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Monday, 12 January 2004

Rewriting the past, dancing with the present ::

Today is my middle son’s 14th birthday. When he and his siblings visited me in California from NY last March, he had a lot of fun playing my keyboards. So when I found out about Garage Band, I decided to get it for him, with a USB MIDI keyboard. I talked with him on the phone this morning as he opened the keyboard. This afternoon he IM’d me as he got it working with a couple of freeware apps that play the Mac’s built-in synthesizer, which gives him something to play with until iLife ‘04 arrives. We hooked up our iSights and hung out a little tonight.

I thought he would enjoy some of my amazing friend Justin’s adolescent humor, so I pointed him there. My son was caught up in something else and didn’t go there, but I did. To my surprise, in Justin’s latest entry he quotes me at the end, and spoke to something that happened ... yes, it was a month ago today. I had a falling out with a friend with whom I’d gone through a lot, over a period of years. It was a slow-motion avalanche of miscommunication, and Justin describes the way it happened so well: “While the past is true and exact, our interpretations of it are fuzzy at best and often wildly inaccurate, untrue, distorted, and unreasonably emotionally-charged. ... Imagine how many interpretations of the past we allow to pollute our present and therefore future each day!” I try to imagine, and my mind boggles.

He concludes, “it’s time to tip our hats and toast the glaciers and mountains for what they have been all these years, and then dance with them like the wind dances with clouds—never knowing, always soft, ever-changing, new.” Yeah. Just like that. Thanks, Justin.

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