My relationship with time has always been a little wobbly but since the pandemic, wobbles have turned into free-falls and bumpy rides through the land of “what is time anyway?”
This is my way of saying I don’t remember when “that morning” happened. Was it spring, summer, fall, winter? I don’t know. But it’s easy to flash back to the moment.
There he is, one of our CC Strummers, a big teddy bear of a guy, gripping a giant coffee in one hand and his ukulele in the other. You can’t miss his mischievous Cheshire Cat smile because it kind of lights up the room.
Then he speaks.
“Cali, something wonderful happened to me this morning.” Pause…pause…pause… He leaves me dangling over the edge of this conversational cliff as I mentally scroll through the possibilities here.
“Okay, okay…so what happened?” I finally ask.
“I WOKE UP!”
Well I hear this and burst into laughter, like snorting kind of laughter. (I thought he was going to say he got laid…)
Please tell me how do we miss “the obvious?” That of course…we woke up this morning. But it doesn’t take long for my ha-ha-ha to level out and kerplop into the mortality thing.That IF we have the good fortune to wake up one more day, the rest is gravy. That we are renters in this apartment building of life and sooner or later we have to turn in the key. So being here NOW is a pretty big deal.
These little flashes of whooo-whooo happen once in a while and I try to capture them for keepsies. When I was a kid growing up in Washington D.C. I loved to catch lighting bugs and slide them into an empty mayonnaise jar. My father used a screwdriver to poke air holes in the cap so they could breathe. The next morning I woke up. The bugs did not.
It’s taken a long time for that lesson to sink in. Once a flesh and blood moment of “aha” is snared in a net of words, well…poof. It loses it’s electrical charge. I still scribble in my journal anyway because I can’t help myself. But in this case, I decided to write that waking up thing into a song so I would remember. Really remember. And that’s how “This Morning Something Wonderful Happened to Me (I Woke Up)” came about.
When I started performing my song at gigs I noticed something very interesting. Other people had the same reaction that I did when I first heard the words. They laughed, like “oh yeah…right…” And then they didn’t.
But now they sing along. Every time. With joy! Who can ask for more?
It’s the yin and yang of life, made visible. A little darkness in light; a little light in darkness. “And maybe all is well, even when it is not.” (Yep, I wrote that into the song).
With the help of Michael Kohan, The CC Strummers’ video-creator, editor-extraordinaire, the bass player too and several CC Strummers who cheerfully played in the sand box with us, we have come up with a marvelous visual expression of this deeply felt observation. CLICK HERE to watch and please share it with your peeps!
Here today, gone tomorrow! Whoop it up folks!
This Morning Something Wonderful Happened To Me (I Woke Up)
is from my ukulele CD, Smile, Smile, Smile.
Ask Alexa to play it for you or check out Amazon and Apple Music.
