The Perfect Song Blog

I had a presentation to give in Orlando so with Leigh’s help I found plane tickets online, a shuttle bus online and headed out at 6 a.m., an ungodly hour I’ll try never to do again. Took Northwest to Detroit. While I just flew in Denver in July, it was one way and Leigh and Kim picked me up.

This time I was on my own. Understand this is from the perspective of a guy who hasn’t flown alone for nearly 20 years. I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up and finding some major changes which everyone else seems to take for granted.

When I hit Detroit I proceeded to head in the general direction of the departure gates, not really knowing about the tram. I walked about a quarter of a mile, part of it through an other-worldly multicolored tunnel whose purpose I’m still not sure of, except that it had a rolling walkway so I was free to gawk at the muted changing designs on the walls reminding me of a couple out-of-body experiences decades back.

Arrived in Orlando almost to the minute of their projected landing. I give Northwest five stars. Both flights left and arrived on time. The planes were clean. The pilots (and the weather) were good.

Found my suitcase at the baggage claim, then stood in line to get my shuttle ticket. Finally, after five minutes of Travel 101, I realized I had ordered the ticket online and there was a machine in front of me into which I could feed the bar code on my reservation. Sure enough, it politely, impersonally (and very quickly) spit out my ticket. I had been five hours without a pipe so I stepped outside and had one puff when the shuttle was ready to go.

The shuttle was full so I sat in the front with the driver. She was a Hispanic lady with a Chihuahua and a cat who love each other. We talked about dogs and upbringing.

A sign on the dashboard said the driver appreciated tips. When we arrived at the Doubletree Guest Suites, I fished in my pocket for cash. The smallest I had was a ten. I asked her if she had a five. “I have four ones,” she said. I nodded and handed her the 10 dollar bill. She gave me her four ones.

The Doubletree is an excellent place. Everyone smiles and plays jokes. I asked the concierge for a computer cable. “For a million bucks,” she said.

I nodded. “It’s worth it.”

She handed me the cable. “When do I see my million?”

“The check’s in the mail.”

Later, an African American maid and I had a brief conversation on the elevator. Two hours later I was coming back from a walk and a woman down the hall waved to me. At first I didn’t recognize her. It was the maid!

This was just before I went to my room and found the card didn’t work. I took it to the lobby where the girl said, “You’re just looking for reasons to keep coming down and seeing me.”

“I’ll use any reason I can find,” I said.

She reprogrammed two. I took them back. They didn’t work.

She reprogrammed two and apologized. I took them back. They didn’t work.

I was getting frustrated and paranoid. Did someone not want me in the room? Or was I just a hayseed country boy who couldn’t slide a card into a door?

I returned to the desk. “I’m so sorry Mr. Miller. I’ll send up an engineer.”

The “engineer” was a Hispanic gentleman with English as a distant second language. He found that indeed the cards didn’t work.

Yes!! It wasn’t me!

“I be back in two minutes!” He returned with two working cards. I didn’t know if I was supposed to tip him but I figured my six trips to the lobby counted for something.

I settled into my suite: kitchenette, fully stocked bar, living room with TV, bedroom with TV, bathroom with TV (a bit of an overkill to watch CNN while you’re taking a dump. Do you really need financial analysis while showering? Rich people who are used to this stuff need a kick in the ass).

More in a couple days.

For photos, see my postings.

Emma sat in her nursing home room on a single bed hunched over, picking at something visible only to her from her green pants.

Emma is in the end stage of Alzheimer’s.

For a half hour she never looked up. She was intent on picking whatever she saw on that one spot on her pants.

I was visiting Margaret, Emma’s room mate. Earlier, Emma had made her way from her bed over to Margaret’s. The TV was on but Emma didn’t hear it. Margaret and I played cards and Emma took no notice of us.

To Emma’s left was Cinnamon, Margaret’s teddy bear, a gift from my mother. Emma had her own bear over on her bed but paid no attention to it. After about a half hour of picking at her pants, she leaned over the foot of the bed and spit out some phlegm, then resumed her project.

I had seen Emma often during my weekend visits but had never spoken to her. When she talks what comes out is a series of sounds unrecognizable as words.

A few minutes later, out of the corner of my eye I saw her lean down suddenly. I jerked around, thinking she was falling.

I was wrong. Emma was leaning down on the bed, smiling at  Cinnamon. She reached out and took his little white paws and helped him dance. She laughed and exclaimed something in her own language. Her smile was as wide and unguarded as a baby’s. There was a light in her eyes that I’d never seen.

Cinnamon was alive and communicating with her.

Understand that I don’t mean in her mind the bear was alive. I saw it. The little bear was living. He was smiling. His eyes glittered and the two of them were totally in synch with each other.

It happens in fairy tales. It happens in movies.

It happens in life.

The moment was so real and so wonderful – and understand I use that word knowing it means “full of wonder” – that I had to blink away tears. In this moment the little reddish bear brought real happiness to a woman given the death sentence by a disease we don’t understand.

She sat up and started to turn away. But by some force many of us refuse to recognize, the bear tipped over. He started to slide off the bed, and Emma in a movement so quick and sure it startled me, reached over and caught him before he plunged over the side. I know he did that on purpose in an effort to make her feel needed. She pulled him back up, sat him upright and said something to him, smiling, reassuring him that he would be okay.

A moment later the magic gently faded and Emma sat back up, hunched over and stared downward at nothing. She was as motionless as Cinnamon.

It all took less than a minute.

But when magic enters our lives, a minute is all that’s needed, because magic is timeless. Cinnamon, plush and cuddly, arms forever outstretched, gave Emma something no on in our limited human dimension could.

He drew her out of a gray world in which she often sits and cries or picks at invisible things on her pants. He coaxed her into daylight and gave her a moment of pure joy. Emma in turn saved Cinnamon from tumbling off the bed and told him he was safe now.

That’s all either of them needed.

Down the hall of the nursing home that I visit, Mary, an old woman with flying white hair, pushes her wheelchair up and down the hallway yelling, “I gotta pee! I gotta pee!”

I don’t think she means it, but in here you never know.

In a room on the right, the TV is on and a woman sits in her chair staring vacantly into some other world. It’s not a happy world. She never smiles.

In the room up from her, a small black man lies on his bed with the lights out. Sometimes he’s on his back. Sometimes he turns on his side, I guess for the variety of views. In another room, a heavy woman with no underpants sits with her legs spread watching old variety shows. Lawrence Welk is on and Myron Floren is playing a polka on his accordion. He’s smiling as he pushes the bellows in and out. He’s always smiling. Myron could be fighting a hangover and stomach flu while playing a dirge and he’d be smiling.

Mary rides back down the hall yelling, “I wanna go home! I wanna go home!”

At the end of the hall, another heavy woman with no teeth pulls a spoon from her closed mouth and gums the strawberry ice cream. The woman beside her is asleep. In fact, here and there throughout the building, women are sleeping. Some are sitting. Some are lying down. Some have their eyes open.

The aides scurry back and forth answering call buttons. “Ethel in 206 has wet herself,” one aide says to another. “Can you clean her up?”

Along comes Mary again, this time holding the belt of a male aide as he tries to make his way down the hall. “Mary, you have to let go of me,” he says in a kind voice with just a trace of fear. He’s not sure what to do so he continues walking and pulling her. I can’t tell if she just wants a free ride or something more substantial.

“I gotta pee!” She yells as they make their way down the hall. “You gotta pee?”

“No, Mary. I don’t have to pee. Please let go of me.”

“I gotta pee!”

No matter how hard the aids work at sanitation, there’s always a faint smell of urine.

After my visit, I step into the sunshine. It’s one of those rare, warm, cloudless fall days with no breeze. The perfume of dying leaves plays in the nostrils and fill the lungs.

In the car I push in the CD “Leslie Fiedler and the Boston Pops Play The Beatles.” I bought it used for $3.99. At just the right moment, as I’m driving past fields of corn drooping a bit from the last frost, track 3 comes on with the orchestra playing Ob-Di-La Ob-La-Da, a fun polka type tune from their “White Album.”

In a 2004 BBC poll, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da was voted one of the worst songs ever.

I don’t agree.

I stop at a farmer’s market and buy some ears of corn, fresh-picked apples and locally grown tomatoes that are deep red, heavy and firm.

I get back in the car and take a back road home. I punch track 3 again, appreciating my freedom of movement, the freedom to walk and drive wherever I want, taking deep breaths of the fresh air coming through the open window, reminded again that the moment is everything.

ob la di ob la da life goes on bra
la la how the life goes on
ob la di ob la da life goes on bra
la la how the life goes on

(When you have a chance visit my website, www.perfectsong.net and check out my novel The Perfect Song in both text and audio format. The cyber editions are free but if you’d like to send a contribution to the Perfect Song Scholarship Fund you can mail a check to “The Perfect Song Scholarship,” Mansfield University Foundation, Alumni House, Mansfield University, Mansfield, PA 16933)

I got a spam today that promised to improve my sperm’s integrity!  It caught my attention.  Being a male, I have spent way too many hours thinking about sperm over the years, but I had never looked at it in terms of having integrity.

I couldn’t get this message off my mind.  I kept conjuring up this scenario:

, In the body of a 20-year-old healthy male, deep down in the House of Jewels, the sperm population, known around town as the Sperm Count, got the news about improving integrity.  Larry, a sperm activist who keeps up with the news, called everyone together.

“Listen guys!  There’s a movement out there to improve our integrity.  I think we’ve got to take this seriously.”

“What’s integrity?”  Someone asked.  The rest of the group, composed of thousands of young sperms with only one thing on their minds,  began mumbling in the same confused tone.

When thousands of sperm mumble, the House of Jewels rocks.

“Quiet down!”  Larry yelled.  “For your information, integrity is . . .uh. . .hmm. . .” Wait a minute.”  He swam down past the Sperm Bank and entered the Sperm Bookstore. He checked a dictionary and returned.  “Integrity,” He announced, “is adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.” He flipped his tail with an air of sticky authority.  “So there!”

Zack, an old sperm who had escaped the missions that millions of sperm had been sent on over the years, raised his tail.  “Sperm don’t have integrity,” he said.  “A sperm’s main goalis to get sucked up that long tube above us, get shot into another tube, then swim your ass off to try to hit the egg.  You do it by any means possible.  There ain’t any rules.  Your job is to crack the egg or die trying.  If we adhered to morals or ethical principles, there wouldn’t be any human race left.  ”

Nate, a younger but equally cynical sperm nodded.  “Yeah, that’s the general goal.  Besides,   this dude we’re housed in sends out a new army everyday and 99 percent of them wind up nowhere close to an egg.  What’s the incentive to have integrity?  We’re useless pawns in a cataclysmic play created by a mindless sex machine!  I don’t want any part of it.  I’m for survival over integrity.”

Larry was not discouraged.  “Men. . .or half men . . .”  He stopped, looked at Zack and turned the tables on him.  “Zack is right.  Our mission is to hit the egg.  Do you understand what that means?” He paused dramatically.  “Our mission is the creation of life!”  There was a sudden silence.  “Yes, when one of us – one out of tens of thousands – cracks the egg, we create life!  We are gods! “ He stopped  and looked around at the thousands of squiggling tails.  He had their attention.  “When we crack the egg and create life, we are god like.  No one else can do what we do.  We must have integrity.”

He studied his audience and knew he had lost them again.  The thousands of sperm swam slowly and confused in their creamy gelatinous liquid.  They were too young.  They just didn’t get it.  They had just one thing on their minds and that was the almighty egg.  They were born fighters.

“Save your stuff, Larry,” Zack said.  “These sperm aren’t even 24 hours old.  Think about what I’m saying, here.  The army before them were barely here a day.  As soon as we’re manufactured, this maniac sends them flying.  Look,” he said reassuringly, “Just swim about and accept your place in the world.  You’re in a testicle, for god’s sakes.  You’re going to shoot out of here in a matter of hours.  Pray that your troops will be the ones that actually fly into a real tube with an egg at the end of it.

“Give it your best fight.  Swim with everything you’ve got and hit that egg.  If you don’t get it, well, you gave it your all.”

There was a silence.  Even young sperms understand logic when they hear it.  “That’s all there is Larry” Zack said.   “Live for the day, and believe me, in this testicle, that’s all you’ve got.  Live for the moment and shoot with pride.  After that, it’s out of your hands.”

“And most likely into his,” cynical Nate said.

Suddenly there was a tension.  All the sperms felt it.  The House of Jewels was heating up. The sperms rushed and swam and though they’d never experienced it, they knew that this was  it.  This was the big moment.  There was  an air of excitement, anticipation, and a little fear of the big unknown.

Nate shook his tail.  Things were heating up too fast.  If there was a womb involved, the womb’s owner  would be making House of Jewels Man slow down.  No, this was a solo mission and he knew what that meant.  Thousands and thousands of well-meaning sperm were going to find themselves careening into the open air and crashing into a Kleenex.

Another sad case of friendly fire.

But, he thought, what are you going to do?  How do you fight nature?  There was electric in the room.  The tension was building fast.  The sperm were silent.  It was going to happen any second—

Whoosh!  Off they went in a hot, creamy rush!  A climactic end that repeated itself everyday.

When things calmed  down and the temperature lowered back to normal, Nate looked at Zack.  “Well, old Larry’s gone with the rest of them.  Where do you think integrity got him?”

Zack nodded quietly.  “Right.  When you’re talking  sex, nothing else matters.”

He turned over and wiggled slowly. “Better get some rest before the second coming.”

It was 8:40 a.m. and gray swirls of fog rose lazy and unconcerned in the corn fields.

A scene hit me like a quiet, lovely painting.

I was just passing Dolly’s restaurant on my right, traveling 35 miles per hour through Lawrenceville which is celebrating 175 years of existence.

A short, beefy man in his thirties wearing a dirty brown and beige plaid coat and a bright turquoise baseball cap spotted with grease lumbered along the side of the road through a trail of black rubber chunks toward his fat-bellied concrete truck.

The truck sat at an angle, stopped in mid-limp. Its rear tire had shredded. The burly truck driver must have known he was going to be awhile before help arrived and made his way on foot to Dolly’s Restaurant where he probably had a big plate of ham and eggs with a side of home fries and several cups of coffee. He looked like the type who uses Tabasco sauce

And maybe now he was returning to his beloved truck (all drivers love their trucks, even if it is just a lowly concrete mixer) to get in the cab, lean back, pull his turquoise cap over his eyes and have a nap.

Life’s bumpy, but not bad at all with the right attitude. . .and a good restaurant within walking distance.