ALWAYS A BRAND NEW DAY

It is 11:59 pm. 

I am alive, the most important victory of any day.

I am in a room in a house.  This is also a victory.  I know what it is like not to have a room.

The house is on a hill.  There is a highway next to the hill that the house is on.  There is a window in this room.  I can see the highway from the window. 

I hear music.  It is beautiful music.  I am very happy to be here.  I am alone, but my roommates just left after hanging for a while, so I am excited to be left to my own devices finally.   

This is my room.  This is my space.  My place to be free and be me.  I worked for someone, they gave me money, and I gave money to someone else to live here as long or as little as I like.   

I live in this room on this hill because the cars that come toward my window are only a few minutes away from the heart of one of the most cutting edge cities on the magical spinning ball in the infinite starry sky.  It is only twenty minutes by car to the largest ocean on the music sphere, named for peace.  The sun takes a bow until tomorrow and asks us to give it up for her celestial siblings who will soon be conducting the flow with glorious glow.  It’s the best show.  Maybe I will see it tomorrow.  Tonight I am in my room, letting the music play.  Somehow, somewhere, along the way, I perceived and received a colossal eclectic collection of the world’s most moving expressions of her love, always present if we’re fortunate enough to be aware of her eternal rhythm.  At some point, probably last week, I made a play list of songs.  Listening to music is a way of playing with the universe.  It’s vibrating, you’re vibrating with it.  Everything’s in tune.  Everything’s happy.  Everything’s genki.  I put about 200 songs on this list, and hit the button that lets the universe show me what it wants to show me.

I am sitting in a chair.  It is a camping chair, but it feels like a director’s chair.  I am looking at the world on a wall and through the window, thousands of human beings passing by inside differently colored, shaped and occupied vehicles.  They are all from different places, and going different places.  They are all from the same place, going to the same place, connecting the world to itself over and over and always forever beneath stars in the sky.  Do they wonder why?

It is 11:59 pm.

The beautiful music I hear is Hiromi.

She named this music “Brand New Day”.

I hear her heart, her mind, her masterful control of the music of the soul.

I’m feelin’ it.

It’s the most beautiful song I’ve heard in a very long time.  Maybe ever.  It’s hard to choose one.  She has so many other good songs.  And the whole rest of the universe does too, I suppose.

Sometimes I start the day by walking outside and climbing the hill listening to “Brand New Day”.  About this I have much more to say, but perhaps some other brand new day.  

The album is called MOVE.  It is magic motivation to get going and make the most out of the love ball for everyone involved.  It flows with the feel of all the best emotions.  It transitions effortlessly between sophisticated simplicity and juicy complexity.  It gives me everything I want, and everything I didn’t even know I needed.  That’s why I love her music.  Especially this song.   

It’s the world at its best.

Liner notes…

“Get ready for your brand new day. Morning resets everything and gives you the courage to start something new”

True.

What will tomorrow bring?  What will I do?

Today was a good day.  Today I worked, and I played.  I have spent many days of my life working for others for pay.  There will be more.  Today was not one of those days.  Today I drove down to Stanford University.  It is a forty minute drive away along the bay on a sunny day.  It is my first visit.  I did not attend as a student when I was younger, even though children have been teasing me about my last name and asking if I was going to go to Stanford since I was seven years old.  “Sanford?  You mean Stanford?  You gonna go to Stanford?”  Maybe that’s why I’m finally checking it out.  I guess they won after all.

My writing professor, Dan, went here.  He’s the only professor I cared to get to know at college.  He was my only mentor in my chosen craft.  He was the head of the English Department, and the only professor teaching introduction to creative writing when I took my first writing class sophomore year.  At the end of the year he told me I had talent and that I should give it a shot.  When I tried to write a novel a few years later, I mailed him the first two chapters, he marked them up in a red ink and wrote me a great letter that I still keep on my wall, ending with, “What should you do?  What will you do?  You don’t know yet.  Neither do I.  You certainly have talent.  Time will tell.”  I visited him once a year for the past few years, any time I could get to Ithaca to see friends.

I moved across the country from New York to get to this room in San Francisco.  I left last June.  I visited with Dan on my way.  We had our longest visit ever.  It was great.  We talked books (of course).  He quizzed me on US Presidents, which I’d memorized when I was seven years old, the same year everyone told me I should go to Stanford because it was kind of like my last name.  We talked about Maurice Sendak and Where the Wild Things Are.  Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Mailer, Faulkner, Hemingway, Updike, Shakespeare, Joseph Campbell, Tom Robbins, Vonnegut, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Whitman, Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison.  I told him about modern authors he didn’t know as well.  .  I told him all about my year in Japan.  He taught there himself when he was a young man.  I talked about traveling around the world.  He had done the same when he was a young man.  I kept bringing up my concerns about the future, and he kept saying, “You’re doing FINE!”  I knew he didn’t have long left in the world.  His health had been horrible since I began visiting him.  He kept coming up with excuses for why I couldn’t leave yet.  It had just started raining, he needed coffee, he had one more quiz question to puzzle me.  He always had this impish grin when he saw your mind struggling to solve his little puzzles.  He told dirty jokes.  He told stories about his life and other brilliant people he knew.  He told me, perhaps truthfully, perhaps merely as encouragement, that I had done better on his little quiz show than any other student.  He told me you can’t be perfect.  You can’t know it all.  He strung me along for ten minutes on "which five US state capitals are named after US presidents?".  I even called him out on it at one point after struggling at four for basically the whole time.  Later my friend searched it on his phone and found out there were only four.  Before I left he told me that's it's a great way to live if you love words and stories.  He wished me well on my move and my writing journey.  A week later I canoed into the Minnesota Boundary Waters Canoe Area a dozen miles south of the Canadian border, my first big wilderness adventure of the journey.  I was going to be alone in the woods for a few days, with moose and black bears around.  I canoed two miles on rough waters with a full canoe until I saw a raggedy American flag tied to a skinny tree branch marking an open campsite.  Dan died some time right around then.  I found out a week later.  I’d been camping in the North Dakota Badlands, and when I returned to civilization I checked my e-mail to see the message from his daughter-in-law.  I was on his contacts list, and she thought I should know.  The obituary was amazing.  He was much more accomplished than I’d realized.  I was just outside Teddy Roosevelt National Park.  Just two weeks earlier we’d talked about what a great writer he had been, to complement his brave and manly outdoor exploits.

I thought back to of all of this as I walked around one of the most beautiful campuses in the world.  It had been nine months since I’d seen Dan in Ithaca.  Now he was gone.  I would never see him again.  I had no more proven mentors to guide me on my path.  No one to mark up my chapters and tell me I had talent.  No one of true authority to appreciate that I knew all the presidents and had read all the books.  Nothing against all the life mentors I have had and still have all over the place, but his was a unique connection in my life.  He showed me that it could be done.  I could live my dream if I read and wrote and explored the world and had some fun while I was at it.  He taught me what he could.  Besides, he’s said from day one that he couldn’t teach us how to write.  We could only think about something we cared about and knew about, and say it the best way we knew how.  Everything else was little guidance pointers based on experience, but someone’s always doing it a different way, so you never know.  The only test is how much other people want to read what you wrote.  If your self-expression inspires awe, the world will notice.