The Sweetest Chaos

Mom and Dad’s house has stood for probably over 70 years. It’s been in our family for almost 63 years. Dad once told me they moved there three days after their wedding. On that long ago March day, roots were planted.

The house is really nothing spectacular. It’s been painted yellow or white or light green through the years. White awnings, trimmed at various times in either red or green, hung over some of the windows. As the family grew, Dad would just build another room or make an existing room just a little bit larger. Now it’s a three bedroom, one bath house with a half-basement, laundry room, dining room, kitchen and two space carport. It’s surrounded by a large yard on three sides and a wooded area on the remaining side.

The house has seen the best and worst of times for our family. Births and deaths. Good news and bad news. Reaffirmation and heartbreak. Laughs and tears. We’ve gathered around the old dining room table and shared meals. We’ve come here when we felt there was no other place to go. We’ve walked the floors here trying to walk out solutions to problems. We’ve relaxed here and drifted off to a place where the worries of the world no longer seemed to exist. Birthday candles were lit here to celebrate the certain passing of time. Thanksgiving and Christmas were celebrated here with enough food to feed a small army and enough gifts to warrant more than one tree.

Something happened over time though. It seemed that we grew too big for this house. The kids got married. The kids had kids. At some point the grandkids had kids. Soon, the number that would gather here doubled in size. At one time everybody could squeeze into one room and then we had to squeeze into two rooms and now it is all we can do to fit everyone into three rooms when we are all together. It seemed to become clear that things just wouldn’t be the same if we couldn’t all be together. Dad’s carpenter skills, learned and honed from necessity, just could not keep up with the burgeoning family.

Another thing happened along the way. Some of us moved away. This meant it was longer in between times when we saw each other. Sad to say, it also means, we only see each other mostly during the holiday season anymore. When it was time to gather together, we sometimes decided to meet elsewhere to a place with more room in order to accommodate as many as could come.

This year it was decided that our family would gather sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year though we wouldn’t meet at a restaurant somewhere and take up twelve tables. It was determined we would gather at Mom and Dad’s house just like we had so many times before.

This decision came with some fretting. Mom is older now and can’t clean the house like she once did. Would there be enough room for everyone? We wouldn’t all be able to sit around the table at the same time.

Still, the day came. Folks began to trickle in a few at a time. Before it was said and done, nineteen of us crammed into the house. Two babies, born less than two weeks apart four months earlier, made their initial holiday family appearances along with three others under the age of six, adding a little life and noise to the old pine paneled walls. We couldn’t all gather around the table at the same time but a funny thing happened, someone would sit down at the table and eat for a time and then someone else would work through the line and enter the dining room where someone would get up and let them sit at the table. So, if you wanted, you could have sat at the table because we rotated seats as needed.

Before long, it was time to open presents. We all crammed into the living room and sprawled ourselves over any open space. The three older kids were really fired up for the gifts and ripped through shimmery wrapping paper to get to a taped box only to tear it open to see what gifts they received this year. After this, our family plays an auction game, taking turns picking gifts and “stealing” gifts from each other. Then later, some of us crash while others gather around the dining room table and play cards or spoons or some other game someone has brought along all the while munching on party mix or sugar cookies or homemade fudge. All this would meld into the late afternoon and into the evening. Some would leave but most would stay.

The routine is pretty much always the same no matter where we get together. That’s good. This year though I tried to take it all in from time to time. I looked around and saw two cousins, five and three, try to pick each other up off the ground as kids often inexplicably do before wrestling around with each other on the hardwood floor, laughing with each tumble. I saw the almost four year old proudly and gracefully show off her new dress, which was pretty but not as beautiful as her smile. I listened to the easy natured joking between family members. I saw the two babies look eye to eye with each other as family members snapped photos of the two newest family members. I listened to my Dad relay a story about the three year old great grandson and my Mom that my Dad could hardly tell without laughing so hard that tears came to his eyes.

And it was all loud and crazy and a bit chaotic for awhile. Some chaos is sweet though. Amidst the chaos I kept thinking how this is the way it should be, that this is where we all should be on this day. We should be here together.

Maybe the five year old and the almost four year old and the three year old will remember the gifts they received this Christmas many years from now. I sort of doubt that though. I remember a lot of Christmases but just can’t seem to recall a lot of the gifts I received wrapped in shimmery paper covering a box with tape closing every gap. Maybe they will look back and recall with a smile how we all packed into a house Pappaw built onto and Mammaw looked after. Maybe they’ll remember how the floor filled with wrapping paper when the presents began to be uncovered. Maybe they’ll look back like I do now and see other gifts received that never sat wrapped under a tree…a place called home, family and friends, laughter, memories, roots and a bit of sweet chaos.

Merry Christmas. May your holiday season be filled with the good things in life especially those you love and the warmth of knowing they love you in return.

This One Goes Out

It’s the end of R.E.M. as we know it and I feel okay. Well, okay, maybe, not okay, maybe, I feel a bit nostalgic at the news. I have been an R.E.M. fan for many years so the news this week that they are, in their words, “calling it a day” and ending their run as a band on their own terms stings a little, even fourteen years after drummer Bill Berry left the original line-up.

Granted, R.E.M. is not everyone’s cup of tea. Their lyrics can sometimes be hard to understand and sometimes those same lyrics can be hard to comprehend after you string all the words together. It’s not often been the lyrics that made me buy-in on R.E.M. though. R.E.M. has always been solid musically, whether it’s been songs driven by a piano, a mandolin or a smash crash splattering bash collision of drums and guitars. Sometimes, their songs sounded stark and foreboding while other times their songs jumped out from the speakers like an out-of-control party next door. From a vocal standpoint their often complicated dream-like harmonies, especially in selections from their early days, contrast yet still blend together enough to fit seamlessly like unsuspecting puzzle pieces. Michael Stipe, who sings lead on most of their songs, also has a very unique style, delivering one song mumbling like a slow-talking Southerner, another like a venom-spitting cobra and others like a slightly restrained lounge singer. The early gems “Radio Free Europe”, “Talk About the Passion”, “Fall On Me”, “Superman”, “Driver 8”, “Finest Worksong,” “Can’t Get There From Here” and “Green Grow the Rushes” are all songs I never grow tired of hearing.

Over time, R.E.M. became the next big thing and they released hit after hit. Soon “Losing My Religion” (the title is a great Southern phrase that had almost fallen away with my grandmother’s generation until this song revived it), “Everybody Hurts”, “Drive”, “Man On the Moon” (the lyric “Newton got beaned by the apple good” always cracks me up), “Nightswimming”, “Stand”, “The One I Love” (“a simple prop to occupy my mind” is such a great turn of a phrase), among other hits, all became pop songs of the finest order.

I have to admit though after the Automatic for the People album, R.E.M. kind of fell by the wayside for me. I don’t think I bought any of their music after the Monster album which featured the songs “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Bang and Blame”. While Monster had some stuff I liked, it wasn’t compelling enough to make me want to buy the next album when it was available.

Maybe they changed. Maybe I changed. Maybe we all changed.

With the news of R.E.M. ending their run, I’ve spent parts of the last few days listening to a lot of R.E.M., old stuff and new stuff, reacquainting myself with an old friend and discovering some of what I missed or forgot while we were apart. While I mostly gravitate to the older stuff, I have realized there’s some newer stuff that I really enjoy. And maybe that is why R.E.M.’s breakup causes me to pause for a moment and wonder what might still lie ahead for them, if they only saw it through a little longer. It makes me wonder what I might like from them if they only continued because they can still produce music I like, and frankly, I can’t say that about a whole lot of new music these days.

Maybe there would be another ”At My Most Beautiful”. Here the lyrics and Stipe’s delivery are almost embarrassingly intimate: “You always say your name, like I wouldn’t know it’s you, at your most beautiful” and “I’ve found a way, a way to make you smile.” Then there’s other stuff I find myself playing again and again, songs like “The Great Beyond”, “Love Is All Around”, “Everyday is Yours To Win”, “Leaving New York,” “Animal,” “Walk It Back” and the delicate, aching “Oh My Heart”, written about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, but with lyrics sentimental enough to make a person miss any place and any people once known and left behind.

It’s sad in another way to me, as R.E.M. is associated specifically with Athens, GA and more generally to Georgia at large. Being from Georgia yet no longer living there, whenever I hear an R.E.M. song, I always think of Georgia and most often think of the northeastern and north central parts of the state where R.E.M. is most often identified. While the music R.E.M. played was unique to them, the harmonies they belted out always felt like a part of the state to me. The songs they were performing weren’t songs brought over from the old country but those harmonies were just similar enough to be something, style-wise, that might have been heard years before through those same hills and valleys. So, to me R.E.M.’s music was just an electrified and updated extension of the family-style harmonies passed down through the years from the area’s early settlers to the front porches and backyards of my people all the way down to the bluegrass groups I heard on the radio and the Southern gospel quartets I watched Sunday mornings on TV’s Gospel Singing Jubilee. R.E.M.’s music just felt, or maybe more correctly, just sounded like it belonged from where it emanated.

R.E.M.'s music also belonged to our generation, more specifically, the college kids of the 1980s, at least initially. You remember us…Polo cologne, Levis’s denim jackets, skinny ties, big poofy hair, neon colored clothes, Raybans. In my opinion, no other musical group, with the exception of U2, really consistently defined the college experience of those in the 1980s as much as R.E.M.

Maybe that is another reason why R.E.M. calling it quits hurts a bit. It’s just another sign of growing older, growing further away from that time and those songs, those people, those moments.

My all time favorite R.E.M. song is “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”. I can’t exactly tell you why it is my favorite. Sometimes you just can’t locate the words for why something is the way it is. It just is. To me, “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” is like sweet iced tea, I just like it. While it’s my favorite R.E.M. song, I have avoided listening to that song since hearing about R.E.M. deciding to finish up on their own terms. I have listened to the old favorites and the newer ones I somehow let slip by as I grew older. Still, soon enough I will crank up “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” and when I do I know I will stumble across a set of lyrics that will make me pause and wax more nostalgic wondering if there will still come some day when R.E.M. will be back…”I know it might sound strange, but I believe you’ll be coming back before too long.”

And when I hear that and think that and wish that, I feel fine.

Milepost

Here I am right beside another milepost along my highway.

Looking back I never thought about what would happen when I reached this age. It's not that I thought I wouldn't live this long. It's just I never imagined all those days between then and now would ever really dissipate in such a hasty manner. But there are a lot of yesterdays behind me and they continue to pass by at an alarming speed.

Looking ahead I look out onto the horizon. It rests there just far enough in the distance to seem like some hazy mirage. I see things just ahead but can’t make them come into focus clearly enough to determine what those things are. The winds whip by urging time to keep up it's steady pace.

And here I am, right here, right now. I look at things now with older eyes than I did before. Here I am at this place where growing older seems much more likely that growing up any more. And here I am hoping the passing time makes me wiser instead of smarter.

Still, I find myself riding the brakes, trying hard to not rush too far into the future so that I can’t still look back where I’ve been and so I can still enjoy the scenery along the ride