“Pinocchio, you’ve returned!” And here am I, the first decent morning I’ve had in a while, the whale’s mouth opening a crack. H.o.p. is running in to yell, “The garbage truck is here! The garbage truck is here!” Bang, boom, crash. He sits back down at the computer to draw some more of the marvelous pictures of robots he’s been sketching. And guess what he’s listening to over and over again. I know everyone out there in Progressiveland hates Lileks (I’m not blogging for Progressiveland however, I’m just blogging), and Lileks weirds me out as well and his politics–in fact I’ve thought of, in a sense, the Hanford paintings as being rather anti-Lileks, not him personally but that nostalgia for the 50’s, when the atom bomb ruled the earth (he leaves out that part). Anyway, Alicublog had a link to a Lileks post the other day, one he deplored, and I visited and returned for some reason today. I was thinking of the posts that Lileks wrote on the death of his mother, just like I’d thought of them–his mention of his mother’s hospital bed in the living room–when my father-in-law apologized for the hospital bed in his family room our last visit before he died. Anyway, I read his Bleat and because he mentioned his knowledge of the use of the theramin in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and that it was in his podcast, I chose to listen to his podcast for a first time…
Which H.o.p. loved. He loved the theramin from “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. He wanted me to play it over and over. The podcast, which was mostly sci-fi music and commentary on it, ended (almost) with the movie theme from the 1996 movie, “Star Trek: First Contact”, which I don’t think I’ve even seen. Lots of horns. Something I wouldn’t usually like, I don’t believe, except it has vague touches of Ennio Morricone touching down in those horns and I love Ennio Morricone. I’m crazy about Morricone’s music. I need to get a CD to replace the tape I used to have of Morricone.
H.o.p. liked the music. He wanted to know what it was about. I said it was from Star Trek. He wanted to know what Star Trek was.
Oh m’god. H.o.p. doesn’t know what Star Trek is. I’m not a television sci-fi fan because I’m not a television fan and I just don’t care that much for television faces and stories. But I was raised on the original Star Trek and watched reruns of it throughout my twenties. For all its flaws and though a western vehicle shot into space, it was an important show. And H.o.p. didn’t know what Star Trek was. Knows Star Wars but not Star Trek. Damn.
Marty and I were talking before he headed out the door with our old vacuum cleaner (which is one of H.o.p.’s puppet friends and he didn’t want to see it go but we convinced it would be fine at the Singing Store where it might even be fixed, and he liked the idea of it being fixed). H.o.p. was playing the Lileks podcast over and over and over again, going from the theramin to the Star Trek music to the theramin. Marty left and I introduced H.o.p. to Star Trek through Dr. Spock, he liking the idea of aliens. H.o.p. gave me back my computer so I could finish the Hanford pic I have been working on. He wanted me to bring up the podcast on his computer. Which I did.
I finished working on the Hanford pic while Lileks had a “word from our sponsor” moment which was a 1950s Edsel commercial, and I was thinking about those plutonium radiated people at Hanford who had great faith in plutonium and thought they were protected from it, who went home and looked at ads for cars with rocketship tail lights and envisioned a future that was Cadillac Fantasia.
But H.o.p., who knows nothing of the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, kept going to the theramin and then the Star Trek music, appreciating it with his Today ears, and somewhere between the 10th and 20th listen it drew me in, and H.o.p. too, having given me some big hugs. I sat and looked at his intent self, listening to the Star Trek music, which has all the starry-eyed hope of “Once Upon a Time in the West” and nothing of the heart-busting pathos, for which reason it’s not at all of the same caliber, and it was suddenly a good morning. The Star Trek music had sucked me in, its broad, sailing, warm french horns (a good friend of mine is a french horn player), and for the first time in a long while I didn’t feel like the show ended gazillions of years ago when the universe splattered itself all over the cosmic kitchen floor, it’s all for naught, a Big Zero instead of a Magnificient Circle of Life, so what the fuck am I still doing here. Not a recent development, and something I plan on milking for all its worth with the new novel I’m working on, which has been incubating a while (old one up in the left hand corner there, one of the old ones at least). I felt happy. I was looking at H.o.p. and thinking this really is fine and I asked him for another hug.
I felt happy and didn’t know if I might have been still feeling miserable if H.o.p. and I hadn’t listened to the Lileks podcast and that felt odd.
I started making coffee and H.o.p. wanted a H.o.p. moment with me. He hugged and hugged me and had me sit with him on the bed so we could look at each other and talk. He was playing the Star Trek music again and talking about how much he loved it, that it made him think of robots and he told me all about the robot movie he’s going to make.
He suddenly said, “What’s the other world like?”
I said no one knows.
He said, “Is life like a field trip and death is home?”
I don’t talk about “It’s All For Naught, a Big Zero” around H.o.p. I talk about the Circle of Life. And this was a new one, the comparing death to “home” and life as an excursion. Where did he come up with that, I wondered, since, he has so struggled with the idea of death, doesn’t like it, doesn’t like to think about death. I thought how certainly many people think of life and death in that manner but I thought it best to expand it a little.
I said, well, I don’t know but that some people thought that. I said no matter what that he is life and that life of which he is made, that is everything he is, will live on, perhaps not as he understands it now, but it will live on.
This I know is so. Despite my own angst over the worthiness of personal ventures in the face of the great sea.
I heard my computer signing off after a Windows update and jumped up to try to catch it as I had unsaved material, but it was too late.
“Oh, it’s lost,” I said.
“Don’t worry. That’s the Circle of Life,” H.o.p. said brightly. “You haven’t lost it. Nothing’s lost.”
“Oh, really,” I said, pouring coffee.
Which was the wrap-up of “Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World in Search of The Great Penguin” (up there in the left corner).
As he gazed up at me, smiling, reassuring, I tried to remember if I’d phrased this sentiment in that way for him in the past. I wasn’t sure that I had. Maybe. Maybe not. It’s funny what he picks up and keeps and what he tosses. Because he tosses a lot. He’s his own person. Which is what the nickname, H.o.p., stands for. “His Own Person.” Which I want him to be and he certainly is because we have profoundly different opinions and thoughts on things. He’s not a “yes” kid. He’s not an “Oh, you like that, then I like that too” kid.
“You know, that’s the Circle of Life,” he said, smiling. “You lose something and you find it again later!”
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