Another birthday for you

A couple of months ago I was cleaning out my old room at my father's home and I found an old newspaper obituary page dated July 2007. My father had spotted the name of the mother of one of my high school classmates that day and saved it for me. Out of some kind of morbid interest, or enthusiastic disinterest in any actual cleaning, I ended up absorbing myself in that page for a half hour or so in the creaky chair in front of my old bed.

I read through the words dedicated to Sean's mother once or twice, reveling in what few but warm memories I have of her. And after that I scanned the rest of the entries too. I don't know what I was looking for, exactly--a kind of kinship, maybe, or another name I would recognize. There was none; only the long faceless patter of names and affections played out on any midweek obituary page, the doctor who loved, the father who tried, each glimmer equal parts familiar and faraway.

But then a small sheepish rectangle of text on the periphery caught my eye. This is what it said:

In Memoriam: Mitchell Evan Gordon

7/26/54 - 9/12/87

Another birthday for you, Mitch, without you being here. Though the years have been slipping by, our love and thoughts for you are always in our hearts, and always will be. You have left us with so many beautiful memories and we are holding on to them lovingly. We will never stop missing you.

Love and Kisses,

Mom, Dad, and all of our family

That was all. But I couldn't stop reading and rereading it. Just thinking about what went into writing that piece. And how they write to him in the paper on his birthday, year after year. And whether it's the same text, only copied-and-pasted. I doubted that. Whether it's easy or hard, and whether it hurts them or helps them, to pay for this intimate ritual every July for three decades, to write it and then see it in print. Whether they can afford it, and not just financially. Who these people are.

Who Mitch was. What it must be like to die at age 33. Just under three and a half years after I was born Mitchell Evan Gordon passed from this sphere. And how it must make him feel, if he's looking down on them through cherubic morning spectacles from that big breakfast table in the sky, to know that at least one day of the year there'll be something just for him. And whether he would care that it's so public, or if he minds that his little obituary box looks so small and unassuming sandwiched between all those big time captains of industry and dearly beloved recently departeds.

I grabbed some scissors and cut out the entry for safekeeping. What else could I do? It felt important enough to do something with.

Sure enough, though, time passed. Somehow or other the worn and grease-staining clipping ended up in my car. I'm lucky it didn't get thrown away in one of my bicentennial purges. I found it just the other night and immediately the same feeling came flooding back: that this was something to protect. This time, though, I couldn't help wondering if there was some larger significance. Why it was that providence brought this little snippet from another world to my attention once again?

My own 24th birthday draws near, filling me with anxiety about the future. Am I moving quickly enough toward my goals? Will I ever reach them? Do I even know what they are? Am I already too old? Am I talented enough? Am I wasting time? Am I in the right line of work? Will I even be able to pay my rent next month?

But the joy of life lies in weathering its challenges, and none so greater than those within. In all I'm profoundly lucky to be alive, and I know it. The alternative feels, at times, merely a hair's breadth away, that minuteness of a box on the obituary page that few, if any, ever read.

At the Car Wash

Tomorrow my roommate and I have a meeting with a certain so-and-so who happens to be my friend's boyfriend's father. This individual runs two carwashes and tells me the competition is "huge." He's putting up some T.V. ads next month, and he offered me peanuts to write a jingle for him. Of course, food is food to a starving man, even if he doesn't care for peanuts. But I figured I'd one-up him. Working with my friend Tim, I assured him we could produce the entire ad ourselves, saving him money and guaranteeing his business a better ad than the faceless corporate blob will belch out. That way we can also allocate the budget ourselves, ensuring me my fair share.

Now let's hope I can convert on my swagger. Last time I met with him he treated me to a free "Express Wash"; tomorrow, I want him to give me the green light. With a hot SoCal summer coming on, this car wash could stand to benefit.

I'll Come to You

The last few weeks have been an absolute dogfight. The Puritan endeavor of waking up at zero in the morning to record local radio has yielded some fruits, but nothing ripe. I'm still plagued by the same denizens of my bitter jingle winter: evasive phone bureaucracy ("I'll have him call you as soon as he gets out of his meeting..."), non-caller-backers-when-they-say-they-willers, and legions of advertisers who insist their half-witted talk-over-insipid-canned-music ads are serving their needs just fine, thank you very much.

Since people always seem to drop off the face of planet after an optimistic phone conversation or two, I'm now shooting for face-to-face meetings whenever possible. If there's a lull in the conversation during one of my cold calls, I immediately suggest we get together in person to discuss the prospect further. This may wreak havoc on my vital resources of gas and time, but I figure I stand a better chance of wooing their better judgment when I'm standing before them, jingle samples in hand. Who wouldn't be swayed by a sprightly and well-groomed young man delivering his infallible schtick?

I even make it easy for them to set up a meeting. 2:15 on Thursday the 47th? Sure, it just so happens I'll be passing through Nothingtown on exactly that date at exactly that time! Never mind if that means I'll have to book it from my 8AM in Blackholesburg. Shall we do lunch?

My Intergalactic Apologies

Still no leads from my footage last week. Most of the advertisers I cold-called were pleasant on the phone--a welcome surprise--but nobody seemed interested. These are hard times for my economy and I think people are especially wary. Perhaps my initial triumph last year was merely riding the tail end of a now-defunct boom.

I'm not giving up, though. I can't; a recent investigation of my bank account reveals I'm nearly broke. It's now or never, and I'd like to be doing this rather than something else right now.

Which means I have to work harder. Tomorrow, one week after my last trip, I'll travel someplace new in hopes of a customer. And I'll repeat the process every week until I find something, so help me God.

Tomorrow I'm opting for Bakersfield. I went there at the end of last year, but never got around to analyzing the footage. Now it's just sitting there on six tapes dated December 3rd, 2006, likely obsolete now that we're in a new advertising cycle. I'm out of tapes so I'll have to take those tomorrow and record over them.

It's strange, though. I feel funny about overwriting that old footage, even though it's no use to me now. Almost like I might miss something important. Perhaps someone, something, wanted to get a message out to me on that exact day in that exact radio area. If aliens sent from a faraway galaxy with almost-perfect coordinates landed in the Greater Bakersfield Area and sent out a radio beacon to find their soon-to-be-anointed human crown prince, they almost accomplished their mission. Almost. But I have to use those tapes for something else now, so I'll never know. I can only hope that the denizens of Zorticon B or whatever obscure cluster of stars were able to find a substitute despot to take home on their pizza-catered mothership.

All of this is merely conjecture, of course. Perhaps I'll just be missing out on Christmas ads and insipid morning drive time chatter. Even then, though, doesn't it make you just a little bit sad? Recorded but never heard, pursued but never perused, sought but never examined?

Wish me luck. Better luck than I had last week, at any rate.

Sondheim

Critic Frank Rich interviewed Stephen Sondheim over at UCLA tonight. I got to go, courtesy of my mother. Hearing Sondheim's vignettes about his life and work filled me with fire for my own potential. I wonder if I could ever find kinship with giants.

I'm going to head out to buy a bunch of biographies of people I admire, and I'm going to read each one so that I'm never at a loss for examples.

At the end of the interview, the MC re-entered and informed the audience that it will be Stephen Sondheim's birthday in three days. Which brings me to a question: how many of you can say you sang for Stephen Sondheim?

I can, now.

Back to the Gold Mine

Tomorrow, after a financially-tenuous hiatus that has lasted almost two seasons, I return to my work as a journeyman jingle writer. Teaching was fun, and caroling was a refreshing way to pay the bills, but the calling on my business cards beckons.

Winter is over. I've got a mostly-full tank of gas and the old set of directions; my stereos and tapes are amassed on the living room floor, and the alarm is set for 5:00am. It's time to get back to work. And I can think of no better place to resume my adventure than the first and only place I struck gold: Victorville, CA.

#4

Today my idol, Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, announced his retirement after 17 years of spectacular play in the National Football League. I feel heartbroken.

People who know me well are sometimes surprised to hear a musician hail a football player as his role model. For me, looking up to Favre is a no-brainer. Like all of history's greatest performers, Brett Favre could improvise under duress with gusto and skill, and he never lost his composure as a leader and a player, no matter how great the adversity or how many mistakes he had made the play before.

The very paragon of passion and dedication, Brett Favre showed me that joy alone can sustain brilliance and that it's never too late to shine. He is the greatest athlete of our generation and I will miss him dearly.