Tell Me Christmas Are We Wise

 

Merry Christmas! Yes I know it’s the day after Christmas. It’s time to firm up our plans for New Year’s Eve and start putting away the Christmas decorations. Christmas 2019 was great but Father Time keeps moving on and so must we. In just a few nights we’ll be welcoming in the 3rd decade of the 21st century. Can you believe it? It seems like just last year we were all partying like it was 1999. Time does indeed move on. And quickly.

So what did you do this day after Christmas? Did you do some gift returning or exchanging? Did you stock up on sale items for Christmas 2020? Did you spend one more day with family before heading out tomorrow? Did you binge-watch the final day of Christmas movies on Hallmark, Ion, Lifetime, and Netflix? Or did you spend this day sitting at home, doing pretty much what you do every day, spending it alone?

This afternoon a friend and I went to see the Trans Siberian Orchestra (TSO) performance of Christmas Eve and Other Stories. Let me tell you the rock and roll road show still exists and man was it fantastic! Awesome guitar licks. Glass shattering vocals. Music that really did rock my socks off. And a light and pyrotechnics show that was better than anything I saw in the 70s. The TSO musicians are true rockers and they made this 60-year-old guy feel like he was 20 again this afternoon. Yes, we went to the matinee performance – I am 60 you know.

You can google the history of TSO to see how Paul O’Neill and his collaborators brought great rock musicians together in the late 1990s to create an entertainment explosion of song and stage. I get goosebumps whenever I hear their music and think about how they took classical music compositions we pretty much all know and rocked them out to reach into another genre. If you haven’t heard them before you should give them a listen. And if you have never seen them on stage, you really need to. Get ready to see the longest hair you’ve seen since Cher in the 60s. And that’s just the guys in the group!

Christmas Eve and Other Stories is the weaving of basically three stories. The original Christmas story of our Savior coming to the earth. The story of God sending an angel today to see if the spirit of Christmas still exists in the hearts of humankind. And the story of a run-away young girl trying to get home to her father who longs for her return. The music that brings all these stories together is beautiful. Each song tells a story within itself and when the songs are put together it’s very moving

There’s one song that always moves me. It’s called Old City Bar. That’s right, in the midst of a Christmas performance there is a song about a bar. Remember this is rock music.

This song tells the story of the run-away girl trying to find a way to get back home on Christmas Eve. It’s sad and inspiring at the same time. It’s a song about how we’re all connected, especially on Christmas Eve, and how we all share the same hope for love and belonging. I’ll include a link to the song at the end of this post. Maybe it will talk to you and maybe it won’t. Maybe this style of music isn’t for you. But the central message of Old City Bar, as well as the entire Christmas Eve and Other Stories performance, is a message for all of us to think about not just on Christmas Eve but every day of the year.

That message is pretty much summarized by this one verse:
“If you want to arrange it
This world, you can change it
If we could somehow
Make this Christmas thing last
By helping a neighbor
Or even a stranger
To know who needs help,
You need only just ask.”

Change the world. We all have ideas on how to change the world to make it better. But better for whom? For a neighbor? For a stranger? For ourselves? The story of Christmas is perhaps the greatest story about change that has ever been told. You can choose to believe it or not. That’s your right and privilege. But I suggest to you that no greater change for a better future has ever been given to humankind than that which occurred on that first Christmas. If we want to make this Christmas thing last, this spirit of Christmas, of peace and goodwill towards men, then perhaps it is as simple as just asking if someone needs help. Even if that someone is ourselves.

The other song that always moves me is called This Christmas Day. It’s the song the father sings once he learns his daughter is on her way home after receiving the help of the bartender of the Old City Bar. If you’ve ever had a child or other loved one that’s been struggling away from home, you will relate to the father’s words.

Here is the first verse:
“So tell me Christmas are we wise
To believe in things we never see
Are Prayers just wishes in disguise
And are these wishes being granted me
For now I see the answering
To every prayer I’ve prayed
She’s coming home this Christmas Day”

Just as this father saw his wish, his prayer, being granted, I think we too will see the answering to our prayers for those we love. To believe in things we never see. I believe we are wise to place our hope in Christmas and to live out that hope every day of our lives. Think of the joy that would give our Father and the peace we will experience.

Here’s wishing you a Happy New Year friends! I hope you give a look and listen to the Old City Bar link below. Check out the entire Christmas Eve and Other Stories if you can. It will rock your socks off and more than likely bring you the peace of Christmas in a light show pyro-technic sort of way.

I’ll see you down the road in 2020….

The Road Most Traveled

Robert Frost wrote ‘The Road Not Taken’ many years ago but its poetic message holds meaning across all time. It’s one of the very few poems I remember from my high school literature classes and I think I’m beginning to understand why it has stayed in my mind for these some 40 years.

A traveler is faced with two paths. A choice is to be made between two options. One path looks to be well traveled while the other appears to be hardly a path at all. The first has well worn tracks from those that have walked it before. The second is grass covered with barely a trace of steps being taken down it. Which to choose? Where does each go?

Coming out of high school, I had decided to go to The Ohio State University to obtain a degree in secondary education. I wanted to be a high school history teacher. It seemed like a good choice for someone just starting out in adult life. I had been a student of a couple really excellent history teachers and they had inspired me to take that path.

But after just one quarter at Ohio State, I determined that four years of undergraduate and a couple more years of graduate studies were simply to long. I wanted to get going with a career and living life much sooner. So I switched to Computer Science at the two year tech college and received my associates degree.

I spent over thirty seven years in the I.T. field, leveraging that two year degree, working my way across many positions and levels of responsibility. Some of the work was tough while some was pretty easy but all of the programs, systems, and teams I worked on have helped make me who I am today. And have also brought me to where I am today.

I do wonder some days how being a history teacher would have gone for me. Would I have been successful reaching young minds and making dusty events from years ago relevant in their lives? I like to think I would have been. My teachers did that for me.

And I also had the example of Mr. Gower from the 1984 classic movie Teachers. If you have not watched the movie give it a shot. From the first time I saw Mr. Gower stumble into the high school history class as a substitute teacher, I wanted to be like him. You see Mr. Gower, not being a real teacher at all, was a little looney and had wandered away from a mental institution. He brought a different way of teaching history to the classroom.

When he came to class dressed as George Washington and re-enacted the crossing of the Delaware with his students, I thought that’s exactly how I would do it. I too would take the looney path if for no other reason than it was different and just might lead me to something really special.

Richard Mulligan as Mr. Gower in Teachers

The line most folks remember from the Robert Frost poem is probably this, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by.’ But it’s the last line that has stuck with me all these years of choosing different paths.

‘And that has made all the difference.’

At times I have taken the road most traveled and at other times I’ve chosen the one traveled less. Every one of those choices were the correct ones to make. Some were easy to walk and others brought me difficulties. But I now understand that it’s not choosing the right path to the right destination that is important. It’s simply the journey that makes life worthwhile.

Tomorrow, the Doodle and I start down our next path. After a couple months of getting used to living in our RV, the Terra, we begin our journey out of Ohio. For the next six months we will be choosing paths and roads that many have traveled and some that few have gone down. But as Robert Frost penned, I know that each choice, including the little looney one of living in a RV, will make all the difference.

I hope you join us as we travel by following our blog posts. We’re going to use the blog as a daily journal for the most part. Some entries will be short while some longer in thought and some will even be shared by the Doodle from her perspective. Those will probably be the most entertaining.

So again, I hope you join us on our adventure. And please contribute your thoughts and comments on our postings. I’d love to hear your stories on the paths you have taken.

See you down the road….

The Seldom Seen Road

For the past year, I have been living in a very nice two-bedroom apartment in Powell, Ohio, which overlooks a road called Seldom Seen. It’s not a very long road, maybe two to three miles in length that connects the Scioto Riverside Drive to Liberty Road. I was curious as to why the road was named Seldom Seen because today it’s pretty busy and just about everyone in our community knows where to look for Seldom Seen. Should be renamed to Frequently Seen maybe.

So to discover the history and the reason why the road was named Seldom Seen, I went to the source of all true and factual knowledge, Facebook, and posted my inquiry to a group dedicated to all things Powell. As of this post from along the road, no one seems to know with certainty. But there is a lot of fond recollection of past times spent on Seldom Seen before it became Frequently Seen. Memories of bike rides down to the river or visiting the farms that were along the road. The good old days if you will.

I grew up in Coshocton County, Ohio. I too have fond memories of taking long bike rides in the country on dusty roads. Passing farms and ponds. Stopping to get a drink from a natural spring along County Road 24. Some Saturdays I would tell my mom where I was headed and approximately what time I’d be back and then start peddling out of town to spend twenty or thirty miles of my life enjoying the back roads. Maybe even some seldom seen. Yes, those were the good old days. At least they were for me.

The road. We bike it. We drive it. We walk it. We sometimes despise it. But we all are on one road or another during our life. Use of a car is optional but for expediency, it is a good idea. Many of the roads we go down over the years are not drivable. They’re rough and rocky. Full of potholes and wrong turns. Some even dead ends. Each road, even the road of life, can be an exciting adventure full of enjoyment. But very quickly that road can become an unexpected calamity. A detour from what we had planned. And sometimes our GPS doesn’t recognize the road we’re on or it takes us on a road the doesn’t even exist. I guess there’s just no way around it. The road, the road of life, is what it is and we just have to do the best we can to get to where we’re going.

This is the first post from along the road for the Doodle and I since we have moved out of our apartment overlooking Seldom Seen and into our motorhome. For the next two weeks, we are staying at a very nice campground in a little town just a few miles from Frequently Seldom Seen Road but yet far enough away to be a new experience for us. Something we haven’t seen before. The roads between where we were and where we are were very picturesque with farms and creeks dotted along the way. A very pleasant drive today. But I know that those same roads have had some pretty tragic accidents over the years.

Maybe it’s good luck or bad timing that brings us what we encounter on the road. Maybe it’s not our fault. Maybe sometimes it is. Either way, it is what it is and each of us has to decide how we respond to what we encounter. Do we push right through it? Do we try to steer around it? Do we double back and take another road? Or do we sit and wait for the road before us to open up again? I’ve made all these choices in my life. Some were the right decision at the time and others were not so much.

I’m thinking the point is to just keep going down any road you can take which will get you closer to where you want to be. Adjust your course as needed but keep going. Take that seldom seen road maybe just to see it. Don’t sweat the detour as it may just take you to a place you never knew you needed to see. Make a call to a loved one while you wait for the road to open up again. Better yet get off at the next exit and go see them. Your destination will still be there. It’s okay to take your time and see what or who is along the road and even notice who is traveling next to you. Life is one road we’re all on together. So why not share it and the experiences with one another. Having travel buddies does tend to make the road seem less long you know.

What was it James Taylor sang it the song Secret of Life about the road?

“Isn’t it a lovely ride,
See me sliding down and gliding down,
Try not to try too hard,
It’s just a lovely ride”

Hope you take that seldom seen road. You just might see me and the Doodle on it too.

See you down the road….

Dog Tales – Go West Young Man

While walking the Doodle this morning, I was thinking about a trip I have coming up. Just a week away, I fly to Chicago, board Amtrak and head west to Glacier, Montana, and then onto Portland, Oregon.

Now when I say I was thinking about my trip I mean I was mentally reviewing my trip spreadsheet row by row to see if I had left anything out of my plan. I do a spreadsheet for every trip to layout the schedule and control costs. I’m just wired that way and I suspect a few of you are too. I like to plan spontaneity. 🙂

This will be my first train trip since I was four years old and I’m just as excited about this one as I was back then.

I’ve always enjoyed trains. My dad had an O gauge train set and I’ve owned a few others over the years. They were all fun to setup and play with but mostly I enjoyed daydreaming about traveling cross country on a train. So the trip next week is hopefully the first long train ride of many for me.

When I was a kid, I loved the TV show ‘Wild, Wild West’. James West and Artimus Gordon were the first two secret service agents in the late 1800’s and they traveled and lived on a train. Awesome!

Jim’s courage and Artie’s cleverness were quite the combination. They were able to serve their country, kick the butt of various villains, and meet a lot of very pretty women. Still sounds like a good gig to me!

I don’t plan to be vanquishing any villains this train trip but I am excited to step out of my comfort zone and take a trip of this type on my own. I imagine as I’m sitting in my seat, watching the vastness and beauty of our nation roll by, I’ll replay some of those old Wild, Wild West episodes in my mind.

Maybe I’ll come up with some gadget or disguise like Artie or climb out the train window and run across the top of the cars like Jim. Or most likely, I’ll just enjoy the ride and talk with a few newly made friends. And if one or two of those new friends are pretty women that will be ok too. 😎

On this trip I plan to start writing about the life journey of other folks I’ve met over the years. We’re all travelers on this road of life. Some times we share the road, or track, and sometimes we take different routes but we all have experiences that make us who we are and who we are to become. And in sharing those experiences we will usually discover that we all have more in common than we thought.

So my friends both now and soon to meet, if I give you a call, drop you an email, or tap you on the shoulder over the weeks ahead, here’s hoping that you’ll share a bit of your life journey with me in order to share with others. Thanks in advance my friends!

See you down there road, ah, or maybe the track….