1. I purchased Grand Funk Railroad's album, Closer to Home, during either my sophomore or junior year in high school. I can't remember why I bought it, but as I've been thinking about albums that shaped my musical taste and how my mind works, Closer to Home popped in my head today. I listened to it while working out.
One song on this album moved me, transported me into a meditative state. It was as if I temporarily left the world of my high school bedroom and took residence in world of almost pure memory, thought, and feeling. The song was "I'm Your Captain (Closer to Home)".
Suddenly I was not only listening to the song, but I was also watching the final moments of the concluding episode of a multi-part story on the television program, Lassie. Lassie had strayed from home. As viewers, we experienced Lassie's adventures and the heartbreak that Timmy and his parents, Paul and Ruth suffered with Lassie missing. The story came to a climax, as I remember, when Timmy gave up, sure Lassie would never return home, and went to a spot at the bottom of a hill with a shovel to bury Lassie's toys.
Timmy heard barking. He looked up. As the Lassie theme song began to swell, Lassie came running over the top of the hill and into Timmy's arms.
I cried as hard as I've ever cried in my life.
But that wasn't the only emotional memory "I'm Your Captain (Closer to Home)", with it's repeated lines, "I'm getting closer to my home" called up in me.
The song also transported me to Oz. I felt again the aching of Dorothy who only wanted to return home again, repeating again and again, "There's no place like home . . . There's no place like home."
I think of all the different ideas and story structures I worked with over the many years I taught English, the one that mattered most to me, whether in Shakespeare's plays, the novel The Color Purple, Homer's Ulysses, and many other books, movies, and poems, was when a story centered on separation from home and then a return, of separation from loved ones and the power of reunion.
Today in the Fitness Center, I couldn't remember the last time I listened to Grand Funk Railroad's album Closer to Home.
The feelings, however, of their song about being separated from home and drawing closer to being home again, were fresh today. I was sixteen years old again in my bedroom. I was five years old again watching Lassie, watching The Wizard of Oz. I was in my late twenties again, teaching the plays of Shakespeare for the first time, trying to convey to my students the power of reunion, say, in The Winter's Tale, paralleling Leontes and Hermione's reuniting with Timmy and Lassie's or Dorothy and her family's. I was in my forties and fifties again, teaching the Literature of Comedy, joining my students in reading stories and watching movies of reconciliation, of returning home, hoping it would help them see that one of the things I loved about baseball was that it was a game of leaving home then trying to get back again.
So, this album didn't have the musical impact on me that others I've been writing about did.
It had a deep emotional impact that shaped my vision and understanding of literature and movies and what I see as of ultimate importance in life itself.
2. I was especially receptive to this experience at the Fitness Center today because a few hours earlier, Peter Blomquist had emailed me a single question: "What's your creative edge right now?"
I'm not sure I understand this question, but I decided to answer it by telling Peter that lately I'd been spending my daily workouts listening to albums from high school that laid the groundwork for my eclectic tastes in music today. Peter asked a series of follow up questions, which I answered at some length. All that writing -- much of which also has appeared in this blog -- had loosened up my mind, opened the way to have such a panoramic experience listening to Grand Funk Railroad.
3. Lucky for me, Debbie didn't eat all of her pizza at the Fainting Goat Sunday. I got to have some of her slices for dinner tonight. The pizza intrigued me. It was a Hawaiian pizza, but unlike every other Hawaiian pizza I've ever eaten, this one used barbecue sauce. It surprised me. It threw me off at first. And I loved it! It was delicious and stimulatingly creative.
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