Notes On The Spectrum Podcast: Today Is The Sun’s Birthday
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e e cummings – I Thank You God for Most This Amazing
This was my mom’s favorite poem, read at her memorial service several years ago. My son and my sister’s son performed a version of “Amazing Grace” at the Wildflower Center, where one of her massive paintings still hangs, a gift to Lucy Baines Johnson.
Today is my birthday. Thanksgiving 2025. I’m a full-on turkey today. I’m crossing from my 62nd birthday to my 63rd trip around the sun. My golden year. The year of my escaping.
Yesterday, talking to a colleage at work about time and the limitless loop of time described by Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, in Slaughter House Five. All time happens at once. Our human minds can only handle the viewport of the present life we are living. The multiverse is alive and well, your childhood is still happening, continuous. Mom, favorite sister, Sidney, still holding me this morning as I recline in the comfy chair doing what I love. Writing. Laughing at cats and myself. (Ignoring comma suggestions from my AI spelling and grammar checker. I can’t seem to turn off grammar and “premium” suggestions, but it’s worth it.)
I am better and stronger than I was last year. I am in a good position for take off, my seat is in the upright and locked position. “We just have a few more planes ahead of us, and we’re off to Spain. Sit back, folks, and enjoy the ride.”
That should be our mantra for living. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
Getting too obsessed with moments and failures is non-productive. Putting our energy and attention to people and family we can’t control, again, futile. Stop the madness. Remind yourself to breathe and pause before speaking.
Recently at work, I was stunned by an event that resulted in me being called into the principal’s office. Seems I had asked a question about a nose piercing. One of our younger, new cashiers, the one currently with the pink hair and one of those decorative and curious bullring nose piercings.
“I don’t know anything about tattoos and piercings,” I told the store owner and the manager who engaged with me tonight on Vonnegut. This was several weeks ago. “I’m curious about them. I might have asked her about her nose ring, in the same way I would ask Cloud {that’s his name} about one of his tattoos. It’s not derision, it’s curiosity.’
I was told, “We’ll follow up with you.”
Nothing.
In the conversation about time and Kurt Vonnegut, one of my “Shifties” said, “He died most perfectly.”
“Huh?”
“He fell out of a tree. That’s the way I’d want to go. Just the way I’d imagine Vonnegut dying. It’s perfect.”
He did not fall out of a tree. He did die from complications of a fall. Probably in his bathroom or on a slippery sidewalk in the sleet.
“Simply a fall that caused a traumatic brain injury.”
His son, now a family physician, wrote a follow-up to his ecstatic Eden Express, a famous mental breakdown captured on the page. In the book, Mark Vonnegut jumps ship for a commune created in Nova Scotia. He thrived and then withered. His failure to thrive and near death hallucinations and mania is powerful and heartbreaking. His father, Kurt, dropped his life and traveled to Nova Scotia to rescue his son.
His follow-up book, 20 years later, recounts his father’s heroic efforts to bring him back to Earth. Amazing. Both books might be good to reread. It’s been on my bedroom floor for months as I was considering giving it to a friend who loves Vonnegut.
I am not going to rescue my son. I am going to provide him comfort and shelter. If we have a few moments of sharing and love, that’s great. That’s the goal. Moments of love. With your kids. With your ghosts. With everyone around you, within reason.
I never understood what happened in the store. It seemed like the report was “overheard” by someone rather than reported by the young pink woman. I don’t know. No further information was given. No follow-up either. But hey, it’s Thanksgiving, everyone’s busy selling turkeys and pumpkin pies. Pinkie and another young peer, who was more recently an enthusiastic “music reference” friend, have gone strangely quiet and distant.
Ah, I’ve seen this movie before. Give them plenty of distance. No conversations about the offending conversation. No closure. I guess icing them is all the closure I need. There’s no benefit from pushing against the flow of the holidays. Everyone’s panicked, busy, stressed, and shopping their asses off. Not me.
Today, my birthday, I will attend a lovely lunch at my uncle’s house with my cousins. I look forward to his antics. He often tells stories about my dad or mom. He’s 101 and has no filter. He just says it as he thinks it. A brilliant and clear-eyed pilot, still. Not too emotionally connected, but hey, look at his kids. They all live on a compound with him behind my grandfather’s lake house. The one my dad pawned with his massive lake castle, just a mile up the same lake. He one-upped his dad. They had issues.
The house where I saw my favorite sister at our Christmas rejoinder with the cousins, an hour before she lept off the bridge. I asked her if she wanted to come with me and my fiancé. She seemed distressed. She said no. She hated the woman who would become my wife, despite her suicide. She wasn’t going to hang out with Lisa. Nope. I don’t think she consciously killed herself, I think it was a momentary lapse of reason, panic, sadness, and a conversation she had with the eldest cousin, a spitting image of her round Mama.
There was an argument about my sister’s newly purchased house. She was moving back to Austin. Leaving Santa Fe, the magic horses, and her perfect studio in the New Mexico air. The place where she felt the mad spirits of the Native Americans. She had put an offer on a house near her friend’s house, where she was staying with her Boston Terrier, Ruby.
The argument was about the condition of the roof. My sister didn’t know jack shit about buying a house. Neither did, nor do I. Mythology has it: that was the trigger that caused her to stop her Land Cruiser on the overpass, leaving her beloved Ruby in the car, and soaring down into the dry Texas creekbed below. I guess she didn’t die right away; there was evidence of her digging into the dirt with her fingers as the life slipped out, and she ghosted for real.
I guess father-son issues are universal. I mean: Jesus and god. Right?
Well, that puts my canon in good company.
I’ve been reading Proust for the first time it’s making sense. A newer translation and one of his later books in his opus. When a book speaks to you, your entire mind lights up. Like a neural computer receiving a system update.
We need to teach our kids to read. To love reading. Then to write, paint, sing, and express themselves. I came up through that process, facilitated by my favorite sister early on and my mom later in her life when her resistance to my “sex and drugs and rock n roll” mellowed.
I guess this sort of summarizes my current alignment with god. I’m still trying to assess the Jesus and his father thing. I need a little more time. I certainly embody his desert trial. “Father, why have you forsaken me?”
And there we are. Here I am. Onward.
note: image created with AI
For readers new to hyperfiction: see this explainer video: Blueprint Of Icarus Ascending
