September Song

“Ah! sunflower, weary of time/
Who countest the steps of the sun,/Seeking after that sweet golden clime
/Where the traveller’s journey is done...”

— William Blake, 1757-1827

It took us a while to find them. We drove to the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area on River Road where my wife Barbara had seen them in past years. We walked to the field and all around it. Just a lot of tall grass. We started back to the car, meeting along the way another seeker. She hadn’t found them either. 

Back in the car, we drove another 5 km down the road to another entrance to the WMA. There were many cars parked there, which seemed promising. An older man with a floppy hat, photographer’s vest and a large birding scope was headed back to his car. “Do you know where they are?” we asked. He pointed us toward a trail. “Follow that path,” he said. 

The path took us past a marsh covered with algae and lily pads. Frogs spoke unseen from the water. Then the trail turned into a wooded area bustling with butterflies and damselflies. A crawdad made its way across the overgrown track.

Then we saw them. The field of sunflowers nearly 500 meters long and perhaps 200 meters wide. That’s when we realized that we were a week or two late. The sunflowers were still in full bloom but fraying at the edges, a bit bedraggled in the hot summer air, no longer at their peak. 

It is a cliché that life is short but if that is true for a human being it is all the more so for a flower. The life of a blossom is counted in days and these sunflowers, which had been in the full blush of youth just about a week ago, were now preparing to enroll in Medicare. Yet, in that short time, they had fulfilled their reason for being. Each of those thousands of flowers had produced hundreds of seeds, potential sunflower offspring carried to the four winds in the guts of birds and other critters or simply fallen to the ground to take root in whatever soil they find. Reproduction, the mission statement, for every species on the planet, the path from the present to the future, had been executed in breathtaking beauty by these cheery pagan sun worshipers. 

Like me, a little past its prime.

But although their core purpose was complete, they were not yet ready to relinquish the summer. Today, as the sun appeared, each of those blooms turned its face toward the source of life and followed it across the sky as if rejoicing at the chance for another day.  

“They are a little past their prime,” my wife said.

“I know the feeling,” I replied. 

As I said it, it occurred to me that more than just a quip, I had stumbled upon a truth about my own existence. I too am a bit past my peak. I too have largely fulfilled my purpose. My own seed has been scattered and taken root in other soils (in the Denver metro area as it turns out).

“It’s a long, long while from May to December,” the classic tune, September Song tells us and I have without a doubt arrived at the eponymous month “when the days grow short.”

But a short day is better than no day, and so, like the sunflower, I awaken gratefully each day eager to see what it will bring. I go into the morning air (after coffee, of course), turn my face toward the sun and the Source of Life, and follow them until nightfall when I fall back into bed. 

But even in sleep, I face east, anticipating the moment when the sun and I will turn our countenances toward one other once more and I will greet her again — at least as long as we both continue to rise. 

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing. 

The Big Shill

Everyone is selling something but at what cost?

In 1999 Julia Child and Jacques Pepin did a cooking program together for PBS. The show was filmed in Julia’s kitchen in her home in Cambridge, Mass. It’s the same kitchen that was lifted whole and placed in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. You can see it there today. The program was great fun due to the fantastic chemistry between Julia and Jacques. There are whole episodes of the show on YouTube and I encourage you to check it out. I’ve watched all the episodes many times including the one on “Pork,” which contains not a single dish that I can cook. 

One thing you will not find in any of the 22 episodes of the series is the name of a single brand or product. Even when they were using a popular brand of mayonnaise or olive oil, they took pains to make sure that the label was facing away from the camera. They never mentioned the brand of their food processor or cookware or even a favorite knife. 

Yes, there was a mention of the show’s sponsor during the opening credits. Something along the lines of, “Today’s show was made possible by a grant from the Acme Product Company,” but that was about it. Julia never endorsed a single product for money during her entire career. 

My, how things have changed. 

I am a big podcast listener. I listen as I am walking every day. With a few exceptions, all of these podcasts feature the hosts endorsing this product or that. The same products seem to show up over and over. A certain dietary supplement, a hydration powder to add to your water bottle, a mattress guaranteed to improve your sleep or at least to track it. In most cases, I do not begrudge the endorsements. If making a podcast is your whole work, you need to find a way to make a living and accepting ads and/or endorsing products is a way to generate revenue. 

But if you are famous for say, acting, is it reasonable to trade on that fame to make a little more money? And if you are going to do endorsements, I do think it is a reasonable question to ask yourself, “What is the value of my reputation and how much of it am I willing to squander.” Because for each paid endorsement, even for a product you truly believe in, there is a price to be paid in reputation. It may be small or it may be large. What is that price and why should you care?

This is the question that occurred to me recently when I started seeing a series of ads for Wells Fargo Bank featuring the comedic actors Steve Martin and Martin Short. I don’t know anything about the financial circumstances of these two living icons of comedy. I’d assume they are doing ok but I must admit that I don’t know. Perhaps the only option at this point in their illustrious careers is performing in ads for what is arguably one of the most corrupt and criminal banks in recent history. (Don’t take my word for it. Here is what the U.S. Department of Justice said about Wells Fargo in February of 2020. 

And more recently, Wells Fargo was still at it in 2023.

Even worse, the Short-Martin ads aren’t even mildly amusing. 

In a world in which almost everyone will sell almost anything for a few bucks, those who will not stand out. One such a holdout is Sam Harris. Harris has a popular meditation app called “Waking Up” which is available by subscription and contains no advertising. He also has a Podcast called “Making Sense” which has no ads and is also available only through subscription. If you don’t have a subscription you can listen to the first 20-30 minutes of each episode free. After much debate (I hate subscriptions), I subscribed to the show for $150 per year and I am glad I did. He offers very thoughtful interviews and commentary— ad free but not free.

Another example is “For Heaven’s Sake” a podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, which features analysis on the changing situation in Israel and is also ad free. 

Other podcasts have ads but allow you to forgo them in exchange for a paid subscription. But that is not the same as Sam Harris who has the courage to say, I am not going to take ads; if you want my content you have to pay for it. 

But folks like Sam Harris feel like exceptions to the rule. Even government officials and political figures are selling meme coins, crypto currencies, NFTs, and beach towels with their likenesses. Often they are giving the impression that what they are selling is their favor. In other words, it often looks like a bribe. 

Most of us are not famous enough to be in a position where we can trade our endorsement (or likeness) for cash but it still may be a useful thought exercise to ask yourself: Just how much would it cost to buy you?

Your reputation is what’s left when everything else is gone. What’s the price for yours?

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing. 

Legacies

In the fall of 1982 I spent a semester in London. I lived a few steps from the Warwick Ave, Underground Station in the northern part of the city near Regent’s Park. I lived in a large house with other students from my college and from another college, Drew University located in New Jersey. One day when I was in the communal kitchen making tomato sauce for pasta, one of the Drew students, Mary (last name not remembered) showed me how to easily remove the skin from a clove of garlic by lightly smashing it with the back of a spoon. I still peel garlic this way (though I often use my knife handle instead of a spoon) and every time I do it, I think of Mary and of London. It is not something I do consciously, it just happens. Mary and I were not really friends, we never spent much together that I can recall. I have no idea where she might be now and I can’t imagine that she remembers me at all much less showing me how to peel garlic. 

When I was a kid we we lived in a house in Baltimore that had a “secret” doorway in the kitchen leading to a narrow wooden staircase that led to a room we called the library because it was lined with bookshelves. From there a narrow hallway connected to a the smallest bedroom in the house which had its own tiny bathroom attached. In earlier times the bedroom, bathroom, and library (which had probably been a storage room of some kind, it was freezing cold in the winter) would have been occupied by a live-in maid who would have been able to slip down those steps early in the morning to get breakfast going without disturbing the still sleeping family.

We never had a maid live-in or otherwise. The extra bedroom was used as my father’s den (the precursor to a man cave) and the extra bathroom was his photography dark room. On the back of the door to the secret kitchen stairs hung a storage thing with pockets where, for some reason, we stored shoeshine polishes and brushes. One time when I was 9 or 10 years old my Grandpa Alfred was visiting and he taught me how to shine my shoes back at those kitchen stairs. To this day whenever I shine my shoes, I think of my grandfather leaning over the library steps showing me how to brush the newly polished shoes to a lustrous shine. 

Around twenty years ago, my wife and I traveled to New York for the weekend to see master blade smith Bob Kramer talk about knives and sharpening in a Sur La Table kitchen store. I am crazy about Kramer’s knives. His handmade knives from his shop in Seattle cost thousands of dollars and you have to participate in a lottery just to have the chance to buy one. I will never own one of his handmade knives but I do have several of his licensed designs manufactured by Zwilling to his specifications. They are the closest I’ll get to a real Kramer Knife but they are my favorites notwithstanding. Anyway, after his presentation, I got to speak with him for a few minutes and he showed me his method for honing a blade on a steel that I use to this day. Whenever I hone my knife on the steel (nearly every time I cook) I think of Bob Kramer and how he personally showed me to do it.

There are countless other people from different eras of my life that float through my mind as I make my way through the days and weeks performing a skill that they taught me or just remembering how they were there in the right place at the right time and made my life better with their mindful presence.

We all wonder what our legacy will be. Many of us have worked at jobs or in organizations our whole lives to change things for the better and then wonder if we made a difference. Yet it may be that our most lasting impact may be in the moments we stopped and helped someone with a kind word, a teaching, or a smile. Maybe that person will forever associate you with a place, with a skill they learned, with the kindness you showed.

You’ll probably never know exactly what your legacy is. But you can be sure that you’ll leave one.

The world’s a narrow bridge; fear nothing.