A number of factors and influences came together recently with the end result being to get me to write more often and on more topics (generally) and to write this blog (specifically). The primary force was the growing urge / need / compulsion to write and allow myself a creative outlet. Other influence came from the urging of certain friends, the blog created by The Younger Daughter to document her time abroad, a dog’s encounter with a skunk, and the serendipitous discovery of a most wonderful blog and website by a favorite writer.
As someone who has read “Flying” magazine off and on for decades, and has read it religiously since starting my own flying lessons about two years ago, I’ve found a number of really wonderful writers working for that publication. If you like flying and would love to read some great stories and articles about all aspects of aviation, particularly general aviation, I urge you to read “Flying” either in print or online.
Lane Wallace’s “Flying Lessons” column in the July, 2009 issue really caught my eye. We’re all in a time of transition and turbulence with the loops that the last year’s economy has thrown us. On top of that, some of us are finding ways to deliberately shake it up by doing things like getting an MBA, taking flying lessons after age 50, and starting to write a blog. So I really enjoyed the “Uncertain Storms” column that Lane wrote and her points on what we can learn about life from being a pilot really rang true with me.
After harassing a number of people I know and insisting that they read it immediately, I went back a month or so later to re-read it and to send out the article’s online link (http://www.flyingmag.com/flyinglessons/1630/uncertain-storms.html) to a list of family and friends. And I noticed something I had missed the first time, a comment in the afterward about a website to visit and a free e-book to which this article was related. That started a whole new round of referrals and proselytizing as I’ve been telling everyone who will listen about this fascinating, thoughtful, and inspiring website that Ms. Wallace founded.
It was like another light bulb had gone on after a long time in darkness. I started to wonder about the snowballing avalanche of signs and portents that were being thrown at me. Had they been there all the time and I had suddenly stopped being blind to them, or had I made some sort of transition to a better path so that they were available to me now when they hadn’t been before? I don’t know, I need some more thought on that. But the fact is that I was finding a lot to think about, some great new resources, and I was looking forward to every new post.
And then Ms. Wallace wrote this interesting review for her August 25th post (http://www.nomapnoguidenolimits.com/2009/08/25/leading-from-within) and another pile of puzzle pieces clicked together. Go read the article. It’s OK. I’ll wait here for you…
(Insert soft, patient, off-key humming of The MomDude while he waits for you to get back. Probably “Defying Gravity” from “Wicked”...)
You see what I mean about that site? Great stuff! And when I read that particular article, my brain went back to high school in a flash. The Idiot Subconscious took over and it was like watching a movie on the freakin’ huge screen at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, sitting in the front row with five stories of Cinamascope glory searing your eyeballs.
On the wall in the locker room used by our football and basketball teams was a poem to which I can still remember the first lines:
“How do you act when the pressure’s on?
When the chance for victory is almost gone…”
That poem had not only seen me through high school, but it had been a great help to me in some dark days when I was at Annapolis and wondering what I had gotten myself into. It had helped me get up off of the proverbial mat more than a few times, both mentally and physically.
A couple of years later, no longer at Annapolis but now busting my ass at UC Irvine as a physics major while also working full time (and then some) and trying to keep my sanity and my GPA afloat, I again remembered that poem from the locker room. Not remembering the whole thing, at one point I took a shot in the dark and wrote a letter back to my old high school basketball coach, asking him if it was still on that wall, and if so, could I get a copy? It was and I did. Thanks, Coach! It really did help.
But that was long ago and the copy was long lost as life moved on, things got different, marriage and kids came along, and so on. The poem was remembered but pushed back into the hazy past. Until Ms. Wallace’s column whacked me square between the eyes.
Now I need to find that poem again. Coach has long ago retired. I have no idea who would be in charge at that high school now, not that I couldn’t track someone down if necessary. But of course it’s not at all necessary - a quick Google search produced the following, just as I remembered it:
How do you act when the pressure's on,
When the chance for victory is almost gone.
When Fortune's star has refused to shine,
When the ball is on your five yard line?
How do you act when the going's rough,
Does your spirit lag when the breaks are tough?
Or, is there in you a flame that glows
Brighter as fiercer the battle grows?
How hard, how long will you fight the foe?
That's what the world would like to know!
Cowards can fight when they're out ahead.
The uphill grind shows a thoroughbred!
You wish for success? Then tell me son,
How do you act when the pressure's on?
So it’s not Shakespeare. Or Kipling. Or maybe it is. While I’m happy as a clam to have “found” my “lost” treasure, and found it on several websites (including, not surprisingly, on a few current high school football schedules and calendars), only one of those websites gives a credit for it, and they list it as being from “The Winner’s Manual” by Jim Tressel, head football coach at Ohio State University.
While I don’t doubt that the poem will be in Coach Tressel’s book (I’ve got a copy on order), I doubt that he wrote it. For one thing, he’s only three years older than I am, so as good as he might be, I don’t think he was writing inspirational poetry as a young man of 17 in Ohio and getting it posted on locker room walls in Vermont. Call me crazy, but I think the odds are against it.
“No Map…” is a great website, an instant front page bookmark for me. I get to read even more of Ms. Wallace’s writing than “Flying” brings me each month. The fondly remembered and cherished inspirational poem of my youth is back for me to post somewhere where it can once again help me up off of my mental face when I’ve been slam-danced into the turf by a bad day. I’m writing my blog to share all of this with you. The pieces are falling together, almost like bliss.
But who wrote the poem?
Monday, September 14, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
A Date Is A Date Is A Date
For those of us using the Gregorian calendar (as opposed to the Julian, Lunar, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Islamic, Hebrew, Germanic, or ISO Week Date), today is 09-09-09. The internet and news programs have had numerous articles in the past few days about numerology and the significance given to the date. For the record, as a card-carrying pragmatist with a degree in physics, “numerology” is 100%, high-grade bullshit. But that doesn’t mean that the day with the repeating digits isn’t significant to me personally, and I was surprised when it snuck up on me.
One of the reasons that I note the date is because September 9th is the birthday of a friend and co-worker of many years. That makes it more memorable to me that March 3rd, May 5th, July 7th, August 8th, October 10th, or December 12th. (It’s left as an exercise to the student to figure out why January 1st, February 2nd, April 4th, June 6th, and November 11th are more memorable than average.) But beyond that, it was a very closely related “special” date ten years ago that first got September 9th stuck in a prominent part of my brain.
It was on “9-9-99” that my divorce from The Kids’ Mother was finalized.
We had been separated for almost three years by that time and I was even more years into that unexpected phase of life that earned me the “MomDude” non de plume, but a five-minute meeting with a judge on that day of many nines made it official and permanent. No muss, no fuss, no screaming, no scenes, no lawyers. The fact that our divorce was “amicable” is one of the only good aspects of what is by default a grueling and painful process.
So now I’m surprised by the fact that today I was completely blindsided by the ten-year anniversary of that reasonably significant life event. I remembered the friend’s birthday. I saw all of the BS on the idiot box about the numbers in the dates all lining up. I noted that the big “Beatlemania” release of new video games and the latest Apple Computer conferences were today, probably not by coincidence. I am looking forward to seeing the new Tim Burton film “9” that opens today. But somehow that ten-year anniversary was hidden from me by The Idiot Subconscious.
At least, it was hidden until yesterday afternoon. As so often happens, The Idiot Subconscious picks the most off-guard times for its reveals, maximizing the “shock and awe” effect on my mental equilibrium. Or maybe it just seems that way, an egocentric selection effect of some sort. I’ll have to ask The Village Wise Woman.
From there it gets fuzzy, meaning that I’m not quite sure I how feel about it all, or how I should feel about it. For one thing, it’s been ten years, pure and simple. A lot of that pain and grief has faded simply due to time. A lot of the structural/logistical nightmares and frustration have vanished into memory due to changing circumstances. The kids have grown, I’ve remarried, The Kids’ Mother passed away a few years back. Yeah, it was something of a red-letter day at the time, but that time has passed. Yeah, ten years is one of those “big” anniversaries, but I haven’t exactly been having celebratory anniversary parties every September 9th for the previous nine years. (Well, OK, there was that one wild party in my head on the first anniversary…) In short, we’ve moved on.
Right?
Maybe I’m just worried about encroaching senility, which is more likely not senility at all but simply an odd foible of an imperfect human brain. Is the problem that it really, really seems that I should have remembered, and it bothers me that I didn’t, that I forgot? Is it just that I’m caught off guard by the fact that I didn’t remember, juxtaposed with the perception (correct or otherwise) that it should be an important anniversary?
Too many angels dancing on the head of a pin, too much worrying about it, too much trying to understand and control rather than simply being. No doubt it’s the result of a Catholic school upbringing and the latent guilt that it tried to imbed in every cell of my body. It can make you crazy, and nearly has at times.
But, hey!! Remember, it’s the new me that’s in charge, and I hereby declare that it doesn’t matter that I forgot, or didn’t remember, or didn’t notice, or whatever happened. The date and the anniversary are worth noting, but only in proper perspective, and that perspective is that we have moved on and we are continuing to move on. As they say when they fly the Blackbird, “Yeah, though I fly through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no Evil, for I am at Mach 8, 70,000 feet and climbing!!”
Maybe I should just go get an XBox 360 and the deluxe version of The Beatles Rockband and stay up until about 4:30 in the morning rocking out.
One of the reasons that I note the date is because September 9th is the birthday of a friend and co-worker of many years. That makes it more memorable to me that March 3rd, May 5th, July 7th, August 8th, October 10th, or December 12th. (It’s left as an exercise to the student to figure out why January 1st, February 2nd, April 4th, June 6th, and November 11th are more memorable than average.) But beyond that, it was a very closely related “special” date ten years ago that first got September 9th stuck in a prominent part of my brain.
It was on “9-9-99” that my divorce from The Kids’ Mother was finalized.
We had been separated for almost three years by that time and I was even more years into that unexpected phase of life that earned me the “MomDude” non de plume, but a five-minute meeting with a judge on that day of many nines made it official and permanent. No muss, no fuss, no screaming, no scenes, no lawyers. The fact that our divorce was “amicable” is one of the only good aspects of what is by default a grueling and painful process.
So now I’m surprised by the fact that today I was completely blindsided by the ten-year anniversary of that reasonably significant life event. I remembered the friend’s birthday. I saw all of the BS on the idiot box about the numbers in the dates all lining up. I noted that the big “Beatlemania” release of new video games and the latest Apple Computer conferences were today, probably not by coincidence. I am looking forward to seeing the new Tim Burton film “9” that opens today. But somehow that ten-year anniversary was hidden from me by The Idiot Subconscious.
At least, it was hidden until yesterday afternoon. As so often happens, The Idiot Subconscious picks the most off-guard times for its reveals, maximizing the “shock and awe” effect on my mental equilibrium. Or maybe it just seems that way, an egocentric selection effect of some sort. I’ll have to ask The Village Wise Woman.
From there it gets fuzzy, meaning that I’m not quite sure I how feel about it all, or how I should feel about it. For one thing, it’s been ten years, pure and simple. A lot of that pain and grief has faded simply due to time. A lot of the structural/logistical nightmares and frustration have vanished into memory due to changing circumstances. The kids have grown, I’ve remarried, The Kids’ Mother passed away a few years back. Yeah, it was something of a red-letter day at the time, but that time has passed. Yeah, ten years is one of those “big” anniversaries, but I haven’t exactly been having celebratory anniversary parties every September 9th for the previous nine years. (Well, OK, there was that one wild party in my head on the first anniversary…) In short, we’ve moved on.
Right?
Maybe I’m just worried about encroaching senility, which is more likely not senility at all but simply an odd foible of an imperfect human brain. Is the problem that it really, really seems that I should have remembered, and it bothers me that I didn’t, that I forgot? Is it just that I’m caught off guard by the fact that I didn’t remember, juxtaposed with the perception (correct or otherwise) that it should be an important anniversary?
Too many angels dancing on the head of a pin, too much worrying about it, too much trying to understand and control rather than simply being. No doubt it’s the result of a Catholic school upbringing and the latent guilt that it tried to imbed in every cell of my body. It can make you crazy, and nearly has at times.
But, hey!! Remember, it’s the new me that’s in charge, and I hereby declare that it doesn’t matter that I forgot, or didn’t remember, or didn’t notice, or whatever happened. The date and the anniversary are worth noting, but only in proper perspective, and that perspective is that we have moved on and we are continuing to move on. As they say when they fly the Blackbird, “Yeah, though I fly through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no Evil, for I am at Mach 8, 70,000 feet and climbing!!”
Maybe I should just go get an XBox 360 and the deluxe version of The Beatles Rockband and stay up until about 4:30 in the morning rocking out.
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