Sunday morning. Plaza Art Fair. An absolutely gorgeous, late-summer day.
My wife orders a sangria from a food truck. Lady asks if she wants a glass or the half-bottle carafe.
“Carafe? How am I supposed to drink that?” she asks.
The lady hands her a straw the length of her forearm.
Perfect.
We walk towards the sound of jazz coming from the fair’s main stage. It’s flanked on either side by booths exhibiting various artists.
A light breeze kicks up. The sun shines. My wife sips her sangria. I realize I wore exactly the right shoes.
It’s pretty damn ideal.
Then . . .
“And here you are, out walking around on the Sabbath, having a good time. Meanwhile, you have no idea where your soul’s gonna spend eternity. Not a clue! Well, I got bad news for you, friends . . .”
It was one of those sidewalk preachers, bellowing into a megaphone.
“You might think you have all the answers,” he says ominously, “but I’m here to tell you . . . you don’t.”
My wife and I exchange a look and cross to the other side of the street.
We continue on in the direction of the jazz, smiling, unbothered.
And that’s that.
Now, there was a time when sidewalk preachers made me uncomfortable. And people who sing in subways. And those guys who cover themselves in metallic paint and stand frozen on boardwalks.
Anyone willing to put it all out there for public ridicule used to creep me out. I mean, do they want people to think they’re freaks?
I think differently now.
After a year in the corporate cubicle, I realized I was dead wrong to have judged such people – those willing to step, unafraid, onto whatever their stage and do their thing.
See, it takes guts to do your thing. And I admire guts.
The cubicle doesn’t require guts. It requires a pulse. Barely.
Things were pretty bad there for a while.
I went off the existential deep end after I re-read Walden.
You know the story.
Thoreau goes to live in solitude in the Massachusetts woods and pens the line, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
I was among that mass of men. And the realization terrified me. Had I really thrown away my Navy career to do . . . this? What a waste.
I know, I know. You have to make a living somehow, right?
That Lisa Loeb wannabe doesn’t strum her guitar on that orange line platform every hour of every day. She has some crappy job to go to like the rest of us.
But that guitar sustains her. And she doesn’t give a shit what you think about it.
I understand that now.
In the movie Yes Man, Zooey Deschanel plays opposite Jim Carrey as Allison, the lead singer of “Munchausen By Proxy,” a fictional band with a dedicated, but limited following – of five people.
She opens a set with, “Hello, Jake, Penelope, Rodrigo, Phillip, Zachary . . .” as an amused Carrey watches on.
I’m sure she’d rather play to a packed Wembley Stadium. But she seems content with these five.
She’s doing her thing. And that’s totally cool.
Even if it’s fictional.
Adam Wainwright, the St. Louis Cardinals’ all-but-certain Hall of Fame Pitcher, likes to write and sing his own country music songs. And they’re bad. Really bad. The broadcasters played one during Sunday Night Baseball. It was so hard to stomach, I had to mute the television. It was awful.
But he should keep right on singing those horrible songs, loudly and often.
Right on! Adam Wainwright.
And that sidewalk preacher?
Keep on preaching, brother! Ain’t my cup of tea, but I admire your conviction.
Me? I do a little writing. And I dabble in watercolors.
Neither is likely to land me in the White House or an exhibition at The Met, but so what? They make me happy.
I do think Thoreau was right. And that’s sad.
But to hell with him.
That whole life-of-quiet-desperation thing?
Not on my watch.
How does one avoid going to his grave with the song still in him?
Simple.
Start singing, baby!
Just start singing.
Whatever that means for you.