This is one of those rare times when the world and life in general have rendered me semi-mute. (Don't laugh!)
No specific reason for it. All is "fine." I'm in an excellent place, physically and mentally. Transform or die, right?
Time is creeping up on the one year anniversary of my father's demise. Grief has taken me on quite a ride these last 12 months. I'm adapting to the emotional sinkhole that exists in his absence. Oh sure, he stepped on my heart many times in the 54 years I knew him. No pedestal required. Still, I miss that keen insight and wicked wit. He was SO smart. About most things. I look forward to having some sort of ritual for my father when a daughter arrives next month. Maybe we will paddle a kayak out into Hilo Bay and toss some of his ashes and lots of fragrant Hawaiian flowers. Or plant a new fruit tree here and scatter them around it. The surprising thing about his death is that I felt like I was prepared for it. He was sick for 4 years. I guess you can't prepare for what you haven't experienced before.
Over the course of the last decade, I've noticed a trend I could not possibly have predicted and yet it now feels eerily inevitable.
The trend involves friends-- or more accurately friends from another time. Folks I saw lots of music with. Mostly one particular band, which strikes me as frighteningly myopic at this point. Good old hindsight. Don't get me wrong; I wouldn't change it and I don't have buyer's remorse. (Well, maybe a little.)
The majority of us former deadheads have parted ways, or communicate very little. I still have a handful of longtime friends that I met that way, and we have seen each other through the decades. One of them arrives for a visit in a few weeks, but she is a rarity. All of them began as friendships based on the unswerving love of that particular music. When the music stopped, I began to find I had little or nothing in common with people I always figured I would know for a long time.
Some who resisted any type of lifestyle change are either dead or invisible now. Then there are those who swung to the right in ways that scare the shit out of me. Especially when one considers where their heads were 30-plus years ago. Or where I assumed their heads were. Every once in a while, one of those folks from the old days pops up somewhere and I am often floored by their tightly-closed minds.
Maybe we got different things from our days of youthful abandon. I don't know, but I have been wondering what the hell happened to almost everyone.
