It's Tuesday morning, and I'm just getting back to this thread after being away for a few days attending my first cousin's wedding in the bucolic upstate New York mountains. We had a weekend focused on fun and celebration, eating (and drinking, though not for me), being outdoors, making/enjoying music, and meeting friends and relatives both old and new - in a setting featuring warm sun, brisk clean air, brilliant autumn leaves, interesting rocks and trees, snow-covered peaks, star-blanketed night skies (nice to see once in a while that the Milky Way is still around us) and panoramic mountaintop vistas revealed after a slightly grueling but invigorating (so you didn't mind the mud and slush) hike up. I found myself lingering, after group photos atop an abrupt rock face peak overlooking miles of valleys and ridges below, to watch as individual brightly colored leaves would every so often break free of their tree moorings and sail off gently into the abyss, yet not falling but buoyed upward and outward on thermals ascending the cliffside, floating away gradually against the blue sky like a slow and solemn dance procession. But all the while privately I kept wanting to hurry back home and to my computer because I knew I was missing this thread at a critical time.
That, and also because of an email exchange Pat and I had last week. You see, a few months back, when I sent Pat an old CD changer I had cooling in a closet, I did so with the threat that I would regularly be making and sending him CD-R's of whatever music I felt inspired to give him - mostly just in case he ever tired of having to get up and down to flip records during his illness, but also as a form of communication of my regard for him. Well, you know what they say about where the road paved with good intentions leads...
Despite plenty of initial enthusiasm I found I quickly became rather bashful about the prospect of imposing unsolicited music upon a guy I didn't really know, who had a large collection I was unfamiliar with the contents of, and who probably could no longer be in possession of the unthinking sense (that I suspect most of us are guilty of, however incorrectly in reality) that he had all the time in the world left in which to listen. Simply put, I didn't want to waste Pat's valuable time and attention on anything not of his own choosing, or that he or Barb might not dig as much as me. I was relieved when I learned that some of Pat's local friends - who presumably know his tastes better than I could - loaned or gave him several CDs, and after only a couple of stabs at sending him stuff, I aborted the mission thinking discretion might be the better part of valor in this case.
After reading recently that Pat had just 30 or so CDs to play I asked him last week if there was anything in particular he wanted, and instead he encouraged me to go ahead and send him whatever I felt like. I really wanted to deep down, so I agreed with both excitment and some reluctance to compile just one CD-R. I decided on making a collection from a group, my favorite among currently active rock bands, that I don't believe he's heard before, and I hope no one finds this too strange or inappropriate but part of the reason was because I feel they've written some inspiring songs about affirmation of life within comtemplation of death (though it's incidental, for those who might wonder the band is The Flaming Lips).
However I couldn't quite finish putting together the CD-R before we had to leave town, and after reading, the evening prior to our going, that Pat couldn't keep food down anymore, while we were away I feared it would really be too late upon my return for completing and overnighting the disk to be anything more than a futile gesture - even on the outside chance he might have liked the music nearly as much as I do, which of course was never any certainty. So now, reading Pat's most recent posts above, I've decided - again - that at this juncture I shouldn't send it after all. I feel kind of foolish concerning myself like this about something as small as a CD (though I myself will listen to it and think of Pat after he's gone) when Howard, who writes so eloquently, has actually traveled to be with Pat, but it's emblematic to me of the essential powerlessness I'm sure frustrates us all in this situation - with time slipping away, and words seeming like but leaves blowing away on the winds of a changing season we cannot alter.
That, and also because of an email exchange Pat and I had last week. You see, a few months back, when I sent Pat an old CD changer I had cooling in a closet, I did so with the threat that I would regularly be making and sending him CD-R's of whatever music I felt inspired to give him - mostly just in case he ever tired of having to get up and down to flip records during his illness, but also as a form of communication of my regard for him. Well, you know what they say about where the road paved with good intentions leads...
Despite plenty of initial enthusiasm I found I quickly became rather bashful about the prospect of imposing unsolicited music upon a guy I didn't really know, who had a large collection I was unfamiliar with the contents of, and who probably could no longer be in possession of the unthinking sense (that I suspect most of us are guilty of, however incorrectly in reality) that he had all the time in the world left in which to listen. Simply put, I didn't want to waste Pat's valuable time and attention on anything not of his own choosing, or that he or Barb might not dig as much as me. I was relieved when I learned that some of Pat's local friends - who presumably know his tastes better than I could - loaned or gave him several CDs, and after only a couple of stabs at sending him stuff, I aborted the mission thinking discretion might be the better part of valor in this case.
After reading recently that Pat had just 30 or so CDs to play I asked him last week if there was anything in particular he wanted, and instead he encouraged me to go ahead and send him whatever I felt like. I really wanted to deep down, so I agreed with both excitment and some reluctance to compile just one CD-R. I decided on making a collection from a group, my favorite among currently active rock bands, that I don't believe he's heard before, and I hope no one finds this too strange or inappropriate but part of the reason was because I feel they've written some inspiring songs about affirmation of life within comtemplation of death (though it's incidental, for those who might wonder the band is The Flaming Lips).
However I couldn't quite finish putting together the CD-R before we had to leave town, and after reading, the evening prior to our going, that Pat couldn't keep food down anymore, while we were away I feared it would really be too late upon my return for completing and overnighting the disk to be anything more than a futile gesture - even on the outside chance he might have liked the music nearly as much as I do, which of course was never any certainty. So now, reading Pat's most recent posts above, I've decided - again - that at this juncture I shouldn't send it after all. I feel kind of foolish concerning myself like this about something as small as a CD (though I myself will listen to it and think of Pat after he's gone) when Howard, who writes so eloquently, has actually traveled to be with Pat, but it's emblematic to me of the essential powerlessness I'm sure frustrates us all in this situation - with time slipping away, and words seeming like but leaves blowing away on the winds of a changing season we cannot alter.