and one could do much, much worse than being a fool for June.
in these days, climate has taken on the unpredictability that weather used to have when I was a child. yet the color wheel of the seasons, changing the light on a mountain pine in four gradual but distinct ways like a 50's color wheel splayed over a 50's aluminum Christmas tree, has not been completely lost.
and a younger group of folks should not have as much idea what's coming as someone like myself, who is just getting let out of 52nd grade today for summer vacation.
but there's a part of me, either eternally primitive or compulsively skeptical, that is surprised every single damn time. look at that light! look how green it all is! it's kind of actually getting warm! maybe we could have lunch...outdoors! maybe it's time to invent the short sleeved shirt!
wow. never saw all that coming.
now, by July, we don't need to invent anything else for Summer, and plans routinely include ways of coping with 100 degree heat. outdoor parties and gigs are in full swing, with tarps for rain and fallback plans for wind.
and as far as being a U.S. Beatles fan is concerned, for a change, it's good to be US.
when With The Beatles, their second album, came out in the U.K., it included no hit singles and
four American R&B covers. songs we can't live without, true...but Meet The Beatles, in America, contained "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There", and, save "Til There Was You", all originals. I say, a better LP.
we paid for it with the movies, where non-Capitol labels got to release film soundtrack semi-Beatles albums. my life is better for hearing the George Martin film score instrumentals and all...but if they were all drowning, I'd still save any one of the dropped actual Beatles songs instead. a little throwaway number fron the Help! album called "Yesterday", for example. you should look it up...not bad, really.
by July, we've heard Sgt. Pepper's, and we are starting to get the hang of Summer.
Magical Mystery Tour came out in the U.K as a double E.P., six new Beatles songs that didn't invent a new season but fit comfortably, ambitiously, into the new studio tan style of Sgt. Pepper.
ah, but stateside, Magical Mystery Tour was fleshed out into a full LP, with three single A and B sides that sit close to the apex of The Beatles' studio achievements. Capitol giveth, and Capitol taketh away. but the U.S. LP version was later adopted for all rereleases of the record in any format.
anyway, the U.S. Magical Mystery Tour is July to me. not reinventing, settling into High Summer, in high fashion.
by August, it's been dang hot for awhile. school's dreaded stutltifying structure has been cast off for eight weeks now, the slaves emancipated...but just as a few rebels are starting to wish the heat would break, the most free thinking of children can admit to kind of missing school in a few incredibly limited ways.
outdoor parties are looking for something a little different as a theme...outdoor gigs are running smoothly without much surprise...
no one really wants to do June again.
and The Beatles, who signed an eight album contract after Revolver and after six months of working on Sgt. Pepper jokingly wanted to name it, "One Down and Seven to Go" (reflecting on the incredible labor of doing that a batch more times), recorded The White Album.
August.
the girls are coming over tonight for a 24 bit 44.1k Full On Destination Straight Through listening of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
the Memorial Day lunch they made yesterday was a masterpiece. eaten in the back yard, with the remastered Exile playing through the window as if it were a new record blasting from a college dorm. we all sang afterwards, and I played, watching what had come back and what hasn't quite. still very short of breath and more than a little stiff.
but I am the June fool this year, and this is Summer for me. any health shadows (I go in for the CAT scan today, to start the determining of a radiation program, probably to begin next Monday) are hard to feel in the Summer sunshine of returning health. I'm dreaming of doing three gigs and a rehearsal or two this week, with very loving tolerant folks who will graciously accept what I can do now.
I won't be doing any Beatle head bobs. I don't know how fragile my voice will be. I'll be sitting a lot. I have an abiding pain in the neck, probably karmic for being one.
but as McCoy says, it's life, Jim, life as we know it. (well, he said the opposite, but you get it...)
and as I always tell the unvarnished truth when I get a good shellacking, it seems to be when the real crisis has let up that people start to feel how damn fucking hard this has all been.
I remember in sixth grade when Bruce Gustafson and I went after the same fly ball...neither caught it, and his head caught my nose.
I ran bleeding and crying to the school nurse.
my nose was broken. she said, do you hurt?
my body was in shock, adrenalin pounding. no, I said.
she said, then why are you crying?
today, I know why I was crying, and would expect her to know more about why than I did. at the time, it was a real puzzler when she put it that way.
I said, I'm bleeding all over my favorite shirt.
the second operation was supposed to be a finite mission, to remove one small piece.
the nurse who worked on my IV was kind of the first clunker of my whole experience at Swedish. I have kind of stellar veins (maybe it's good I never met Keith Richards. or Anne Rice)
but she had trouble making them work for her.
I've been kind of good at just doing what had to be done, accepting what losses come up. but I felt a little at that time (incorrectly) that the major shadow was passing.
I almost passed out. I felt hassled, angry, nauseous, as she went from arm to arm.
when I woke up, I was impatient to know how it had gone. and of course, til the meeting later, no one would say.
when I found out he had been troublingly close to spinal nerves, and left a cuff in there...all impatience vanished. right into shock, and taking in the shadow. ready to accept and work.
the girls are starting to have some little breakdowns, seemingly about small things. I get it. the real deal is that this has been hellish for them, and they've been supernaturally strong and giving.
but now they find they are bleeding all over their favorite shirts.
because we don't feel the shadow we felt. and feelings we've had come up...hurt. anger. impatience, annoyance, inconvenience...all of the things that it makes sense in the realm of life to feel...just no sense when fighting a shadow of death.
all of our healing continues, bathed in the energy and prayers of our support networks. things are well enough that we may strut and fret again, our hour upon the stage for the time being granted continuance.
I will encounter my limitations this week, and I will hold the perspective of how small they are compared with what I feared. but I'll also hurt, tire, pant, and curse some.
all of which will fade away, tonight when Sgt. Pepper begins to play.
I have vacated my life for the past six weeks. my Summer Inhabitation of it now begins.
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