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A phone call just alerted me that Hi-5 is on television.  You know, just in case I want to watch overly animated twenty year olds sing to a room full of dancing pre-schoolers.  I guess it’s today’s version of the Micky Mouse Club or something (which I watched religiously as a child, thank you very much).

My son enjoys sing-along shows, but also wants Red Hot Chili Peppers playing full blast.  I hide the CD as often as I can.  Yesterday he burned a CD with only the song Mombo Number 5 on it.  The same song, five times in a row.  “Because I like it,” he says, smiling, making the ride to school, well, five times more irritating then just one Mombo would be.

The oddest, but maybe the sweetest one, has to be the Lawrence Welk cassette tape that he pops in (with headphones) once in awhile.  He holds real still when he listens to Lawrence Welk, and I wonder what an eight year old boy can be thinking, hearing those sounds.  Does he actually enjoy the music?  Or does he only enjoy the memory of his great-grandpa listening to that very same tape?  What is it like to be eight years old and in love with a great-grandpa dead now for one year? 

I could reach out and touch him.  I could ask him.  But to see him there, sitting so quiet and lost in his own thoughts, it would seem like a crime.  He is miles away.  A lifetime.  His great-grandpa’s lifetime.  My arms would have a hard time wrapping themselves around all that.

Still busy days here in the west.  Full days, where I limp around like a Festus Haggen wannabe because of a sciatica nerve that is driving me crazy.  You know the nerve - that big one that makes its move by literally being a pain in the ass.  And you know Festus, even if you think you don’t. - that no-account hillbilly deputy that follows Matt Dillion around like a loyal pup on Gunsmoke.  I know, no one watches Gunsmoke anymore, but they should.  James Arness played a tough but fair lawman, which I contribute to the babysitting he received at the hands of my very own Grandma.  I kid you not.  Grandma Viola, a tough and fair Norwegian woman herself, enduring the hardships of early twentieth century rural Minnesota life, her then young hand gently guiding a then even younger man.

I’d like to say there’s more to the story, which I’m sure there is.  But I don’t know it.  But someday, when there’s more time, I’ll at least imagine it.

There is also rumor that one of my oldest friends has finally found his way to these words.  We both spent time growing up in Minnesota, where we followed each other around loyally like Matt Dillion and Festus.  I’m not sure who was who.  I think we took turns. 

But an email this morning clearly stated that he has something to say.  Something that he thought should move straight onto these pages, with no editing, for everyone to see.  Naturally, in true Gunsmoke style, I agreed.  It’s called friendship and playing nicely.  If it was 1928 and we were being babysat by my Grandma, she would nod approvingly and hand us a freshly baked cookie.  Or maybe she would make us muck out the barn, I don’t know.  But something character building, I’m sure.

What I’m not sure about is what my friend, the mystery guest writer, will have to say.

Inside of us there is a void that imagination will never fill.  There is a sound so quiet, buried so deep, that it can only be heard by a handful of people.  Few, if any, will ever listen, and of those, even less will feel the need to follow the sound.

Allow me to let one of mine introduce himself.

There is a certain logic to declaring war upon oneself.  Although not an action of utter necessity, I am a firm believer that such inner conflict and turmoil will ultimately lead an individual to, shall I say, climb the heights of a mountain in order to reach an enlightened apex called understanding. Whatever it is that brings one to satisfactory conclusions, it’s safe to say that an amount of struggle does take place. In the immortal words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “What does not kill us only makes us stronger”.

And it is in this context that I must pay homage to this tidbit of unequivocal truth. I must confess that a war rages within as I debate with myself. I am being swept away like the spirits of March. Shall I enter Keith’s “new” website like a lamb or a lion?  I know that the lamb would appease our pastoral friends. But there’s something undeniably righteous about “being a lion”. Maybe it’s “pride”. Maybe it’s “king”. Sounds reasonable. For those who know absolutely nothing about me, I WAS the homecoming king of Dawson (my hometown in Minnesota) for a day.

Or maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe it’s all in the lion that I do not possess. I am, by profession, an instructor. Image my desire in possessing a thunderous roar so that my voice might resonate throughout the classroom. Terror has a way of getting ones attention. Or better yet, how about a pair of sharp retractable claws?!  Imagine my unabated power!!  George Bush, strolling through the sands of Iraq, crushing the skulls of earth’s scourging infidels, destroying all that was God’s creation. I am Randy, and “I approve of this message”. Pomp. Ardor. Horseshit. 

But who am I trying to kid. I am nothing more than a middle aged lamb. My bleat is weak and my hooves are worn, chipped from endlessly writing instructions and assignments upon an equally old chalkboard, amounting to nothing more than a reflection of what I am becoming. It’s all futile and meaningless. I have been left behind, just as the advent of March’s brief foray with spring has already succumbed to the turbulence of April. It is a time that March will never know. I wonder if she really cares. I don’t.

I am Randy. I prefer to be known as Keith’s good friend.

In my attic lie two shotguns.  I can close my eyes and see the rust slowly forming along their barrels and triggers and levers.  Without climbing the ladder, I know that they are like everything else in my life right now.  Neglected but not forgotten.  Things in need of attention.  I have no need to see them to know that a layer of dust covers their stocks, and that the grain of the wood, worn smooth beneath my grandfather’s hands and the feel of his cheek more then seventy years ago, now grows faint and disappears.

Would he have seen the irony of this?  When I see his grave, will my thoughts travel up to that attic, even though my head stares at the ground?

There are other things in my life that are neglected.  Reminders of things that I should do, but don’t.  Reminders that life will always separate and leave us with only memories.  Leave us alone with memories that sit in our heads and gather dust like bits of history sitting in an attic.  I can close my eyes and think of the times that I held the shotguns throughout my life.  In one moment I can see myself silently struggling to follow my grandpa through fresh snow under a canopy of leafless birch.  Thirty years later and I can still hear the silence of those woods, the only sound the crunch of boots against snow, as one small boy struggled hard to match the stride of the much larger man so that his feet might fall into the prints left in the snow ahead of him.

Did he know that it would take thirty years for the silence of those woods to resonate into something different?  Did he even know that he made no concessions for my small steps?  It has taken me thirty years to begin wondering whose steps he silently followed through those woods?

I have begun to think that any man can withdraw into his own mind.  I have begun to think that memory both saves us and kills us, all in the same moment, without our even knowing it.  Connecting us while it separates.  Comforting us while it hurts.