Grandma's Window

Tuesday July 29th, 2008 - Kenosha, WI/Lake Villa, IL

More good vibes all around today. I’m on a nice creative roll right now and I don’t want to waste even one single solitary second of it. I know this doesn’t last forever but for right now I’m in a fantastic mental zone. I feel like I’m bulletproof and nothing can stop me.

I read an interview with Stan Musial once where he talked about how fantastic he felt in spring training every year knowing he was going to hit .330 when the season started. He’d love every minute of it and it was interesting to read that article because I’d never heard it put quite like that before. Right now I feel the same way. Whatever I do is going to work.

I don’t know why I know that but I just do. I think I’m in the position in life I’d hear my grandmother talk about as she got older. She thought that all of us reach a point where we figure out the secret of how life works. It doesn’t happen at the same time for any of us so it becomes a race. While we‘re stumbling through our life there‘s a giant window closing.

IF a person can figure out how life works in time to get through that window before it’s closed that equals success and happiness and all the things everyone dreams about. If not, it’s a horrible feeling knowing what to do but also knowing the window is closed forever.

My grandmother said she missed her window. It was closed by the time she figured out what life was about. Maybe that was why she was so crabby. From my earliest memory it always seemed like she was cold and hard and angry about something. It wasn’t until she was in her 80s that we had these conversations and she really opened up about everything.

She was German and not at all warm by nature. I don’t think I got my first hug from her until I was about 37. She told me she loved me and I wasn’t sure how to react to it. I’d not heard her say it before. She had a long life and a lot of time to think about stuff like this.

Whatever anger and bitterness she kept inside her kept her from living whatever dreams she might have had. We didn’t speak at one point for over nine years. I thought we would never speak again. She didn’t approve of my being in ‘that goddamned show business’.

It was only when we reunited after all those years did we start to become close. I would go out and see her once a week or so and bring her lunch and sit and talk with her and let her just say whatever she was feeling. She opened up on a lot of things and was very wise on many subjects. That theory of the closing window really makes total sense to me now.

I don’t think my window has closed yet. I think this is my time to leap through it before I end up like my grandmother. And grandfather. And father. And most of the people who ever lived. I don’t want to end up like them. I am going to choose to live a fulfilled life.

That takes effort and planning and total commitment but what’s wrong with that? I have lived this long trying to figure things out so why not take it all the way and jump through that window? It‘s a little scary but it‘s a lot scarier to think what might happen if I don‘t.