Osler's Razor

I was walking today when a song slipped out of my iPod. I don't remember putting it in there, or hearing it before. It was "High and Low" by Greg Laswell. It isn't the kind of song I would normally like, but it captured my mood in that exact moment-- kind of a very gentle melancholy born of sad but not tragic memories.

"Once I can see straight,
I might move somewhere cold;
Seattle or the Bay Area
To see your ghost
What's left of you
What's left of you.

Found a letter from a man
I might have met
Addressed to you
I'll steal the words he ended with:
"I miss you."

My life has been largely free of tragedy and full of good fortune. There was no dead father or alcoholic mother or jailed sibling; no debilitation emotions or crushing illness. My sadnesses don't take me back to a horrible memory but rather to my own failings, those moments when I should have been kind and wasn't or felt lost when others were really there for me. My dad was painting a portrait once, and someone said the subject looked sad (it might have been the one shown here). My dad disagreed; "It's just the good blues" he explained. I like that phrase, and I know that feeling.

The funny thing is that the good blues today came on the heels of what has been a wonderful week. They just kind of wafted in on a memory of a slight I may have once inflicted, many many years ago. Of course, with the kinds of things that happened this week there are always the seeds of both challenge and change, the vague sense that all this may be temporary in one way or another.

And, it is October.

October, when there should be leaves on the ground and the sound of a marching band practicing and events at the school to be a little late for, when certain scents return-- apples and cinnamon and pumpkin and smoke. Each leaf on the ground is a death, but also an accomplishment and promise fulfilled, greater than any of mine. When I have the good blues, each leaf is humbling.

If you were in my courtroom today, I'm sorry that my critiques were not as sharp and knowing as I hope for. Part of me was somewhere else apart from here in place and time, a little boy in a lion costume walking by the curb, pushing the leaves with his feet, sad that Halloween was over.