I like to think of my podcast Knee Deep as filled with moments that take our minds off the Big Performance and put the attention on those serendipitous events that add grace to our lives.
Serendipity, by definition, can occur anywhere, anytime. I’m remembering a line from a song on an album in the 1970’s by Crosby, Stills and Nash titled Four Way Street which was recorded live. In the song called Right Between the Eyes, these harmonizing geniuses surprised even themselves by starting out on the exact same note. Given that the popular trio was known for the perfect melding of their voices, the error made the start of the song all the more obvious. As they hit the sang the same note, you could almost see the three musicians freeze up and stare at each other, as if to say, “How did that happen?” Finally, one of them broke the silence with this: “I would never (have) believed we could all have started out on the same note, but we did it.”
Dead silence ensued, then applause and laughter burst through, and the audience relaxed into a song list of what have now become classics. The perfect harmonies created by the trio was replaced by something so much better in that beginning– the charm and personality of three regular guys. Their silly mis-start set the tone for an album full of surprises that seem, each time one hears them, like they were written just for us. It is a beautiful thing when that happens – I think they call it art – when the free exploration of a craft reveals the supernatural skill of the artist and transports the listener or viewer through an imaginative journey. It is a journey where you never want to go home, and it can happen anywhere at any time, even without an artist of any kind, and, it just so happens I went on one of those journeys last week.
It started when a plastic grocery bag blew in from a recent storm and got caught in the top branch of a dead oak tree in our neighbor’s yard. When I first noticed it blowing around up there, I was mildly annoyed that a grocery bag was putting an ugly smear on my otherwise clear view of the sky. I was used to bags being caught in bushes and around signposts and the like, but this bag was waaaaaay up there and had overtaken the space that normally attracted birds of all kinds and had been a haven for a kind of metropolitan squirrel park.
However, this bag was changing all that. It was just a vagrant traveler, a moocher, who had taken up residence without permission, and there was nothing short of a tree service that could do anything about it. Furthermore, looking up at the bag, I had the odd feeling that it was waving at me like one of those people who wave at you from like they know you, but don’t. When you get up close to them, you aren’t the person they thought you were. Likewise, I knew the trash bag didn’t know me. I knew I wasn’t the person it thought I was, but it didn’t seem to matter. The bag kept waving at me anyway.
Each time I went out the back door, there it was again, flowing back and forth without a care in the world, flipping and flopping around like a kid in a trampoline factory. I knew that nothing short of a gale force wind was going to bring that bag down. And even when there was no perceptible wind at all, the grocery bag was still moving, catching the slightest puff of air and gracefully spinning and twirling, a plastic pirouetting danseur groc’eirre.
It was enough to make me sick. Somehow, in the back of my twisted and cynical mind, I believed that trash bags had no right to be that happy and free, like we are. In fact, I believe that plastic grocery bags had no rights at all, that they had only one place in our world which, by the way, certainly was not next door to me high up in a tree with the best view in the neighborhood. To my point, I believed that trash bags should be used and not seen, that their rightful place was either with other bags of their kind in the check-out line or hanging quietly under a sink waiting for any garbage that might be thrown their way.
And this is where things take a nasty turn. I had, without even knowing it, begun to believe that the placement of this carefree bag high up in a tree had been place there just to irritate me.
Now, having owned a sailboat most of my life, I had always relished being out in the wind and on the water. One would think then that I would have an appreciation for the natural display of nature’s forces and be captivated by watching the wind catch the insides of a little sack up in a tree and equate it with a little sailboat up there in the sky. Next, I would be able to imagine it on a beautiful tack across the aqua-green surface of a bucolic lake. One would think I would have that image etched in my mind like a postcard in a gift shop, and that I would be able to feel the sack fill up and revel in knowing that the vacuum, like in a real sailing experience, is created on the other side was making the sail-sack up moving as if it were truly sailing. It’s a physics thing all sailors understand and appreciate – that we are moved forward to fill a vacuum like miniature sailboats destined for some distant shore.
This image in turn conjures up a picture, doesn’t it, of me on a journey, one where I am taking out my own trash to my own trash can, that I then would be excited knowing that I could leave the back door and look up and be at peace knowing that this universal law of physics, like gravity and thermal vortexes, was still at work around me. One would think then that a warmth would come over me, and I would feel at peace with the world, and know that God was with me, omnipresent and steady, because I could look up and see one of those very laws at work in a grocery bag high up in a tree, and then I would return to the house as if I’d just returned from a prayer retreat, satisfied, sanctified, perhaps a bit holier, having then filled a small vacuum in my own life, and knowing nothing could change the irrevocable laws of our Master, and his invention, the grocery bag.
One would think that, yes, but it would not be true. I looked up at the bag each day as I went out and thought, “There it is again. It’s still there, that lousy, filthy piece of detritus, a grocery bag, blown in from nowhere, trying to be friendly with me and perhaps even happier and better off than me because it has no mortgage or a financial plan and doesn’t take cholesterol medicine or worry about when the warranty runs out on its television set. There it is, up there floating, a drifter, a freeloader without any responsibilities, and serving no real purpose other than filling a vacuum in a tree.
These thoughts had taken up an uncomfortable residence in my mind, and I thought of trying to knock the grocery bag down with a rock or a homemade javelin of some kind. I realized I couldn’t do that because we live next door to a hospital and my spear might land on the cardiac unit being wheeled into the emergency room for a patient who had just arrived and had consumed too much steak and beer on Labor Day weekend. This tubular patient needed an EKG, and not be able to get one because my spear, the one I had thrown at a plastic garbage bag blowing freely in the wind, an athletic launch that I could never repeat again, had missed the bag completely, gone right over it and right through the EKG machine, and disabling it.
I must have imagined in my mind the horrible screech of the javelin through a mobile cardiac unit that jarred me back to reality. I realized one plastic bag was holding some kind of power over me, over our neighborhood and the campus of the hospital. I remembered a time, back in the 1970’s, when three amazing singers from Crosby, Stills and Nash hit the same exact note mistakenly at the same time and botched the beginning of a live concert and that it was a mistake that shot the song to the top of the Pop music charts back in the day, and I thought of the lyrical, serendipitous beauty of that moment.
It could not have predicted or duplicated again, and I went back outside for another look at the skipping grocery bag up in the tree, and I brought up that very Crosby, Stills and Nash song on my phone, Right Between the Eyes, and looking up at my neighbor’s dead tree at the lowly plastic trash sack, and I heard the voice of the grocery sack voice that said, “I could never believe that I could have made it all the way up here, but I finally did it,” and I saw the grocery bag as a little child dancer in the sky who was happy and free, on stage pirouetting and spinning and spinning and twisting and loving every minute of it, and there was a live audience applauding her, the little grocery bag dancer up there, a little piece of beautiful, delicate trash on her way to stardom, who knew all the secrets of physics and the wind, and was moving about without a care in the world.