Our Walk of Life

[Catchy organ music intro] "Here comes Johnny singing oldies, goldies. Be-bop-a-lula, baby, what I say..."

I love that song - more so now than I suppose that I did in the 1980s when it came out. At that time, I was just finishing my undergraduate degree, and was hanging out with my volleyball friends a lot. MTV was a new thing, and the songs that were being "video-ized" were pretty popular. Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits put together a video that showed sports players' bloopers with his music playing in the background. I found it to be both funny and refreshingly unlike the other videos being shown - of bands playing the music live and trying to tell the story of the song in snippets, or even creations where the artist lip-syncs to the lyrics while "acting" then out. He was different, and imagined a wonderful walk of life that sometimes went awry.

I like it now for the memories of my life that it provokes... of many evenings with those volleyball friends in a bar called Dante's on Roosevelt in Seattle's University District - the smell of cheap beer (Tuesdays were $1 pitcher night!), the old video games that ate more quarters than they registered for play, the abused pool tables. We had some marvelous (though tipsy) times in that place, regardless if we won or lost. I wonder what Dan, Nebosja, Jim, Katie, Pam, Micky, and Bunny are doing these days...

Sometimes that walk of life is a trudge. Other times, it is skipping and laughing and burbling along. But we only get this one walk, and to me that bears remembering. Maybe I have said stuff like this before, maybe even in this blog (truth? I have not gone back to read through it... hard walk, that). But I felt like I should recall that we daily choose the path and the tempo of our walk. That we are not walking alone, and that the pace changes regularly. So, today, let's make the walk purposeful.

Namaste.

[Catchy music continues... "Here comes Johnny gonna tell you a story - hand me down my walkin' shoes!"]