More paradoxical things...

There are two songs that continue to grab at me these days: Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Eels and Dirty Day by U2. (I can't WAIT for the new U2 CD out later this month! The new single is so hot...)

Free me from a dark dream
Candy floss ice cream
All the kids are screaming but the ghosts aren’t real
Here’s where you gotta be
Love and community
Laughter is eternity if joy is real
You don’t know how beautiful
You don’t know how beautiful, you are
You don’t know, you don't get it do you
You don’t know how beautiful, you are

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the previously mentioned tunes speak volumes to me about what it means to be a child, to have children, to be a parent and to figure out how to embrace your aging parents with honesty and grace. And as is often the case with me, it is more both/and rather than either/or. First "Dirty Day" with those two killer lines:

Dragging me down, but that's not the way it used to be
You can't even remember what I'm trying to forget
+
Get it right, there's no blood thicker than ink
Hear what I say there's nothing as simple as you think
Wake up, some things you can't get around
I'm in you more so when they put me in the ground


This song is so ominous, dark and true that it blows me away every time I hear it... and I listen to it over and over and over. The tension, the contrast and the sad harshness... I've been there, maybe you have, too, yes?

Then Mr. E, a cat who has every right to be angry and crazy, sings this incredibly real and tender song about a father he never understood - and who clearly never understood him - but who he has found a way to love. My wife OWNS this freakin' song... it rings so true to her and her father - but it is pretty true for so many of us. (Funny, this song ALWAYS gets people crying in church.)

The poet, Michael Meade, has written: It is our knowledge of death that makes us pray. Every path a child takes looks precarious to the parent's eye. And it is, and precarious is an old word that means "full of prayers..." Blessing requires something of the 'other world' or else it may miss the delicate accuracy of anointing a life. And the father cannot himself be in the position of the child nor caught in his own 'inner child' if he is to bless. The one who prays must give the space of the child up or else a swamp of sentimentality will come in. You see, if there is no bear or king or temple involved, the ritual of blessing will stop and a need of the parent or a moral lesson will rush into the gap.

Yeats once wrote "A Prayer for My Daughter" which I have always loved: ...may she be granted beauty and yet not beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught, or hers before a looking-glass, for such, being made beautiful overmuch, consider beauty a sufficient end, lose natural kindness and maybe the heart-revealing intimacy that chooses right and never finds a friend.

Bono is right... "those days, days, days run away like horses over the hill."