A VERY Scattered Entry on Music...

The kids were with me over night and I overslept big time this a.m.---I didn't wake up until 8- the kids school starts at 8:30 and it takes 15 minutes to drive it. No one seemed terribly upset that they were going to be late...and once we did get in the car, Caleb had a major discovery. He found my audio tape-connected-to-a-cord-thing that you can put in the tape player of the car and plug in to an Ipod Nano like he did this morning. He first played a song I knew I should know ("It's Jimi Hendrix, Mom..."Purple Haze" he said, like he was talking to someone who wearing a chartreuse leisure suit and who is still using a plain old CD player) and then he played another song, and then another, and then another by the same guy, and I guessed right this time, Tom Waits. I love Tom Waits. I heard him, at least intentionally, for the first time last week when I bought Caleb this CD...while standing at Barnes and Noble on the Plaza downstairs in the CD department, Caleb said the magic words as he held the "Rain Dogs" album up, "You are really going to like this guy..." and he was right...not quite sure how Caleb can figure out what I like, but he does. I am trying to find words to describe Tom Waits...but he just sounds like Tom Waits...a little like a beat poet who got stuck in a Moog synthesizer with Joe Cocker???...no, he just sounds like Tom Waits. (If somebody can tell me how to easily import ITune purchased music onto this Blogger blog, I promise I will actually put a Tom Waits song here when I learn how...you have permission to teach my by phone or email.)

And another thing...I had a wonderful dream about Don McLean (it had something to do with the recurrent theme of listening to someone sing/speak at church, but I can't seem to ever remember what exactly was said---just that it was joyful) the other night (yes, the "And I Love Her So," "American Pie," "Wonderful Baby," "Starry Starry Night" Don McLean, who still kills me softly with his song...and whose picture is above) I was a HUGE Don McLean fan in high school..I love his poetry...and I still hang on to a line he wrote in an album from later in his musical pilgrimage "I've lost my sense of rhythm, but I've gained a sense of time..." I love it. I wrote a paper on the Van Gogh song when I was a sophomore in high school, and that painting hangs in the room where I am typing this.


A couple of nights ago, I was talking to Kendall Waller on the phone as I drove down the interstate (fancy that ;-}) and we started talking about places where we would like to pastor...not specifics, just the sort of place. We both talked wistfully of university town churches...me, because, I said, altruistically, I love the intellectual liveliness that exists there. Kendall said, well yes, but he also likes to be around the counter culture. (Not really a strange remark from a man --- even though he, too is a district superintendent --- who builds car stereos for competition, listens to Metallica, and got a citation in Springfield during annual conference for having the sound up too loud in his car--- And who can give a pretty good definition of "postmodern" by the way.) And I said, as I have said many times before and will say many times again, "I'm so glad you're on the cabinet." Not that some of the other wonderful folks on the cabinet couldn't define postmodernism, but I don't know many who listen to Metallica driving through the foothills of the Ozarks...

Gosh, I do love finding new music that whips around my ears and mind and brings out a smile or a sigh or a sob ... to heck with being stuck in a genre...bring it all on...Can you say "prevenient grace???" God often shows up in the strangest places these days...