Sometime in late 1977, my sister Michelle got a gift, a brand-spankin’ new album, “The Stranger,” by some guy named Billy Joel.
Flashforward to about six years later, when some little kid stumbles across this album and becomes enamored with its cover, pretty impressive as both the front and back covers were black and white, an album tossed among a treasure trove of colorful and creative albums like Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill (a cornucopia of vibrant colors and images screaming to be noticed), and Alice Cooper’s School’s Out (resembling and opening up like a school desk) and Billion Dollar Babies (a green snakeskin wallet).
Luckily, something on that album cover caught this kid’s attention, because when the needle hit the hook, he was all in. For this kid, who has still never been to Manhattan, he was whisked right into the heart of New York. From the front cover with Joel sitting melancholy in a tiny bedroom, a pair of boxing gloves on the wall, to the back cover with he and his band in an Italian restaurant, this album captured an East Coast vibe through and through, which was exactly the idea. And man, what was sandwiched between those two covers was pure meatball and marinara bliss.
Now I’m getting hungry, and ahead of myself. Let’s back up.
It’s a new year, and that means new opportunities on the horizon for Lucy’s Way: A Dog, A Drunk, and The Tao.
As I get ready to start applying for vendor fairs, reaching out to libraries and bookstores, and readying to launch new endeavors to try and get Lucy’s Way in the hands of recovery centers in Indiana, one event is already set in stone. It’s an exciting one, and not just for myself and Lucy’s Way, but for Marion and Grant County, Indiana as well as local indie authors.
On April 25, from 12-3 p.m. I’ll be joining 20-plus authors for a grand opening signing event as Bookworm Orchard opens its doors at the Boston Hill Center in downtown Marion. Bookworm Orchard will house the works of multiple indie authors as a gathering space and creative haven for local authors and artists. Find out more about this awesome endeavor at Bookworm Orchard.
For me, this event will coincide with the one-year anniversary of the release of Lucy’s Way last April, a month that I’ve always associated with all things Lucy. Her birthday was on April 1, and I started typing the first words of what would become Lucy’s Way on April 1, 2021.
Wow, five years.
Seems like a long time, and yet a drop in the bucket when compared to the other project I just finished, which was sorting through an attic of relics and memories going back at least a century.
Before I go further on this, here’s a little bit about what cleaning out an attic, literally and spiritually, can mean according to a little trip down Google lane:
“’Cleaning out the attic’ refers to both the literal, physical process of removing accumulated, unused, or forgotten items from the highest, often dusty, part of a house and, metaphorically, the spiritual or psychological process of purging one’s mind and soul of negative emotions, memories, and habits.
Literal Meaning
- Decluttering and Organization: Removing years of accumulated, unwanted, and unnecessary items stored in a home’s attic or upper levels.
- Restoration of Space: Transforming a space that has gathered dust and cobwebs, making it functional, useful, and organized again.
- Letting Go of the Past: Sifting through old items, sentimental, or practical, to decide what to keep and what to discard.
Spiritual and Emotional Meaning
- Mental Decluttering: Clearing out the subconscious mind, removing hidden, negative, or toxic thoughts.
- Releasing Past Hurts: Forgiving and letting go of grudges, bitterness, and shame that have been stored away “out of sight, out of mind”.
- Spiritual Renewal: Allowing the Holy Spirit or inner awareness to illuminate dark, neglected corners of the heart, resulting in personal transformation and peace.
Essentially, whether literal or spiritual, cleaning out the attic is a process of removing unnecessary debris to create space, peace, and light.”
Whoa, heavy stuff, literally as well as figuratively.
Without getting into every detail of this spiritual soul cleansing, one thing I learned as I uncovered boxes upon boxes of photos was something I’d already known: that my mother loved taking pictures. Wait, let me rephrase that. My mom loved taking pictures of people who were just realizing it as the picture was taken. Okay, let me be more specific. My mom often took pictures of people who were just realizing it, often just as they were placing food in their mouths, sometimes blinking or with their eyes closed, and on more than one occasion a combination of these things.
Let’s remember for a moment the act of picture taking was once much different. You were tossing the dice with every roll of film, snapping away and sending it off, anticipating its quick return weeks later only to find blurry photos, half faces peeking out above thumbs, pictures of the inside of bags and purses, and of course, people in the process of putting food in their mouths.
This wasn’t just my mother. Thousands of people committed these crimes, probably millions, myself included over the years. That’s how it worked when you didn’t have the option of quickly deleting and starting over, which is more readily available today, in many walks of life.
Let’s give my mom a little love, as she hit some real home runs in capturing my childhood, and that of my sisters and other family, on film. One of these was pic of me and Lucy circa 2008. It’s easy for me to tell the time as we are surrounded by boxes of my stuff, which was when I moved back in with parents, something I detail in Lucy’s Way and remember quite clearly. But I didn’t remember this pic until I stumbled across it. It was a time full of mistakes as I navigated the waters of early recovery, but not of the same variety as I was making before recovery.
Sometimes I think we forget the power of mistakes, and how they can turn into miracles.
But that leads me to the idea of figuring out and knowing when to make a change versus knowing when it’s okay to leave something like it is.
And that brings us to Lucy’s Way.
In many ways, after my first big edit, there were more mistakes, and more edits needed. But that’s what happens when you are moving lots of sections to different places etc. But looking back, the editing process was both challenging and fun.
At any rate, my book is in print, and there’s no going back. And yet there’s things I wish I could have back.
In writing you’ve got two main types of errors, the grammatical variety and factual inaccuracies.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve made minor flubs in sports articles in more than two decades, and 90 percent of the time, I’m the only one who even knew it was there and it didn’t dramatically effect anything aside from my perfectionist instinct.
There were, and still are, errors in Lucy’s Way.
Some of these are parts I wish I would have written differently, though if given that opportunity I might very well rewrite them over and over and over again, never quite happy with the result. I believe it’s called indecisiveness.
There is a factual error early on where I erroneously refer to the little park by the girl scout cabin as being off of the Cardinal Greenway whereas it is actually the Mississinewa Riverwalk. This error is on p. 67. Who all noticed before I said something?
So there’s errors where you want to do something and there’s times where you just have to shrug your shoulders and move on.
Like life.
I could easily pull the book and put out a new edition with that one little thing fixed. But sometimes, you’ve just got to ask yourself, how important is it?
That’s also something I’ve carried into my recovery.
There were many times early in sobriety that I just wanted to scream “DO OVER” and magically rewind. No such luck. Gotta play the hand you’re dealt, but a lot of people in recovery still don’t see it that way. They want it all back now, even though it took years of work to get into this mess. For me, it took truly realizing that my greatest weakness could be my greatest strength. That’s when the admission of my addiction became empowering. And when I first started allowing a dog to show me a better way.
Mistakes becoming miracles.
We live in a day and age where we can change our minds mid-sentence and go back and quickly edit something away. We can redo a song, an album, redo a book with edits and changes with the snap of a finger (well not really, but not that far off). It doesn’t have to be like mom’s pictures anymore.
But even as we quickly edit so many pieces, we can’t edit the words we speak into existence once they’re out of our mouths. I’ve wished I could, countless times, but all I can do is try to be better today. We can’t edit bad decisions. We can just make the most of them and move on.
At the end of the day, the attic project is done and I’ve finished Movin’ Out, which brings us full circle back to Billy Joel.
I made it a point to look for The Stranger while cleaning out the attic, whistling that instrumental ditty that opens the title track. The reason, pure and simple, to connect again with something that I connected deeply with in my youth, something that allowed me to understand and see how joy and happiness felt, something I would lose for a while in addiction and gain back in recovery.
I didn’t find it.
What I did uncover was the memory.
Oh, the sonic pleasantries gifted on a child’s ears in the form of “Movin Out (Anthony’s Song),” “The Stranger,” “Just the Way You” and “Only the Good Die Young.” And how about “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” I mean seriously, even at age six I could tell you this song was a masterpiece lyrically and musically, even though I understood very little of the subject matter. It’s seriously like four awesome songs inside one really awesome song. If six-year old me had been a music journalist in 1982, I would have made it plain and simple that The Stranger was an absolute musical masterpiece of an album.
The only thing I’ve often wondered is why the album didn’t open with the title track, that instrumental piano piece with him whistling that conjured a black and white image of someone in an overcoat and fedora walking down an alleyway in my head. It plays before “The Stranger” which is the second track on the album. It closed the album at the end of “Everybody Has a Dream.” Had it opened and closed the album, it would have been bookends to absolute brilliance. I wonder if Billy Joel ever wonders about opening the album with that track. Maybe if he reads this there will be a reissue. Then again, I guess he did pretty good on that one without my advice.
And “Movin’ Out” is a pretty killer opener. So what if the instrumental could have been before that and…see where I go with these things, back and forth and back and forth. I believe the word is indecisiveness.
One mistake I still can’t get okay with on my end is how in the world did I not discover the joy of “Vienna” when listening to The Stranger? I mean, that song actually gives “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” a run for its money. That song is so good, and I’ve been listening to it multiple times a week for the past couple months. Maybe I didn’t notice it because it opens side two and my little brain was so enamored with side one. Hey, cut me some slack here, I was six. But that doesn’t explain all the years that passed since then without me appreciating it. I guess this is one of those mistakes I’ve got to be willing to own.
At the end of the day, the attic was a spiritual cleansing of my heart and mind as I move into this next stage. I made sure and stayed engaged in the moment as I was sorting through many years of memories and history.
Shooooot, why did I not title this blog Mindful Moving??? I guess I could go back and do that. Or what about…ah nevermind.
And where the heck is that album?
I love this! I remember you, Laurie and Michelle as children. Such sweet kids. I had no idea all of this was going on in your little head! I am so proud of you!