Happy Late Night, Sweet Baby,
I saw a post tonight about a concert in Battle Creek, so I figure you might be there. I say "might be" because I Googled it and it's quite a distance, 320 miles from Madison, but then again you are no stranger to road trips, so maybe you did go. :)
If you did, then you know the only requirement is that you had a blast. :)
One requirement and one given : the given is that you got great pics.....
I am writing from home tonight. I am off until Sunday morning, and tonight I got home just in time to see the live tribute, at Dodger Stadium, for our baseball announcer Vin Scully, who I've mentioned before and who is retiring at the end of this season after 67 years. For people my age, and even older, he's been with us our entire lives, and he's more that just a sports announcer, he's a poet as Kevin Costner remarked in his beautiful speech during the ceremony. He's also a phenomenon; I mean, I haven't even been alive for 67 years, much less doing one thing the whole time. I don't think you'd even find a factory or store worker who's been on the job for 67 years. But in Vin's case, what he did was more than a job, it was a calling, and you can file it under the "Life Is Magic" heading because no matter what happened in the world for the last 67 years (think about that amount of time), there was Vin, bringing the game to the city of Los Angeles in the same calm friendly voice year after year......after year.
Hey SB, you know how we've talked about how time can seem to go both fast and slow. Well, the thing that makes baseball such a great sport is that it's like Zen. It's slow, the structure of the game never changes, there is no time limit in a baseball game (unlike all other major sports which are timed), and like Zen, on the surface it seems kind of simplistic. I remember having a Big Realisation one time when I was about 18 or so, and I thought, "why do grown men hit a ball with a stick and then run around in a circle"?
I thought, "doesn't that seem like something 5 year olds would do"?
But of course I wasn't understanding the Zen, or the chess match that is involved. Chess matches also take time, and in taking time, the players also defeat time. They defeat time limits.
There is no Time Limit to a chess match. You can take as much time as you like, even to make a single move. With baseball, you have to move the game along a little faster than that, because the crowd is watching and athletes are involved, but the concept is the same: in baseball, as in chess, you are defeating time, because there are no time limits.
And maybe that is why Vin Scully could announce Dodger games for 67 years, without his voice ever changing, without it ever sounding old, and with the same enthusiasm as when he started. Maybe by doing it year after year, he tapped into that timelessness. I repeat : for us Dodger fans, he has always been with us. For me, it's been my whole life, and he was doing it 11 years before I was born!
Baseball - like chess or Zen - defeats time. And that's what we all want to do, defeat time so we can live forever, like the feeling you get in a romantic movie or watching the Gentleman's game of baseball, the game that never changes.
I was blown away by the Vin Scully tribute tonight. It really settled in deep, in the same way that last night's screening of "Diary Of A Country Priest" did, when I realised I was living inside the movie as I watched it, that it too had a timeless power.
All of this is why I say, and will always say "Life Is Magic", because beyond the 24/7 cycle, beyond the News and the extreme things that are reported every day - usually violent, the kind of things that happen in a split second - is this enormous sense of timelessness that is not seen nor reported but only felt.
That's the magic and also the secret : You've got all the time in the World.....
Always rely on glimpses and intuition, the most powerful guides in your life. /////
Well, that's all I know for tonight, SB. I also watched the final two episodes of "11/22/63" and was blown away because the story is along these same lines. I knew that because I read the book, but they did a tremendous job to bring it to life.
See you in the morning, from home this time. I Love You. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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