Life Colors

An emotional week; the kids are all tired and disoriented. The memorial service for their friend is Sunday.

At last night's spring concert, a bunch of last year's 8th-graders sat together, remembering their friend, and watching this year's classes perform. I sat with them, high above the stage at the lovely old Herbst War Memorial Theater.

My daughter sang, which was not a surprise, and then played the drums, which was. She doesn't think so but she was good on the drums, setting the beat and keeping it going in style.

As some kids sang onstage, and others watched offstage, my mind began to wander away from the moment. It was my birthday. The boys both forgot to say anything and then felt bad.

But I didn't mind. This week questions of life and death are very much on their mind. Birthdays, by contrast, are silly luxuries.

To still be having birthdays by my age is a feat of its own. But in the news I read of the oldest man in the world dying at age 114. Compared to him I am indeed very young. His life spanned three centuries, surely one of the very few people ever having accomplished that. He lived and died in the upper midwest -- Montana in the end.

My eyes wandered to the ceiling of the old theater. My mind wandered back through years and decades to my own childhood, and the defining events, including many deaths on my father's side throughout my youth.

Two uncles in accidents, one when his car was crushed by a train; a cousin, his car also hit by a train, then more uncles one after the other, then my grandmother. Then my mother's side started passing on.

Finally, two entire generations had vanished, leaving me as an elder.

Now I sit way up in a family tree with six children, four grandchildren and a fifth on the way. My role is that of the keeper of our history, the story-teller.

I tell stories -- that is what I do. Plus I drive kids to and from school and soccer. I shop, I cook, I clean.

Sometimes, people pay me to help them tell their stories. More often, I help them tell stories without pay.

Within me, stories scream to be released. Novels. Crazed voices, tender voices, stories of betrayal and stories of peace. The words form themselves into sentences that remain unwritten.

Tales untold. Will they be told? Should they be told? How will they get told?

The chard ripens red, a tiny plum forms on the tree. Something catches my eye -- a hummingbird, green, buzzes into position to slide his long slender beak into an apple blossom, which quivers as he enters her. She gives up her nectar.

Far overhead, a jet banks, reaches the coast and begins its journey across the Pacific. The phone rings; a bill collector's fruitless quest remains unanswered. Unanswerable.

Who owes whom? Why should I pay them when Virgin hasn't paid me? The richest one percent of Americans are millions of times as rich as the 90% of us who have grown poorer under Republican tax policies. Our Democratic President, so hated by the right that they pursue conspiracy theories about where he was born, making themselves ridiculous and pathetic in most of their fellow citizens' eyes. They have no viable candidate; Obama will sweep to victory next year in a landslide.

Donald Trump?

That's a good one. Almost as funny as Sarah (Stupid) Palin.

I don't care about politics, and I certainly don't hate Republicans. My Dad was a Republican and I have pulled the lever for Republicans.

I don't much like Democrats, actually; I'm an Independent voter. But I like Obama, even though his inexperience has led him to mishandle the politics of his first term.

So he will get a second, of that I am certain. Mitt Romney? Give me a break. There are no viable opponents.

A song is playing somewhere in the distance. What is that music? Only a note drifts in, then another, nothing long enough to identify. Maybe it is a fairy crouching in my bamboo, a tiny woman strumming her harp, singing the songs of Asia. Maybe she is imaginary, but if so, maybe too am I.

Perhaps none of this exists, except for the hummingbird, he of the long slender beak. Maybe he alone, sucking sweet honey in an afternoon sun, has received the sustenance to go forward. Maybe we, by contrast, are dying of thirst and foolishness, never even hearing the song that could have carried us to a better day.

But the beat goes on. The drummer stamps her foot and waves her hair, she hits this drum and that one, building a tempo that has the crowd's heartbeat rising. We get ready to rise and cheer our throaty cheer. We are aroused.

The beating heart. Your beating heart. My beating heart. Your story; my story, our story.

That beat goes on.

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