Measuring life by the summers
Hello again,
I don’t know who said it first, but I love the idea that life is not counted in years but in summers.
For the past decade my summers have been full of three kids and the many things they chase after while school is out — swimming, baseball games, float trips, riding bikes, popsicles, watermelon, lightning bugs, campfire singalongs, and dance parties. The wild thing about being a parent is getting to revisit the freedom of summer through the eyes of your kids — it is their own fresh and unique experience, and yet also it all seems to rhyme and run parallel to many of my own childhood summer memories.
One summer as a kid we had a small inflatable pool on our back deck where my sisters and I would spend many hours. I’d plug in a small boombox and would dance and sing along to the same cassette over and over again: a Time Life anthology of the hit songs from 1965. This was the music that my own parents heard during a few summers when they were kids. My generation has its own summer hits, just as my kids’ generation has its own. But every summer for the past few years, as my family is adding songs to a road trip play list or picking songs while we grill out, I’ll randomly add The Byrd’s version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” to the mix. It’s a small, subtle, strange gesture perhaps, but an attempt to connect them to a deeper sense of time and history — one small thread of a larger fabric of time and space that actually somehow connects us all together across time. My kids don’t hear the same “oldies” on the radio that I heard as a kid. The music of my youth is now “classic rock.” But damn, despite our ages and the passage of time, isn’t music one of the most timeless creations we can hold onto and share and pass along? Is that not what good art is all about — creating something that might not last forever (forever-ever?), and yet persists somehow, deep within our memories and everywhere among us?
I hope you’re all chasing some good things this summer, too. I hope you are catching a couple of them, the ones that might be worth holding onto for a long time, and maybe even a few things that might be better off if you let go. I hope we all find the right things to grab hold of tightly, the things that have a good hold on us, the things that want to persist far into the future and reverberate in the ears of the children we haven’t even dreamed of yet. Hey Mr. Tambourineman, play a song for me . . .
THE THREAD - SUMMER SALE!
I’m doing a summer sale for my most recent collection of essays and poems, THE THREAD. If you don’t have a copy yet, or if you want to get an early start on gifts for the holidays, you can order THE THREAD for $15 per copy during the month of July. There’s a lot of love and care in this small book of mine, and I hope to get it into the hands of more readers while I still have a few boxes left. Thanks for reading!
KC ARTSPACE FLATFILE EXHIBITION
I currently have a few pieces on display as part of this year’s Kansas City Flatfile at the Emily & Todd Voth Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute. This is a really great bi-annual exhibition including over 200 local and regional artists, and I am very grateful to be included again this year. The exhibition runs through the end of September, so if you’ve got some free time this summer, go check it out!
CURRENTLY READING: Meg Wheatley’s Perseverance, Rita Bullwinkle’s Headshots, and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Jade Bird’s Different Kinds of Light, Bob Dylan and The Band’s Before the Flood, Moby’s Live Ambients