Hey Caitlin!

No sooner did she turn 14 than Caitlin suddenly turned radio host! Mom (my illustrious daughter Shannon) took her to work today, and I must say she looks good with those headphones on. Hosting can't be far away.

In other news, Caitlin looks happy with her hand-knitted birthday present from Grandma, who never thought she'd still be knitting blankies at this stage. Sixteen balls of wool, a few weeks with the needles and a few dollars spent at Michaels, but I must say it all turned out well.

NEWS FLASH! 

More of Caitlin the journalist, learning camera techniques from a CTV technician. She also appeared for a nanosecond in a story her mother did, but I can't post that one unless it pops up on YouTube. Stay tuned!

                 And here she is in her Halloween costume.

Ghost moose of Sweden

Last words: a day in the life

It seems incredible that this is the first take of the Beatles' dizzyingly-powerful masterpiece A Day in the Life. The pieces of it are already coming together. Certain elements that will appear in the finished song jump out, such as the weird, disturbing counting that seems to go on forever. You wait and wait for the mounting cacophany of the orchestra, but it doesn't come, perhaps because it hasn't been thought of yet. In fact, it almost certainly hasn't. This is process in its truest, most raw-minded and risk-taking form. 

I just watched a PBS doc - it was OK but could have been better - which took apart some of the most (they thought) influential songs on Sgt. Pepper, particularly this one. But can they get to it? Can they get inside it at all? My God. "Just" the lyric, seemingly the simplest part of it, contains a compressed, crammed autobiography of John, not to mention all four Beatles, all of their generation, and all of post-War Liverpool.

Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. Mine disaster? Bomb craters? Like the rest of them, Lennon never outdistanced the war and all it did to his country.

It amazes me that the "woke up, fell out of bed" section has already been mapped here, not just roughed out, with that amazing sophisticated McCartney keyboard work. This is literally two completely different songs put together, one inside the other, and though it shouldn't work at all, it does. The workaday McCartney section in the middle, what John called the "middle eight", pulls us into a crazy normalcy that will soon slip sideways. Then there is that incredible line, "And somebody spoke, and I went into a dream . . ." 

Take one? My God. The mind or the ear or memory fills in all the rest, but this is the naked version, not just bare bones but bare genius. That final, silencing, deafening, aurally incomprehensible piano chord doesn't happen here, because it has either not been conceived of yet, or they haven't figured out how to achieve it technically. In the end (so I learned tonight on PBS), they used EIGHT pianos and an organ, which pumps up the sound so abnormally that it is impossible not to be overwhelmed by it. The "decay" lasts an incredible 43 seconds, whereas the average piano chord might make it to 10 or 15. And the mikes are cranked so wide open that you can hear the technicians minutely moving about, breathing. (A side note: more techically sophisticated re-releases of this song reveal that the massive piano chord was still reverberating, so that they could have gone on recording for another five or ten seconds.)

I post this now because this whole thing stirred up stuff in me - can't really describe it, and it made me listen very carefully to the original Day in the Life (in yet another re-release) with its much cleaner, more defined sound. It made my hair stand on end.  It did then, too. What was it about this album? Of course the songs were wildly original, and the arrangements simply mind-blowing in their originality. My favorite effect is Henry the Horse: George Martin took old calliope recordings, cut them up into one-inch pieces, threw them up in the air, and spliced them back together to make a psychedelic crazy-quilt of sound. 

But there was more to it than pyrotechnics. The album was - what? -approachable, somehow. Like someone you knew, and came back to visit again and again. Whatever facet of itself it was displaying - and there were so many of them you couldn't count - it was sure to stick to you powerfully in a place you didn't know you had. 

Most of all, listening to this made me miss John. I don't like the line "he blew his mind out in a car" because it reminds me of his fatally-wounded body lying on the ground outside the Dakota, uttering his last two words: "I'm shot!" And the sense of impending terror - even more naked here than in the final track - is raw in me now because of all that is happening around me.

I read the news today, oh boy. 

I don't mind it for myself. It's the children I worry about. They face so many problems I never had to think about because they didn't exist, and it is harder and harder to be optimistic. And yet, I go about my business day to day, like Paul running to catch the bus, and surprise myself with an unexpected level of happiness. It makes no sense, so I just decided to accept it, a gift.

But it's still there, the undercurrent. God, what is it about genius? You're dead 36 years, and still you express people's unspoken terrors better than anyone ever could, billions of people you will never even meet! How many people who are grabbed by this song weren't (even remotely) born when it came out? How many of their PARENTS weren't even remotely born? How many will get to listen to it, be moved by it, terrified and disturbed by it, who aren't born yet? 

I have a better question. Will they have the chance?

The girl with the flaxen hair

I have to admit off the top that this photo is way out of date. That little girl, one Erica Morgan, is now turning five, a momentous age that represents a developmental leap, and

a new readiness to read and write and sit still long enough to attend classes.

Plus she still breaks the cute-o-meter every time.

Erica Morgan is a princess from tip to toe, from her tossing curls to her crystal-blue eyes,with the longest eyelashes anyone has ever seen. They're like fans, for God's sake. When she flutters her eyelids, there's a breeze.

All my four grandkids are wondrous to me, representing the upspringing of new life in the midst of a very dry wasteland. My disillusion with the writing business (NOT with writing itself, which was still compelling) had parched my insides into those flakes you see in the desert, you know, in National Geographic or someplace.

Erica made her debut at such a time, and I will never forget rounding the corner in the hospital room and seeing her for the first time: she looked like a tiny, pink, compact, living rosebud, and she had that ineffable sweet baked-biscuit smell of the newly-arrived.

It's a fascinating thing watching any baby become themselves, evolve into

who they are going to be. I remember reading somewhere (maybe one of those myths we all ascribe to, like "you remember everything that ever happened to you" and "we only use 2% of our brains") that our personalities are basically set by age two. Yikes. Parents who've made any mistakes at all must shudder at such a statement.

But such is the fluidity and surprise of human nature that even the worst two years can cause the plant to grow around the obstacle. Cedars abound here, and many of them grow too near power lines. Often they have to be trimmed in a weird-looking circle. I saw one recently that had put out a lot of new branches, but they all came straight up within a couple of inches of the power line. The tree "knew".

So what does this have to do with Princess Erica? Even the best life in the world is burdened. If nothing else, it's burdened by turning on the TV (guaranteed to depress anyone) and finding out about oil spills and plane crashes and little children dismembered by fiends. Who can fail to feel something, not hopeful, but horrific?

We need to say to our kids and grandkids, it's all right, there are terrible things out there in the world, but here, in your own home, it's not like that. The odd emotional explosion clears quickly for the most part, and it's back to the twinkly, shrieky fun of two little blondies tearing around the living room.

I love them beyond endurance, sometimes, and I do worry about the sort of earth they will inherit. Is violence escalating, or is it just reported more accurately (the old saw that journalists fall back on)? What about the stress of a madly-accelerating world, with gadgets replacing real human contact and people swelling in gross obesity due to grabbing the easy drug of junk food?

It wasn't supposed to be that way. I remember back in the '60s, there

were all sorts of reports of Xanadu, the World of the Future, of a lean, fit population (all that low-fat cooking, remember?) only having to work three days a week, spending the rest of the time in creative and recreational pursuits.

(Oh, and remember those dumb-ass domed cities, like something out of the Jetsons?)

It isn't going to be that way for Erica, my little blondie. I hope she will manage. Acceleration tends to lead to more acceleration, unless stopped by a crash. Like the frog slowly stewed in increasingly-heated water, we just don't notice it, until we see the alarming increase of depression and addiction and autism and. . . fat.

It's doubtful Erica, in her sparkly little tutu and candystriped tights, will be anything other than sylphlike. I want a happy life for her, want it more than I want to live. I have the tremendous opportunity to love her without reservation, without the burdens of parenthood. I can be the fun nanny who chases them around the room, plays Barbies and PlayDoh and paper giraffes.

Sometimes I ask myself: What good will it do? Won't they forget? Is any of this banked in the psyche? How much do we remember?

No matter. Maybe it's for me, as much as them, and I will remember, remember every single sweet blessed day that I get to love them.