[The latest installment in my sorta-kinda imperfectly-annual series of whatever-the-hell-I-want posts on this month and day.]

Things have been so nuts these last few months, especially in the last couple weeks, that I can’t remember what, if anything, I’ve said about The Next Phase of life — of retirement, generally. So apologies in advance if any of this is not new-new to you…

In short, we’re going homeless — by design — for a few months. Since we had to bag the Europe tour in 2020, and we couldn’t of course anticipate whether “things” would have opened up over there by this year, we decided we’d head out on a road trip across the US. Nominally, it’s a US National Parks road trip — The Missus has visited only a single National Park/Monument of which she has a record, and I’ve visited none.

But the parks etc. provide just the general shape of the itinerary. Really, neither of us has ever seen much of the country. So we’re hoping to correct that, between now and whenever we call it quits, sometime in the first half of 2022.

We’ll just have to wait and see what comes next.

Laurie Anderson is one of those musicians of whom I can genuinely say: I wish I liked her work as much as I admire it. It’s never struck me as music to “like” anyhow, I guess. We’re not meant to, y’know, dance to it, and “a Laurie Anderson” earworm seems, by design, a contradiction in terms. But since I first saw this performance a few weeks ago I’ve kept going back to rewatch it. Maybe that’s what I should’ve been doing all along… The occasion seems to have been a re-release, on its near-40th anniversary, of her Big Science album. For more, see this writeup at the Nonesuch Music site — and, of course, the video itself:

(A comment at the YouTube site says, “I randomly throw in the line ‘He may have been a hat check clerk at an ice rink’ in conversation, and while nobody ever knows what I am talking about, it makes me happy.” This anecdote, including the quotation from the opening of “Let x=x,” may represent the perfect starting point in trying to grok whatever Anderson is up to: when you’re in the music garage with her, understanding is the one tool you should leave hanging on the pegboard.)

The tradition of particularly celebrating so-called milestone birthdays in multiples of 10 may not be “silly,” exactly. I know why it’s done — we count naturally on our fingers, right? But on average, little about someone’s life at age 30 differs from their life at 31, or 29. (In fact, if you think about it, the distribution of actual milestones throughout a lifetime probably has something of a Schrödinger quality to it an event becomes a milestone, forever etched in your head, only after the fact — when observed in retrospect — such that Milestone A occurred [whenever]; B, nine years later; C, three years; D, six; E, four; and so on.)

All of which said, yes, my 2021 birthday would, traditionally, be regarded as a milestone birthday: the one sometimes described as “the allotted three-score and ten.” That word “allotted” unsettles a bit, yes? Not only does it imply the presence of some outside authority, parceling out lifespans by divine choice; it also implies that whatever one has done and experienced to that point, whatever comes next is just gravy — disposable, so we need to just accept it and move on, preferably soon.

In this context, I recently encountered and here offer to you this passage in Thomas Moore’s A Religion of One’s Own:

On my first trip to Italy I asked some friends to take me to the Villa Medici in Careggi, just outside Florence. The villa was then part of a medical center and had been preserved and maintained, especially the beautiful gardens that, though modified in the nineteenth century, showed off the spirit of the Renaissance. Walking through the exotic plants and trees, I came upon an extraordinary sculpture… It is an image of an old man with a child’s body and bird claws for feet, sitting on an owl…

The lesson I take from the mysterious image in the garden is to realize how important it is to deal with life’s mysteriousness, using your imagination and intuition, prepared for paradoxes and surprises, able to appreciate how intricate the path toward fulfillment can be. It isn’t enough to be reasonable, to follow the crowd, to do what is expected, and to be normal and adjusted. We have to be like that figure in the garden: old and young, feeble and birdlike, infantile and wise.

I haven’t been able to find a decent photo of the sculpture in question which I can use here… except for one, frustratingly taken from behind, at the site of the V&A museum. It’s apparently a statue of Aesop. For me, this makes Moore’s determination to draw a lesson from the statue a bit more on point, maybe a bit less like nagging.

Old, young; feeble, birdlike; infantile, wise… Like the passage of milestone birthdays, I think the adjective “wise” is one which can be applied usefully only in retrospect, and ideally never by oneself. But I’ll accept the other descriptors for now, with the hope of repeating the status report in a “Potpourri” post on June 18, 2022.