking the whole dryer apart (held together by a myriad slew of screws, there was a pencil stuck in the fan.” We put it all back together, tested it and it worked like a charm.
But…when I went to reattach the cord, I dropped a screw that sets the wire to a terminal–a very small screw that simply “disappeared” on us. We combed the ground everywhere for close to an hour…nothing, nowhere. We could not find the screw for the life of us, and so the pile of laundry would keep piling as no store in town or out of town had that stupid little terminal screw.
Rex went home. Denise was bummed as laundry was her project of the day, and with her indefatigable energy and resolve was all set for a longer trip to Home Depot for a final last ditch attempt at screw-buying. Right as she was leaving I offered a $5.00 reward to any of my children who could find the screw.
Money is a wonderful motivator. There was a scramble of kids headed to the basement.
Margaret found it within two minutes, more or less hiding in plain sight. The dryer was fixed. EJ replaced the brakes. The other kids stacked all the wood on the porch, and now I am out back on the oh so neat back deck smoking a cigar, sipping tea while sitting between neatly stacked wood–enough I promised them to get us through to March, when we can tackle the other pile if needed.
The unsplit wood is still unsplit. I have no doubt that Josh will grant me a few more days. The splitter is covered for the night. The kids are sprawled on couches. There are hot dogs still to be grilled.
I woke up feeling blessed that I had the time and place and wherewithal to do the daily chores of life, but more so feeling blessed to live in this tiny town of Maynard where people seem to find the time to help each other in small and magnanimous ways–where philanthropy is an action of everyday life, not a pillar or plaque set in some museum or school hallway.
This is where I live.
I am glad to be here.
