place to muse

Soon this site will be gone.  So visit my new blog here: 24books

For those of you who are interested, I am now writing for a non profit organization called Via Affirmativa under the initials, bmk. Check them out here. My first article, Tell Your Mothers, is up. My verbal contract runs through June and could be renewed then depending upon funding.

I may write at ptm occasionally at best. I am trying to earn a living through freelance writing and spend most of my creative energy doing just that. Slowly offers to publish things that I have written are materializing. I will keep you posted. But for now, swing by Via Affirmativa and say, ‘hi.’

bmk

21 years ago I was watching da Bears in our suburban Chicago home. 21 years ago I became a fan of football. One of the greatest teams, if not the greatest, of all time ended their legendary season by winning Super Bowl XX. It is a team still remembered with fondness by even Packer fans, immortalized by SNL’s Superfans, and nominated for a Grammy. While that team can never be duplicated, da Bears and da Chicago blues are back again for Super Bowl XLI.

It is time to learn da Bears fight song so you can sing along with all the super fans.

It is time to reminisce by watching the Grammy nominated Super Bowl Shuffle. Ironically da Bears were beat out by Prince for their 1986 Grammy and Prince will be performing at half time this Sunday.

Finally, it is time to watch a Superfans episode.

Once you have done these things you just might be in the right mind to cheer for the right team this Sunday. If not, well, you can cheer for the other team…whoever they are….

It is time to eat chips and become a football fan. There are those who go to church once a year on Christmas and there are those who watch football once a year on Super Bowl Sunday. Welcome.

FYI, in between the commercials and the half time show there is a football game. This year da Bears are the underdogs–the team no one believes can win the big game. They have a defense plagued by injuries and a quarterback who just completed his first full year in the NFL. If anything, just cheer that even though da Bears have reached the big game once again, there is still only one Super Bowl Shuffle.

Reality TV is back.  The Donald has taken a break from calling Rosie fat and ugly in order to focus on firing wannabe apprentices.  Paula, Randy and Simon have returned as well for yet another season of American Idol.  It is shaping up to be a competitive spring.  Let me know what happens.  I don’t watch to see who wins.

I have seen the first few shows of The Apprentice as well as the first two auditions for American Idol.  I am left with one haunting question:  Who are these people!?!

Reality TV is revealing to me a whole segment of the American population that I would have otherwise never known existed.  Yet these people likely shop in my grocery store and eat at the same restaurants as I do.

American Idol brings together an urban Amish man and an urban cowboy.  Are they for real?  Maybe.  I am not sure.  The people who are certainly for real are even more interesting: the tone deaf, the out of key people, the pitchy people, the I-Haven’t-Been-Outside-For-Two-Years people who are genuinely devastated when they are told that they are not the next American Idol.

I can’t sing any better than any of these people.  I am a poor singer.  But I am not delusional about that fact.  I am not trying out for American Idol.  I have been singing along with the radio before when my friend asks me, “Who Sings this Song?”  “Barry Manilow,” I say.  “Let’s keep it that way.”  I got the hint.

Instead, some of these singers have evidently had friends and family who have lied to them about how well they sing.  “Why don’t you go on national TV and sing?” they say.  “You are better than last year’s winner.”  The next thing you know is that the Cowardly Lion is gurgling out notes from somewhere inside and calling it the best music ever.

Here is some advice:  When told that you are the worst singer on the planet proceed to argue that point by pointing to someone else who might possibly be worse; don’t argue that you are the best.  Take it one step at a time.  Also, friends shouldn’t let some friends sing—at least not out in public.  I watch American Idol because I cannot believe what I am seeing.

That, incidentally, is the same reason I tune in to the Apprentice every now and then.  The Apprentice is like Fear Factor for ‘type A’ personalities.  Watch what happens when a room full of ‘born-to-lead’ types are forced to follow, not just follow, but follow the lead of their competitive peers.   I almost cannot stand to watch, but I do.

I am sure that watching two aspiring millionaires wiggle and squirm in front of The Donald so as to not get fired is somehow educational; it will teach me something profound about human nature, but for now I just watch because I cannot believe what I am seeing.

Maybe that is why we all watch.  We can safely spy on the bizarre lives of other people.  Watch how many articles in the paper and snippets on the evening news are simply biographies or ‘profiles’ of other people.  We cannot get enough of them: we are compelled to people watch.  Sometimes I go shopping at the Mall of America just so I can look at all the odd people and see how I am similar or different.

My wife wants me to apply for The Amazing Race with her.  I keep telling her that I won’t do it until she learns to drive a manual transmission.  Only then will I display my own oddities for all to see.

Last evening a new grandmother stopped us as my wife and I walked our stroller through the mall. She told us, smiling over our newly born boy, Austin, as if she were speaking directly to him, that when she was first a mother she couldn’t wait for her child to sit up, to say his first words, to crawl, and to walk. She eagerly looked forward to the coming of each new milestone and capturing that moment for her child. Then she slowly raised her head, made eye contact with me and said rather seriously, “Don’t be like that. Those moments will come, but these moments,” looking down at our baby again, “will pass too quickly.”

I spent most of my college years looking forward to marriage and that future I thought would be so rewarding, so different, and so fulfilling. Even then people were stopping me, “Oh! You’re in college! Where? That is great! My college years were the best time of my life….” I determined in my heart that I would never say that college was the best time of my life. I looked confidently ahead and said that my whole life will be great.

I firmly missed the point. While I was so intently looking ahead I failed to recognize the irreplaceable value of the present moment. My wife is nearly the opposite in this regard. She doesn’t miss out on present moments because she is looking forward to all the great things in the future; she rather unwarily glides through the present because she is trying so hard to remember all that just happened.

We have a little knit and framed picture of a green-dressed woman holding a white afghan blanket that swaddles her sleeping baby hanging next to our rocking chair. The picture was knit by my mother and hung next to my crib as she fed and held me in the mid 1970s. There are a few simple words marked out in a retro orange yarn, “Cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow…for babies grow up we’ve learned to our sorrow…so quiet down cobwebs…dust go to sleep…I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep!!”

It appears that the young grandma who stopped us in the mall was right. When Austin was born it looked as if his eyes were going to swallow his head upon each giant wink. The space from his eyes to his forehead took over most of his face while it looked as if his nose, mouth and chin were somewhat squished in as an after-thought. I can picture the stork looking at him just before delivery with a big gasp at its forgetfulness, reaching into a big bag full of lips, chins and noses followed by a feathery smear just below the eyes, reassuring, “Hey, kid, you are going to need these.”

It was only a week later that all his facial parts looked like they belonged to their given places. His head was filling out. If it wasn’t for my wife’s tears I may have never noticed. “He is changing so fast and we didn’t get any pictures,” she cries. Her mind is racing to remember how he looked, and winked and yawned just a few days before and had hoped a picture would have frozen the moment until she had time to soak it all into her being.

Those moments are gone now and new ones are coming. It all happens too fast to really appreciate, too fast to think about being a mother, too fast to reminisce.

Isn’t that the case with all of life? We scurry from one experience to another without ever really participating in life; at least we don’t participate in the way that remembers sights, smells, touches, and tastes very well. I remember when I saw the northern lights for the first time. I was a teenage kid who had no idea what was taking over the night sky. One minute I was playing soccer in the dark and the next minute I was lying face-up in a field, wide-eyed so as to not miss anything. I was breathing so slowly that I could feel the moist warmth of my breath spill over my gaping lips and across my face to where it fogged up my glasses.

These lights danced. They bolted. They hovered. They were green and red and orange and white. Each color did its own thing. They shimmered like waves across the sky. They stood tall as beams stretching upward and then fading into the darkness. They rippled and flashed from somewhere below my toes to far behind the treetops above my head. They made the expanse of the sky look like a tiny playground.

That moment, like so many moments every day, was too much to capture. I can’t remember it at all—what I try to describe is shallow in the face of what I experienced that night. It was there and in the flash of a half hour I was playing soccer again.

In the last chapter of Through Painted Deserts, Donald Miller writes, “I don’t think we can really understand how time passes. We can’t study it like a river or tame it with a clock. Our devices only mark its coming and going…. Some things have to end, you know. You feel like life is always leading up to something, but it isn’t. I mean life is just life. It’s all happening right now, and we aren’t going to be any more complete a month from now than we are now. I only say this because I am trying to appreciate everything tonight…I want to feel this, really understand that it is happening….”

Moments flee just before our understanding comes to rest. It is the great game of cat and mouse where the tail of the mouse is perpetually just beyond the eager claw. In our flurry of activity and the undaunted speed of passing time our trouble to hang on to moments seems exasperating—“I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep!!” Despite our best efforts we have to let moments go and allow our memories to chase them until they meet someday taking on a lesser, or at least less present, form.

As I dry my wife’s tears and look down at our growing baby it is startlingly apparent that we have been given a moment that is fleeting as abruptly as we are participating in it. We cannot control its passing or hold it for later. We can only give it away.

We close our eyes and imagine each moment as a gift. For us these moments with Austin are God’s gift—just as is an evening with the guys drinking beer and listening to live blues music. Sensory input is often overwhelming and not digestible. Maybe in giving away the moment we recognize that we never really even possessed the moment in the first place. Maybe moments are not attainable—they are only shareable.

Giving moments is another way of letting a moment go—only it is letting the moment go with intention. It is acknowledging the reception of the moment, experiencing it, and giving it back to the Giver—experiences and all. Each moment is shared. Each moment entrusted one to another.

Moment by moment we take in and we give out. As we sit as new parents on our living room couch staring at our sleeping baby, we are well aware that we cannot keep what is present and that even right now there is another moment ready for our participation.

Place to Muse is undergoing the same reevaluation of focus that the author (aka, b-nut) is applying to life itself.  A baby and a new job will do that I guess.

Consequently, the title of this blog has changed from “Place to Muse: thinking out loud among other things” to “The Weekly Muse: and other anecdotal meanderings.”

I had contemplated giving up blogging altogether in order to pursue writing that pays some money.  Instead, I decided to focus on one, hopefully thoughtful and insightful, post per week.  At this point I can’t promise more than that, but if I am fortunate, I will fill some other weekdays with a less thoughtful story or two—no guarantees though.

I am working on a New Year’s resolution for my writing.  It involves getting published in three different mediums in 2007: newspaper, magazine and journal.  I am not sure which medium I would enjoy writing for the most, but I am sure that I am growing an increasing fondness for the free nature of blogging.

So here, with renewed focus, I begin again.  Monday I foresee the first weekly muse….

Well, that’s right; the momentous moment has passed. Birth has happened and diapers are now dirty. …and sleep? I wish I could tell you. But such are the woes and cries for attention of new parents across the planet.

The important thing, at least for the three of us, is that a new stage of life abruptly began at 2245, November 24, 2006—the day after Thanksgiving and the first day of my new job at Target. I awoke at 3am to Laura’s first real contractions. She had already been up for an hour. When the contractions came every four minutes for a period of two hours we were given permission to scurry out of our house and towards the hospital. We arrived at 6am.

Nearly 17 hours later came Austin Wheeler Knutson. He weighed in at 7lbs. and 10oz. while measuring 22 inches in length. Laura does not like to share what went on in those 17 hours of labor or in the few hours directly following birth for concern of scaring the babies out of young couples’ future plans. However, it is like Laura’s Grandma Bea says, “I don’t know why people keep having babies, but they do….”

I have met many wide-eyed single people who once thought marriage was a good idea too. That was until they talked to all those newly married people who are all too eager to share the trials and struggles of married life. It only takes a few of these conversations before the potential costs of getting married and having babies far exceeds the now bi-gone potential benefits. The next thing you know is that the entire population of the world begins to decline in a fearful hermit-hood.

We will be a part of no such global destruction. So our lips are sealed, but our camera has winked. Here are some before and after shots that remind us all of the possibilities and ideals that keep the planet in motion. Here’s to A.W. Knutson:

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