A good man - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 Saturday, November 24, 2007

Stephen Windwalker is staying balanced in spite of all: moving Friday, writing the best stuff I have done yet on the Kindle, swam a mile last night, eating healthy, spending great time with friends family and VG friends, making some decent biz/financial decisions, and even caught the last three innings of the Sox' win last night -- all is well, and I am putting Kindle Nation back to Thursdays

about an hour ago ·

Spt Foxboro Tom Sheehan

You are putting out such a positive vibration and getting it back in return - tenfold!

The post below is about my -- it seems, now -- lifelong pal and comrade, Stewart Acuff. We've been together through thick and thin and love each other like brothers. In my most recent telephone conversation with Stewart, on Saturday evening, we caught up for an hour about life, work, getting old but staying young, love, lust, and hard times. He was back in Little Rock where we first met, but this time calling me from the Little Rock Airport after spending some time trying to crowbar Arkansas' moderate Dem senators into line on card check, an issue of importance to him, me, the labor movement, and all of us if we have any sense at all. Great conversation, and I'd love to go on, but as is clear from my Facebook status line above, it will have to wait a spell.

A good man - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 Saturday, November 24, 2007

I first met Stewart Acuff in a friend's backyard in Little Rock on the 4th of July in 1978. Stewart was 22 and had just graduated from a little Baptist college across the state of Missouri from where he grew up. He was coming to work for me as a community organizer-trainee in Texas that week.

I invited Stewart to grab a plate of picnic food and sit down on the grass and chat. We hit it off from the start, but he asked me if I could let him off from his prior commitment to start that week so he could go back home for a week to honor a commitment he apparently had made to his father, a Baptist preacher, to go home and teach Sunday School one last time.

I'm sure Stewart expected me to be okay with that. After all, who could stand in the way of a young man teaching Sunday School one last time, let alone honoring his commitment to his Dad?

I could. Problem was, I didn't know his father and mother. (Eventually I got to know them both a little. Once that happened it was clear to me how Stewart had turned out to be such a good person and a great friend.) It wasn't easy back then to hire and train talented organizers. I was a little concerned that if he went home for another week to his Mom and Dad and told them again how he was about to run off to a faraway state and help poor people get organized to fight the power for a salary of $4,000 a year, he would never make it to Texas. Mom and Dad might talk some sense into him.

I didn't tell him flat-out "No." Instead I appealed to his obvious spirituality and said something about the commitment he had made to come to organizing being something between him and God, that I had no personal power to let him out of. I said it without stuttering. He came to Texas without going back home.

We've been the best of friends pretty much ever since. Every day with the work he does he makes me proud. He spent some good time training with me as an organizer in Texas, and then he came to work with me again years later when I running something called the New Hampshire People's Alliance. Later he went into union organizing and is now the National Director of Field Organizing for the AFL-CIO.

As long as I continued to do organizing work, he always made me better at what I did. We also have shared a lot with each other about the trials and tribulations we each have faced trying to balance the desire to live a good life as a man with the frailties and challenges that being a man has thrown in each of our paths.

Along the way, as you can see from a video or two here, he's never gotten too far away from teaching Sunday School.

Keep up the preachin' and the teachin', Stewart.





After Thanksgiving Soundtrack


Bob Dylan - It's All Over Now, Baby Blue


Shawn Colvin - Sunny Came Home

Bonus track

I just got a great email from my friend Ned, who responded to some recent entries and specifically to the Elvis cover of Eddy Arnold's "I Really Don't Want to Know" by sending me a wonderful, rich essay he wrote recently on The King. I can't wait until I finish my current (tardy) copywriting assignment so I can spend the time with it that it deserves, probably tomorrow evening. Meanwhile, back at you, Ned, here is my favorite Elvis song, not "Don't Be Cruel" but just "Don't," which I never noticed back in the day but discovered 15 years ago on a 20 #1 hits compilation. It's such a rich and vulnerable song. (It is also covered wonderfully and breathlessly by Bernadette Peters, although the only track I ever found of that cover was on an LP of hers).



I also have to thank Ned for this. In his email he mentioned, and correctly remembered the title of "The Book of Ezra," my quirky but unfinished novel from sophomore year. Now that is a friend. Thanks, buddy. I love you for that.

PS - I just discovered the Bernadette Peters cover in my collection of purchased iTunes songs, so I am happy to report you can get it from Mr. Jobs for less than a buck.

Sunday Morning Soundtrack

Hot damn! Went off my diet for 5 days and lost another half a pound anyway! It strikes me that maybe I am actually making some fundamental changes in how I eat. This is a good thing. Plus I had 2 great workouts and a really nice long walk around Jamaica Pond and all over JP with my daughter Kip.

So, I Take Five days off, and here's our soundtrack, of course.

Off to a good start, and "A fundamental struggle - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 October 21, 2007"

June 18, 2009: Hugely busy day today in which I am trying to squeeze in some househunting, dinner with a friend, and a meeting on the day I already am up against my weekly Kindle Nation Daily deadline. But I have already been to the pool for 26 laps, so I am off to a good start. feeling great, getting my exercise, eating healthy. We had a nice dinner at Kitchen on Common in Belmont, around the corner from an apartment I'm scoping out and a few steps from Danny's next-year middle school. I'd never knowingly had arctic char. It was exquisite.

A fundamental struggle

30 pounds today, which pleases me much more than 29.5.

I seem to have moved beyond a little plateau, by drilling down on the basic elements that have been working for BMGS these past 7+ weeks: pay attention to the calories, and work them off. I shall keep it up.

It seems from the emails I get that nearly all my 50-something male friends are fighting the good fight when it comes to weight. We can do this. There are powerful forces working against us, but together we can fight the power!

To succeed, for me, it has required that I treat this struggle as if it was really, really important. There are ways in which I think it is important, but others in which I know it is trivial. But if I let it become trivial for me, I will fail.

My pal Stewart wrote the other day about the importance, also, of focusing on the things that are really important:

“Do good. We really are in fundamental struggle for soul and future of this country and our kids. Weigh in. We need your voice--in big fights and little ones. For instance, great news about Merle Haggard. Every word and action for democracy and people and justice matters today--great or small. Don't mean to meddle or tell you how to spend your time. But you have a gift for writing. People will read what you write. Values matter more now than ever. The country hungers for honorable and fundamental values and for folks to voice those values.”

Word.

He is right about every bit of it, and I accept the responsibility and the challenge, even as I am still feeling my way into acting on that acceptance again after lo these many years.

That said, I am drawn for a moment back to trivia.

A good night for the Boston 9 last night. Their $70-million right fielder redeemed himself after a season that had some fans calling him Nancy Drew rather than J.D. Drew. (Not me, I am a Nancy Drew fan). Tonight their $103-million #3 starting pitcher has a similar opportunity. They put it away so early and easily last night that I was able to vacate the bar sometime in the 4th inning. This was a good thing. I had worked out at the gym shortly before the game, and consequently was more than a little thirsty. Bud Light is probably not the right way to rehydrate, but it was cold and good, and I had allotted myself the calories for 4 pints. Problem was, at the rate of the pint per inning that I was sucking down, I don’t think I could have gone the full 9 innings if my team had needed me.

I first heard today’s soundtrack back in the mid-80s when I owned a community bookstore called the Dorchester Reading Authority. I used to play a Celtic music show on the weekend, which may have been a precursor of some kind to Brian O’Donovan’s program, and this song seemed to get play every week. Well-deserved play.

Go Sox!

I'm trying not to use sex to sell this blog, but tonight it is important to stand up for what is right.

Soundtrack for Sunday

I would never steer you wrong. This is a song for all ages, all races, all souls. Listen, drink in the music and the lyrics drawn directly from a man's letters to his son who had made the crossing, and the images. It is just an amazing fusion of music and narrative, and yet entirely artless.


The song was written about 25 years ago by a fellow named Peter Jones, and this recording features Robbie O'Connell, Mick Moloney and Jimmy Keane.

"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscienc

Sound and fury, signifying.... - Originally posted to BMGS 1.0 Oct 20, 2007

Through most of my 20s and my 30s I was a community organizer, working with poor folks who were in many ways a lot like my own people, all over the country. I worked with great groups like ACORN and the People’s Alliance in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine and I trained organizers and community activists all over the country. I regularly worked 70 hours a week kicking ass, taking names and helping people make a positive difference in their lives.

I bring that up now not only for the obvious reason why a 50-something guys brings up all the things he did in his 20s, but I was thinking about how important it was to me, back then, to do significant work. I had put my writing on hold to organize for social change, and when a friend like Stewart Acuff or Larry Ginsburg would ask me what my bottom line was I would say that I just wanted to be responsible for as much good organizing to change as many people’s lives as I could, in any way I could. Whatever my success with that goal over the course of many years, I have to acknowledge that it changed over time, as my children got older and I began to think about looming tuition payments and eventually struggled through some serious difficulties that I created in my own life and the lives of people I loved.

Now, here I am, 57, and working at various writing gigs while I create a more or less daily blog that on several levels is all about contemplating my navel. It has come to this.

But I do not despair. My purpose here is not, primarily or initially, to achieve something of great significance. (Duh, that’s a good thing, hmm?). I’d like to keep getting into better and better shape so I can enjoy life more and have more of it. I’d like to stay true to my path, learn as much as I can, share some of it, and enjoy some music with friends and passersby.

It is all going pretty well. My weight has been on a plateau for about a week, but a good pal emailed me: “Don't feel sluggish about your blog. If you are at a plateau, then tell your readers. Just be honest, like you have been since day one and they'll love you for it.”

I like love, whether or not I expect it here.

Sometimes I do think about whether this is all just an exercise in self-absorption. A close friend of my ex-wife, a woman who in the past has been very good to me and mine, sent me a zinger of an email in which she asked not too cryptically: “Still on the pretentious Bus are we?”

Anyone would be a fool not to understand that the best friend of an ex-spouse tends to be placed in the role of crucible (if that can be a role, which I am sure it can’t but I am hurrying a little here) for some of the anger that the ex does not always get to express in a generally amicable parting. I don’t hold that against anyone, and I appreciate the honesty. Here’s most of what I wrote back, hoping not to be too defensive either of myself or of my blog.

“It's possible, but I didn't see that route listed when I got on, if this is a bus. As in pretense? Or pretend? I don't know. I parse the words not to play a semantic game, but to wonder honestly about your meaning. I will grant that both the premise and presentation of the blog are self-absorbed by definition, but I hoped that by mixing in liberal amounts of honesty, self-deprecation and attempted humor and entertainment (and by the mere and I think obvious fact that when one starts anything by admitting to weighing 273 pounds there is some shame, if not humility, in the enterprise), I might pull it all off while also accomplishing the face-value goal explicit in the title of the blog. I'm sure some people read it and consider it ridiculous, including those who know me and those who don't. I guess I can take your question or implicit statement that I am ‘still on [any kind of] bus’ to mean that you see it as part of a past pattern that I have revealed before. I am open to that idea, and surely it is all of a piece because it is all me. But while I have [screwed up] in the past, I have tried to own it and be responsible for it in different ways. This seems different, and positive in my intentions. But if I come across as full of myself in a simplified way, and in doing so give anyone who is pissed off at me (or whatever) another confirmation that being pissed off at me (or whatever) is the right response to me, I'm not bothered by that and I do not blame anyone for having that response….

“Maybe the whole thing is a waste of the 40-45 minutes a day I have been putting into it, but it began with some real desperation about the 273.5 that was flashing back at me from the scale's digital readout, and a hunch that I could accomplish a few things in the process. I guess I will just have to see.”

Which is true. I will. Have to see.

But meanwhile, another email I got overnight came from, Mark, an old friend who is a damned good writer in his own right. He wrote to thank me, implying that somehow my blog had got him writing poetry again.

Go figure. Do I really believe it? Not so much. Do I believe that it worked for Mark? Absolutely. Does it make me feel that there can somehow be some significance in what I am doing here for a little while each day?

Just enough.

Thanks, Mark. Keep writing.

Saturday's soundtrack

My son's mom and I saw Tracy Chapman perform one night on the waterfront here. She was so good I can't even remember who she was opening for. She's with us this morning, opening for all of us with today's soundtrack.

Ordinarily I don't pay a lot of attention to the visual montage part of some of these Youtube video's, which is unfair of me since their creators are far more talented at what they are doing than, say, I am at creating this blog. But this one of "The Promise" is kind of stunning, almost enough to make up for something like the last few seconds being clipped off at the end of the song*.



*If you want to hear the whole song, this time with some of that ubiquitous footage of the colossally but perhaps unbearably cute Harry and Hermione, here it is.