Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for New Music

Yesterday I fell in love with Harper Simon's debut CD while walking Bo through the crisp fall night. The folksy guitar hearkens back to the kind of rolling musical lines that would feel at home among haunting folk phrases from the sixties, but the slide guitar on many of the tracks makes the album feel like an heir to true old country. You know, before Nashville sold out the twang in its pursuit of winning hits about saving horses by riding cowboys.

I'm guilty of buying Harper Simon's CD because I'm a huge Paul Simon fan and the tracks on Harper Simon's My Space page sounded remarkably like tracks Paul might have written. And after a quick look at the liner notes, I was delighted to find that Paul Simon actually had contributed lyrics for a couple of the songs. But the album's a gem of its own making. The faster songs bounce you even as bittersweet lyrics rip at your heart, and the melodies soar and soar and soar. The final track, "Berkeley Girl," has a musical phrase in it that's such an echo of a phrase from "The Dangling Conversation" (Simon & Garfunkel) that my heart stopped a second, then raced to catch up to the song. That's not to say it's ripped off, oh no. The son's song is the son's, but there's some of the best of the dad in there, too.*

"The Dangling Conversation" was a track off of Simon & Garfunkel's "Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme" album. A high school friend had told me Simon & Garfunkel was the bomb, so being the sheep I was then, when I saw this cassette in a bargain bin nestled between "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" and "Greatest Hits," I bought all three. But I didn't really turn onto the music until my grandfather finally broke down and went to the doctor about his aching back only to find the pain was liver cancer and that the liver cancer was--so sorry--actually lung cancer that had already spread. As rocker Warren Zevon would tell David Letterman years later on the show Letterman devoted to Zevon a few months before he died of lung cancer himself: "I may have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years."

For me, the winter of 1992 was a blur of weekend trips to Lisbon Falls, ME to watch my last living grandparent wither a bit more each time I saw him. I got through it with a Walkman--remember when that was cutting edge?--and it was those Simon and Garfunkel tapes that serenaded me as I wore out the asphalt in laps around Grampy's block. I'd listen to those same tapes on the long trip home when my sister and I folded down the back seat of the station wagon and lay down in what we called the way bag, eyes trained on the clouds I could see through the rear window, ears trained on "The Dangling Conversation" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" and "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall" and "Kathy's Song" which in my teen brain was clearly about the way the music kissed me as I started my days and who cares if the Kathy of the song spelled her name the stupid way because it was absolutely and undeniably about me, dammit.

The point is when music seeps in as a handmaiden to sadness, that music tattoos itself on your soul and sets your musical levels forever. So even if the adult I became enjoys bouncing around and laughing to goof pop, my heart will always be tugged by the soft lilting melodies that have an uncanny ability to carry sadness at the same time they buoy hope.

It's rare for me to love an album inside and out--I consider a record a find if it includes just one song that wiggles its airy way into my ear and won't let me let it go. But I love Harper Simon's debut. My heart felt ripped at the beauty of the softer songs like "The Shine" and "Berkley Girl," and when there was nobody coming along the dark street that winds between the gulf course and the cemetery, I danced down the center of the road to the "Cactus Flower Rag" (you'd be amazed how much the cross over step your coach used to make you do can feel like dancing when done in time to a melody).

Don't try to share any new music with me in the next week, maybe two. I'll be bathed in the hope and sadness of Harper Simon's debut and remembering how thankful I am for those rare and glorious times when I stumble across music that helps reconnect me to wonder.

* The echoed phrase is on the lyric "And she drives a Karmann Ghia" in Harper Simon's "Berkeley Girl." To me, this sounds like "And you read your Emily Dickinson" from Paul Simon's "The Dangling Conversation." Maybe not a direct match, but close enough to take my breath, anyway.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Fall Heat Waves

It's 9 o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to be here today. Nope. No way. Because it's November 10 and 61 degrees outside, the third of three days I would have been happy to enjoy in early May. I want to leash Bo up and go for a long and —here's the key—coatless walk. There's not as much bright and shining sun as there was yesterday, but I'll smile as if there was.

Because when I got back from a fantabulous visit with friends in Los Angeles in July, I came home in a funk. Not because the trip was so good it made me want to live there, but because I knew that we Bostonians had five more weeks of summer left to enjoy before the fall heralded the beginning of the l-o-n-g winter season, while my California girls never, ever have to think about rationing their warmth.

As if on cue, November in Boston came on the back of a particularly ferocious cold front that had me digging through closets in search of hats and gloves for those early morning walks. But in my envy for constant sunshine, I forgot about the special brand of euphoria that comes with an unseasonable reprieve. The absolute high of hearing your ipod click to Katrina and the Waves when you are quite literally walking on sunshine yourself and by all rights shouldn't be. This is November, people. November!

So today I'm grateful for the warming trifecta. And to my friend who pointed out that it made her think about polar bears stranded on chunks of ice that had broken free, I say Bah Humbug! I hate the thought of a forlorn polar bear as much as the next person with an ounce of compassion, but there's nothing I can do to help him from Boston, so I choose to go out and enjoy Boston's impression of November in LA. God knows we'll all need the sunny memory when the mercury drops below zero in a few months...

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for The Next Ten Minutes

My husband has a theory about the mercurial nature of happiness: unhappiness sprouts in minds stuck in "big time" while happiness blossoms in those that understand how to use "little time" to reach big-time goals.

Big-time thinkers—aka the miserable ones—focus on the year it will take to finish the project; the hundred-thousand good choices that need to be made to reach a healthy goal weight; and the thousands upon thousands of hours it will take to write a book, revise a book, shop and sell and pub a book.

Little-time thinkers focus on the next small step they can take right now to move toward the big goals they want to reach. And never mind that moving forward is inching forward. Forward is forward is forward.

The year I spent as a freelance writer I understood this. I took on way more than I could reasonably finish in an eight-hour workday. Scratch that. I took on more than I could reasonable finish in a twelve-hour workday. I realized quickly that focusing on the the many deadlines advancing toward me like the push of humorless troops armed with pocket watches and metaphorical whips was a recipe for hyperventilation, so to preserve a regular breathing pattern, I developed a system: I filled my to-do list with 30-minute project chunks and set an alarm. Each time the buzzer bleated, I crossed an action item off instead of waiting a month to cross the whole project off a much more stagnant list. I was still ridiculously overstretched, but I wasn't hyperventilating. That's the second ingredient in a happy life, I think. A distinct lack of hyperventilation.

So I know that little time works in theory. Set a realistic goal and then forget all about the big project as you focus on the little chunks you can do now. Little time isn't exactly a new thought. Some thinker that came before both my husband and I coined the idea that the only way to eat an elephant was one piece at a time. But I need the occasional refresher course.

Yesterday, for example.

I've been so focused on sprinting to the healthy me, that I didn't notice the storm brewing--all of a sudden I realized that there's very little wiggle room for human frailty in my diet. Cookies. There's no room for cookies. Or hand-cut french fries. Or yellow cake with buttercream frosting from Party Favors. Or chicken tikka masala. The cravings were likely a figment of the period that started this morning (and there's mention of that again, boys), but the thinking that I'd never have any of these things again was very real. Wrongheaded, but real.

Enter Mike's little time theory. He pointed out that I've been locked into big time on this, and so obsessed with getting to the first weight-loss benchmark by Christmas that I've pumped up the exercise and pared back the calories so far that there's not much wiggle room for anything but perfection. And two pounds a week is a lot when you've already burned off 34 pounds.

"Just make good choices for the next ten minutes, and everything else locks into place."

So in that ten mintues, I recalculated my daily calorie range based on a more humane goal of losing 27.5 pounds by January, 2011. Pushing the date 14 months into the future makes big-time me a little crazy, but little time me will be all the happier for it.

How much more happily productive would I be if I could remember to be grateful for the next ten minutes in all my projects? If organizing the house was a series of little time triumphs. If revising the book was a series of ever-smaller chunks: sections or scenes or paragraphs. Can I get a word by word? A letter by letter?

Today I'm grateful for Mike's reminder that life is too big to be squandered in big-time anxiety. That life is lived, moment-by-moment, in the little-time now. Today I'm grateful to focus on what I can do in the next ten minutes.