Sparks from the Fire

Everybody mourns in his own individual way.  Some wail, some must crawl off by themselves, some need to be with others, some need to get drunk, others prefer to pray.  To each his own.

I prefer the silence of meditation and memories.  I prefer to mourn quietly.  I don’t want to do it for a long time as I’d rather celebrate the life, but I do honor the act of mourning even though I believe in life eternal — especially for those who leave us seemingly early.

I lost over a hundred friends in the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s.  Back then, when someone you knew was diagnosed as HIV positive, that’s when you mourned.  By the time they passed, you were grateful the ordeal was over for them.  It wasn’t fun and I’m sorry to say that I got used to it somewhat.  It became a regular occurrence in my life.  Who was next, one wondered, and it was always somebody.

Two wonderful people that Julia and I knew lost their son, Maurizio, in the late 90s Swiss Air crash over Halifax.  We went through this experience with these two loved ones and shared their grief.  Up until this point in life I pretty much left grieving to all the others and tried to focus on the positives of the life lost, but in this situation I got caught in the middle of it and fully experienced the parent’s powerful grief.

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God stands at his conveyor belt.  The unborn babies come down the belt one by one as God stands with his hypodermic needle injecting life into the babys’ butts.  He knows he has to push the plunger each time only down to the red line, but even God gets tired of this routine, loses concentration and consequently sometimes his thumb slips and He mistakenly pushes the plunger all the way down past the red line.  “Oops”, He says, “there’s another performer!” And he tosses that baby over into another bin.

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson was one of these. In fact, you might say that with Michael you had the one where God’s thumb slipped the most.  For about a decade he was arguably the most talented man on the planet and definitely the world’s greatest performer.

In my lifetime I would place Michael right up there in the top 5 with The Beatles, Judy Garland, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra.  We watched Thriller until many of us knew all the steps.  We totally rocked out to Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, I’m Bad, and Billie Jean, and my favorite will always be Man In The Mirror.  That music stop into the big key change will ever be the epitome of great pop music.  Michael was a great rocker, but the King Of Pop.

On top of it all he was a great innovative dancer, right up there with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.  It wasn’t just Thriller that thrilled.  Every time I ever saw Michael dance, my jaw would drop at this wondrous human being.  The rhythm that poured from his body and his music was way beyond the rest of us mere mortals.

I was a fan.  I was in awe of his talent.  I loved him for being a super human performer and then I came crashing down just like the rest of you as he went over some mad crazy edge in his life and lost his balance.  I laughed at him and dissed him and pitied him and finally shook my head and walked away from him as he became more and more confused with his own identity.

He never really had a boyhood — he was always out there entertaining us – and so in his adulthood he turned to playing with boys, hanging out with them and God knows what else.

He was a consummate performer, always trying to make the song, the step, the move new, better, best and he often succeeded.  So it was only natural that he try to remake himself and his look new, better, best.  For a minute there, when he had his long hair and his glove and his white socks, he succeeded again.  But he couldn’t stop tinkering and for some reason thought he might try to make his make-up permanent.  He was great, but he wasn’t God, and he found that out the hard way – losing his nose in the process.

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(If you are looking the first installment of this article, simply visit In God We Trusted-Part 1)

So there we were, in total blackness.  The bottom half of my body still wedged into the tightness of the 2’x3’ crawl space tunnel and the top half sticking out into some unknown space, me on my back, laying in an underground stream, with my four friends still in the tunnel behind me.  It’s amazing how your other senses take over when one sense is dysfunctional.

The Way Out

I could not see, but the smell of the space had changed.  It was no longer of rock and stale air, but now of clean, pure air with a strong hint of mineral water.  It was a good smell, a freeing smell.  The first thing I did was to elicit a loud but short “Ah” into the darkness.  The return of the reverb totally surprised me.  It told me that I was in a huge room.  I took my flashlight from my belt and shined it into the darkness, but the room was so big that its beam found nothing but empty space.  I whispered excitedly back to my spelunking buddies, “Pass me a flare.”

I lit the flare over my head as I lay prone on my back so as not to catch fire from the flare.  As the flare flared in its brilliant redness, I shut my eyes to protect them from the sparks from the fire (no pun intended).  The sudden light took long moments to get used to, my eyes being accustomed to the blackness of the cave tunnel.

When I could finally see, the room was bathed in red.  The top half of my body was sticking out of a hole in the wall of this room about 40 feet up the wall as the stream trickled down the wall beneath me.  In rainier times, the trickle would probably turn into a waterfall with a 40 foot drop.  I did not feel precarious; rather I felt freed from the claustrophobia of the tunnel.

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I am anything but lazy.  “Workaholic” is a more apt description.  I’ve known a few just plain lazy folks in my life, but I find that most people who are deemed “lazy” are not really lazy at all.  They’re really just unmotivated.

Sometimes, I just feel a bit lazy.  I just don’t wanna do nuttin’.  But if I really look at that, it’s always clear that the real reason for the feeling is that I’m a little lost or, more often, I’m so stressed out that I can’t face the work.  So I try to handle the deeper issue, not the laziness.

If you suffer from the laziness malady, just don’t accept it.  Go a little deeper.  Ask yourself why you are being lazy.  Check your motivation.  Make sure you have a goal.  Make sure you are excited about your goal on some level.  Make sure there is a right purpose to your goal.  Make sure you’re clear on that.

Every couple of months or so I like to sit down with myself and check my goals and motives.  It’s sort of an oil check.  Sometimes I’ll write them down on a piece of paper; sometimes I’ll just rehearse them in my mind, but I try to get the concepts clear within myself.  What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  And how do I feel about doing it?  And lastly, what do I need to do to feel better about doing it?  It’s really the first beat of organization on any project that I do.

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I Think On These Things

Music and Lyrics by Peter Link

When I consider the heavens
The works of Thy fingers
The moon and the stars
You ordained

When I consider a child
The steps that he’s taking
His light and his joy
So ingrained

When I think of the way
That each breath comes unnoticed
Sustaining this delicate life

I am swept off my feet
In breathless wonder
At the mystery of life

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My mom was a healer.  As an adventuresome boy, I gave her many opportunities to pull off some doozies when I was a kid.  For her, healing was not a miracle – it was just the natural order.  That understanding was one of the reasons why she was so good at it.

One fall afternoon this 11-year-old boy was out playing flag football.  Now in flag football each player wears two foot long pieces of cloth or rag stuck in his belt on either side of his waist.  A “tackle” occurs when you’re running with the ball and a player on the opposition simply pulls the “flag” out of your belt.  A lot less injuries that way.  Or so they hope.

So here I was running pell mell around right end heading for a touchdown.  An older boy, faster than me, not only caught up to me but somehow decided at the last second to tackle me, rather than simply pull my flag.  Off balance, I wasn’t expecting the tackle and fell forward awkwardly holding the football out in front of me rather than tucking it in to prevent a fumble.

When I fell, I fell chest first on to the top of the ball and the force of my unexpected fall and the weird positioning of my hands on the ball knocked both of my thumbs out of joint.

Ouch!

When I got up from the ground in extreme pain and looked down at my shaking and already swelling hands, the base of each thumb was about an inch closer to my wrist and both hands were extremely disfigured and terrifying to look at.  The skin was not broken but there were two large lumps where there shouldn’t have been any, and each of my thumbs basically pointed in the wrong direction.

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Yesterday was an amazing day.  The Siyahamba Project that I’ve been working on for the past 4 months and that has recently been performed at the Annual Meeting of the Christian Science Church in Boston was posted on YouTube.  I sat at my computer amazed at the outpouring of gratitude and affection coming from hundreds of people as their letters poured in from across the world for both my wife, Julia Wade, and myself.

Norm

Many people worked together to make this project become the success that it is, but one man was its leader – and very few know about his work because he took no credit.  He is the Producer of the Annual Meeting for the Church and the Executive Producer and visionary of the Siyahamba Project.

I have known Norm Bleichman for over 4 decades now and am blessed to call him my good friend.  We were roommates in college and shared many of the same interests in music, sports and show biz in general.  We also had a popular college campus radio show back then called The Blinkman Show where Norm and I with a cast of total morons would perform send-ups of Superman and Batman comics complete with musical underscoring.

We laughed a lot.  We discovered the Beatles together.  We MC’d many of the campus shows as a stand-up comedy act – he the funny guy, me the straight man.  I say with complete sincerity that Norm Bleichman is the funniest guy I’ve ever known.  He has kept me laughing throughout a lifetime and that’s a lot to say for a friend.

After college he went off to fight for our country in the Viet Nam war while I became a draft dodger.  After the war, he came home to work at his dad’s plastic factory while I came to NYC and started a successful show biz career.  I’ve always said that one of the best things I’ve ever done was to help convince Norm that he could be funny on a national scale and get him to finally quit plastics and go to work as a successful comedy writer in Hollywood.  Doing this, he kept millions of people laughing for many years.

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(If you missed the other installments of this article, simply visit Siyahamba -1st Installment and Siyahamba – Sao Paolo-Installment 2)

We drove slowly through the streets of Masiphumelele, a South African township, ever so slowly and carefully. Its residents filled the narrow streets, men hanging out in bunches on the street corners, women bustling to and fro seeming to be doing all the work, and children, as usual, playing their fast and furious street games excitedly and joyfully.

The poverty was everywhere like I knew it would be. The homes were, in fact, nothing more than corrugated cardboard lean-tos with occasional tin roofs, if they were lucky.  The electricity, I could see, was hand connected to each “home” by a naked wire that ran up to a main cable stretched overhead.

Many homes had no front doors to speak of and so I could just look right into the semi-privacy of darkened living rooms. An occasional out-of-place pink stucco house would bless a street, but more often a ruin or two, too dilapidated for anybody to live in, sat empty and rotting.

(Watch the video we made… Siyahamba Project on YouTube)

Initially known as Site 5, the township was renamed Masiphumelele by its residents, which is a Xhosa word meaning “We will succeed”. In 1990, about 8000 residents lived in the area, mostly in shacks, but by 2005, it had grown to 26,000 people.

I needed to see this place. It was an experience I had to have. I was both fascinated and deeply saddened to see our brothers and sisters living in these conditions.

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