Up Your Consciousness …by Greg Tamblyn

Let me say right up front that I have enormous respect for anybody who works with broken pipes, crusty toilets, clogged drains, moldy basements, spiders, cobwebs, and septic tanks.

Like Phil, for example.

Phil is my plumber. I say “my” because he’s the guy my landlord calls when anything starts spurting, clogging, or smelling like ripe sewage. Living in a 110 year old converted stone barn, this happens about as often as the moon goes full.

Phil is a tall, lanky, good looking fellow, with a deep, sonorous voice, longish hair, and one earring. I’d guess he’s in his early 60s. He’s well-spoken, engaging, and takes a genuine interest in the lives of me and my landlord. In short, he’s a nice guy and I like him.

I like him in spite of the fact that I think of him as the world’s most barely adequate plumber.

Let me explain.

My kitchen has — I don’t know the technical, plumbing, kitchen-designer term for it — a triple sink. It’s a large piece of steel with three basins. The middle one has the disposal in it and the ones on either side have drains. When the faucet stopped “running” (a technical term), Phil came over, chatted with me for awhile, looked at the faucet, and decided it was ready for the plumbing graveyard.

Off he went to the faucet store, or wherever plumbers go to get stuff. He brought back a new one and installed it while I was gone. (That’s another good thing about Phil. You can trust him not to steal your lottery tickets or break your guitar strings when you’re not there.) It’s a nice, new, sleek, chrome, 4-on-the-floor, super-turbocharged, ultra-modern faucet. Looks great. Works great. With one minor problem. It only reaches the middle sink. The other two sinks might as well be in Death Valley for all the water they get. You’d think Phil might have noticed that.

He also replaced a leaky bathroom faucet with a new, “simpler model” that he said would last forever. It does work fine, if you have the reflexes of Superman. After about five seconds it starts turning itself off like it’s running out of willpower. So to wash your hands, you have to turn it on full blast, dodge the water ricocheting at your crotch and belly button, then wash fast. If that faucet were a human male, it would need FloMax or Viagra.

When my hot water heater, which runs on “environmentally responsible clean natural gas,” finally bit the dust, Phil replaced it with a new, super-efficient, “green energy” model. My gas bill immediately doubled.

The toilets are an epic story. I have two, each with distinct personalities, and neither has ever worked properly. By “properly,” I mean flushing down your basic human waste. At least without a lot of extra work. Toilet One - Dopey - flushes okay, but always runs afterward. So you have to jiggle it, and with exactly the right touch, or the delicate inner workings will “break.” (Another technical term.)

Toilet Two - Grumpy - refuses to do its job with just one flush. It demands two or three to fully digest what I’ve digested. Since Grumpy is the one my guests use, reminding them to flush three times! is awkward. And embarrassing for everybody when I forget to mention it.

Phil has worked on these toilets at least five times in 16 years. Recently I called him again, and this time he decided they needed to be rebuilt. “Rebuilt” is a technical plumbing term for replacing all the funny looking metal and rubber parts inside the tank behind the bowl. (”Bowl” is a technical plumbing term for the part you sit on.) He replaced the complicated inner workings and — finally! — Dopey works perfectly. Grumpy, however, still needs an extra flush.

Evidently Phil also installed an added bonus feature. When engaged, the rebuilt toilets emit a sound similar in pitch, tone, and volume to a jet aircraft engine. You can hear it outdoors through the foot thick stone walls. Now whenever I answer the call of nature, my neighbors look to the sky for an impending plane crash.

Last spring a bathroom sink was draining slowly. I called Phil. To my surprise he announced, “I don’t really do drains.” I thought this was kind of like a piano player saying “I don’t really play that white key in the middle,” and I said so. Phil sheepishly agreed to look at it, and did manage to get it back to it’s full draining capacity. For a few weeks.

As I said, Phil is a good guy. He reminds me of plumber when I was a kid, Hinrich. Hinrich was a German who always wore freshly laundered pinstriped overalls, talked like a Mercedes engineer, and gave you the impression that your plumbing was the most important thing in the world and that only he could fix it.

My dad loved this guy, partly because of his German approach, and partly because my parents always ran into him at the symphony. (Dad took Mom to the symphony; she let him play golf on Saturdays. Successful marriage requires negotiation.) I have no idea if Hinrich was a good plumber, but my dad used him for decades because Dad loved telling people he ran into his plumber at the symphony.

Phil wears jeans and a work shirt, but his kids go to out-of-state colleges, and he takes nice vacations. I haven’t checked him out on internet plumbing review sites, but I think Phil does pretty well for himself. And I think it’s because, like Hinrich, he lets you know he cares about your plumbing and about you as a person. It fits with my philosophy that we’ll put up with a lot of stuff that doesn’t work exactly right all the time if people are nice and make us feel good.

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn

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Texas Friends!  Much appreciation for spreading the word to songwriters, songwriter organizations, churches, and anyplace else you think might be helpful, appropriate, or fun.   If you write, love to see you!

SCROLL DOWN FOR A FLYER you can copy and email or print. (Or just send folks to this blog address: http://www.gregtamblyn.com/blog/2010/09/01/dallas-songwriting-workshop

Big Thanks!

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When we last encountered Charlie a few weeks ago, I told you that, at 105 years of age, he had slipped on the ice while shoveling his front walk, broken his ankle, and driven himself to the hospital. I heard that piece of the story from others, and like many good stories, it was slightly exaggerated. When I visited Charlie recently, I got the real version. Plus a lot more fascinating stuff.

He did slip on his icy front walk, but it was before he had actually started shoveling. He didn’t drive himself to the hospital, his daughter did. Charlie does, however, still have a license, and up until the injury he was still driving. (There’s a classic 1967 Mustang convertible in his garage. He bought it new.)

The part about Charlie dating actor Chris Cooper’s mother is true. They get together frequently for dinner. As I wrote previously, he showed me a photo of the two of them with Santa last Christmas. Sweet couple.

The part about him playing the sax is also true. How he became a sax player is a giant clue to his makeup.

When Charlie was eight, in 1913, his minister father died in a bizarre elevator accident. The elevator operator turned the crank before his father was completely aboard, causing the elevator to knock him down, crush his chest, and push him into the shaft where he fell nine floors.

Charlie, his mother, and four sisters were left without much of an income. Charlie figured that if he learned how to play the sax he might be able to make some money. On the third floor of their house he could pick up a weekly live broadcast of a local swing band on his little crystal radio set. He taught himself how to play by listening to the broadcast and playing along with the band. Later, when he found out he’d have to be able to actually read music to get any gigs, he taught himself how to do that, too.

Charlie made money playing in dance bands all through college at Missouri, and medical school at Northwestern. (In the mid-1920s!) While at med school in Chicago, his band had a chance for a two month summer gig on a ship bound for Asia. But the audition was in Seattle, and the train ticket was expensive. He heard about a man who needed a transfusion, so Charlie went down to sell his blood. Amazingly, the man turned out to be one of Al Capone’s lieutenants. After the transfusion, the mobster’s wife approached Charlie with a big roll of bills and asked him how much he charged for his blood. Charlie knew the going rate was $35, but the ticket to Seattle was $120. So he somewhat nervously told her $120. She peeled off the bills “like it was nothing.”

After 105 years of living a remarkable life, Charlie has a lot of great stories. I saw pictures of him surfing in Hawaii (in the mid-1920s!), and he showed me a slot machine one local illegal-gambling-house owner used to pay off some medical bills. (It still works. I lost a few nickels in it.) He was reluctant to play the sax for me because his dentures were acting up, but he did play me a reel-to-reel tape of him improvising some melodies. It was beautiful. The man has honest-to-God talent.

I could ramble on about all the adventures he shared in two hours, but let’s get to the possible reasons for his lengthy lifespan.

Charlie has a birthday coming up next month and the family’s planned a big celebration. I asked him if he ever thought he’d live to be 105, and he seemed both surprised and philosophical about it. The broken leg, although completely healed, has slowed him down a bit. He doesn’t want to fall again, and especially doesn’t want to go through physical rehab again. (Who could blame him?) He also has some macular degeneration in one eye and has decided to quit driving. He jokingly says his kids are fighting over that 1967 Mustang.

I wanted to know how he’s done it, so I asked him what he’s done to take care of himself. I pointed out that in all the pictures he showed me, he always looked fit and trim. Did he exercise a lot or eat any special way? Not really, he said. He walked a lot, but that was about it.

Charlie thinks his longevity is a genetic gift. His mother lived into her late 90s, and one sister lived to 102. And none of his sisters or mother (or himself) ever had any kind of cancer. So we’re talking about some strong genes here.

But a couple of other things stood out. I asked him how he spent the last 35 years since retiring from medicine. To put it mildly, Charlie stayed busy. He played a lot of golf, traveled the world fishing, and especially loved photography. (Among other things, he gave me a tour of his darkroom.) He also owned 10 acres of land with several horses. Both the land and the horses took a lot of work.

That acreage, as it happens, was in the middle of what now is a very wealthy suburb. He sold it some years back to a developer. I observed that if he still had it now, it would be worth millions.

“I don’t care about that,” he said. “I never think about it.”

“Really?” I asked. “Not a bit?”

“No regrets,” he said. If you’re living, never have regrets.*”

* Do you think that might have been a factor?

* That, and as Kate Jackson (wife of rockabilly hero Roddy Jackson) suggested: playing the saxophone!

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn

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If you travel (and maybe even if you don’t), eventually an airline loses your luggage. For reasons you can’t possibly foresee, or even imagine, sometimes it actually works out for the best.

I’d been hired to speak and sing for a school group (teachers, counselors, administrators) in Alamosa Colorado. The gig was at 8 AM on a Thursday, so I left Kansas City the morning before, on a United flight through Denver, connecting on United Express to Alamosa.

After we landed in Denver I hiked the four miles or so through the airport over to the United Express gates. When I got there, I was informed my flight had been canceled, due to low passenger count. I’d been rebooked on the next flight, at 8 PM, seven hours later.

No big deal, I thought. I have my laptop, I can work in the airport. There’s a good French restaurant I can visit for dinner, and I’ll still get to bed at a decent hour.

When 8 PM approached I hiked the six miles back to United Express. This area is the ugly stepchild of the airport. It’s a long, narrow hallway with a hundred little gates, no food, and very little seating. You exit the gate directly onto the tarmac and board the plane via an outdoor stair ramp, just like in the old days before jetways.

I was shocked — shocked! — to learn my second flight had been canceled, due to low passenger count. (Why was nobody flying this airline?) The next flight to Alamosa was not till 9 AM the next day. I asked the gate agent how I was supposed to get there in time for my 8 AM gig. She told me — and I swear this is true — they had booked me on a night flight to Farmington that would detour through Alamosa to let me off. This strained all credulity, and I pressed her several times to make sure she wasn’t making it up. I even asked the pilot. Turns out she was telling the truth.

I stood there at the doorway watching the baggage being loaded for my plane, wondering if I would need a parachute to get off at Alamosa, or if they would actually land on the ground. From the window I could see the plane, the pilot, and the baggage loaders with their carts. What I did not see was any of my luggage. My guitar travels in a large, white, ultra-strong, specially made case that baggage handlers have yet to destroy. It’s sturdy, and my guitar is relatively safe inside it. Being white, it’s easily identifiable, even from a distance.

It was nowhere in sight.

I let the United Express gate agent know about this, and she assured me my gear was on the plane. I asked how she could be certain, and she said because it had to be. This is like saying the world has to be flat because it looks like it. I had to see for myself. I insisted. She resisted. I persisted. Finally she let me out onto the tarmac and I quizzed the baggage handlers (who were nice guys) about my large white guitar case and black suitcase. They had not seen anything like them, and they definitely were not on the plane.

Rushing back to the gate in a heightened state of tension, I asked the gate agent to please find my luggage. She frowned and replied there was nothing she could do. I suggested she could surely, at the very least, check with United to find out if my bags had ever arrived from KC. For some reason this extra bit of work in the form of one phone call annoyed her, and she refused to do it.

But a traveler whose back is against the wall. whose valuable and dearly beloved guitar has disappeared, is a desperate, determined person. I was undeterrable. Finally she agreed to make the call. My luggage had, in fact landed in Denver with me, several hours ago. But they couldn’t exactly say where it was at the current moment.

By now my plane to Farmington (with an unscheduled stop in Alamosa) was boarding. The pilot told me they were leaving, and I had to either get on, or say bye bye.

With only a minute to decide, I discerned that arriving in Alamosa without my clothes and guitar would be embarrassing, not to mention pointless. I told the pilot I was staying. I had to find out what happened to my stuff.

So the search began.

I hiked the ten miles back up to the civilized part of the airport and found the United counter. The people there were friendly, understood the problem, agreed my baggage had to be there somewhere, and they would find it. They sent out a three member search party, equipped with detailed instructions, flashlights, walkie-talkies, and what looked like survival gear. After an hour, they came back empty handed. No luck.

But it had to be somewhere! They sent out another search party. Different people this time. Maybe with better eyeglasses. Down into the bowels of the airport. But the result was the same. No luggage.

They were apologetic. They were certain my luggage was somewhere in the airport. They suspected it was locked up in storage someplace, and would definitely be found in the morning. They would make sure it was on the first plane to Alamosa.

This, of course, was no help whatsoever. I told them my gig started an hour before the first flight even left Denver. They were sorry, and they meant it, but there was nothing more they could do.

At this point, all seemed lost. It was midnight, I’d been stuck in Denver for 12 hours, and my guitar was somewhere in Neverland. Possibly Peter Pan and Tinkerbell were playing it. My gig started in a mere 8 hours.

My client had booked me into a hotel in Alamosa, so I called the hotel. A pleasant young woman answered. Yes, she had my reservation. No, nobody had asked about me. Not even the people who were supposed to pick me up at the Alamosa airport many hours ago. That felt weird.

I let that go for the moment, and explained that I was the speaker/musician booked for the meeting the next morning. Yes, she saw that meeting on the next day’s schedule. I told her I was stuck in Denver, the airlines had lost my guitar, and there was no way I could do the gig without it.

“So if you had a guitar you could do the gig?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “but there’s no way to get one by then.”

“My boyfriend will lend you his guitar,” she said.

“That’s very kind, but you don’t understand. I need a good guitar to put on this kind of show.”

“He has a good one. He’s a professional musician.”

“But he won’t want to lend it to a complete stranger. He doesn’t know me from Adam.”

“Oh, he’ll lend it to you.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ll tell him to.”

“He’ll do it because you tell him to?”

“Yes.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“He must really like you.”

“He does.”

“Maybe you should call him first and ask.”

“I can’t reach him now, but I’ll call him in the morning. He’ll bring his guitar by 8 AM.”

“Because you tell him to.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure you want to do this?”

“You’re a musician. My boyfriend’s a musician. We have to stick together.”

How could I say no to such generosity? I had no choice but to believe her.

Incredibly, the car rental counter was still open at midnight. I rented a car and drove to Alamosa. Five hours later, at 5:30 AM, I stumbled into the hotel lobby. The same lovely girl was still on duty. She gave me a big smile, a room key, a bag of toiletries, and said she’d arranged a wake-up call for 7 AM.

“Have a nice nap!” she said.

I slept for an hour, got up, showered, and shaved with the razor she’d given me. (Travel Tip: When one normally shaves with an electric shaver, one’s face isn’t used to a blade, and one’s skin cuts easily — like a steak knife through tofu.) I nicked my face in four places. I stuck toilet paper on it to staunch the bleeding.

It was August. I was traveling in shorts, a t-shirt, socks, and tennis shoes. (Travel Tip: Never do that.) All I had to wear were those same dirty, grubby clothes. This is gonna be great, I thought.

Sure enough, she and her boyfriend were in the lobby waiting for me, with a good guitar in a nice case. Her boyfriend seemed not at all worried about his instrument, and they told me to leave it at the desk when I was finished. So trusting.

I picked up the guitar and found the meeting room. A hundred or so school professionals were milling around, chatting, drinking coffee. The people who had hired me introduced themselves, as if nothing was remotely strange about me not having arrived on my appointed flight the day before, and showing up this morning with cuts all over my face, dressed like a yard worker.

I explained everything that had happened. They were amazed and delighted. Amazed at what I’d been through to get there, and delighted I even showed up. So far so good, I thought.

But the sound system I had requested was not there. Instead, all they had was a cheap microphone on a podium. You can’t play a guitar behind a podium because it blocks the view, it blocks the sound, and you’d have to have a neck like a giraffe to even reach the mic. I explained this, and they quickly came up with a plan to get a real sound system. Evidently somebody had one at home.

While we waited for that to appear, I chatted with folks and got a feel for the group. They all seemed to be in a good mood and ready for some fun. I wonder if this might actually work out, I thought.

The sound system arrived, they set it up, I plugged in, and it worked fine. We began the program an hour late, with me looking like a refugee from Camp Learn-To-Shave.

It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable gigs I’ve done. I played some appropriate songs, and wove my story of the past 24 hours into the show. It fit right into my message that we can’t control everything, stuff happens, so we have to make the best of it and try to have fun anyway. I was living proof of the point, plus they all thought it was funny, so it worked out well.

Toward the end of the program, I let the audience know I had to make my noon flight from Alamosa back to KC. I couldn’t miss it because I had a performance there the next day. So someone was needed to drive the car back to Denver for me and turn it in. Amazingly, three people — three! — volunteered.

Other helpful folks drove me to the tiny Alamosa airport just in time to see the plane land that would take me to Denver. I watched it taxi to a stop on the tarmac. As they unloaded the baggage, my beautiful white guitar case, along with my suitcase, emerged from the belly of the plane. I grabbed the gate agent (a nice one this time) and let her know it was my late luggage arriving. I asked her to please tag it quickly so I could get it on the plane home with me. She was happy to do it.

I watched them load it onto the plane, just to make sure. I wasn’t taking any chances.

I slept all the way to Denver, walked the fifteen miles back to the good part of the airport to change planes, then slept all the way to KC.

When I got to the baggage claim In Kansas City, my guitar and suitcase were…..missing.

They’d lost them again.

Postscript:

• United delivered my bags later that night, in time for the gig in KC. They blamed the lost luggage on United Express.
• I wrote a letter to the hotel management prasing their night clerk, and suggested she was excellent management material.
• I avoid United Express whenever possible.

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn

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I have a new roommate. A street dog. She showed up a couple of months ago, unannounced, and decided not to leave. (Like many of my former girlfriends.) She’s cute, exotic looking, and since that’s all I require, I was instantly smitten. Me being a convenient and easy source of food, so was she.

Almost everyone remarks what a pretty dog she is. Strangers even stop their cars to tell me this, followed by “Hey, what kind of dog IS that?” I tell ‘em she’s half fox, half dingo, because that’s what she looks like. Amazingly, some people actually believe me. Even though to my knowledge (and correct me if I’m wrong) that’s genetically impossible.

The fox/dingo thing is also appropriate because, being young and a street dog, she’s part wild animal. (Like many of my former girlfriends.)

I named her Houdini — Dini for short — for obvious reasons. Our first day together she got out of a locked dog crate. After the second time, I gave up and junked the crate. She also climbed out of a chain-link fenced yard and a wrought-iron fenced patio. (Video below.) She’s escaped my car on multiple occasions when I forget that she can squeeze through window openings one-third her size. Puppies, I’ve decided, are composed of play-dough and rubber.

Which brings up one of our favorite games: Rubber Dog. She loves it when I bend her into creatively un-dog-like pretzel shapes, like some cartoon animal. (Possibly because this makes it easier to lick her privates or chew her tail.) She’s a canine yogi.

When she escapes, it’s purely on her own terms. She responds to my calls with a flat-out sprint in the opposite direction. “Come. Come Here! Now! Come Here Now Or Don’t Come Back!” Fortunately she always does come back, but only when she’s ready. (Like many of my former girlfriends.) I’ve decided her doggie name for me is something like Meal Ticket, and she’s smart. She doesn’t want to get too far from the grub.

Her one truly annoying habit is her choice of perfume. She goes gaga over every opportunity to roll around in dead animal matter. Since I’m the Meal Ticket and don’t respond well to Eau de Carcasse, I retaliate with her least favorite experience, a hose shampoo. Because of her intense resistance, it’s always a mutual cleansing.

As with all young dogs, she needs a lot of attention, preferring hard physical play combined with biting. (Like many of my former girlfriends.) Sometimes this can be fun, but other times I wind up looking like Marv Albert’s back. All of which is why I lovingly refer to her as my high-maintenance house bitch.

On the plus side, however, she gets me off my computer and out of the house three times a day for extended excursions. These are not casual walks. On several occasions we’ve shattered Olympic records for racewalking.

She’s also good for frequent, though unintentional, comic relief. She likes to nap on the couch in weird positions, and moves around a lot in her sleep. Every once in awhile I’ll hear a loud thump, and notice that she’s rolled off the couch in her slumber and landed on the wood floor. (Only a few of my former girlfriends ever did this.) Even though this wakes her up, she just lies there and doesn’t move. Perhaps she’s embarrassed, and hopes I won’t notice.

Another bonus is that after 16 years of living here I’ve finally gotten to know all my neighbors. Or at least the ones with dogs. This is because any other dog within eyesight (or smelling distance — approximately seven miles) is an immediate target for Play! in the form of a full body slam at 30 miles per hour. A few of my stuffier neighbors have resented this, but most of their animals seem to actually like it. I think it’s her winning personality. And possibly that perfume.

Lest you think I’m being too lenient, I do let her know who’s boss. All young dogs must be firmly disciplined to instill good behavior, so I have her on a strict training regimen. I refuse to let her hog the bed. She has to stay on her side.

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn

Here’s the video of Dini climbing to freedom (takes a second to load)….look just to the left of the stone pillar….notice her little tail wagging once she’s out…

Video: Dini escapes

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Loved this cartoon, sent today by alert reader Mary Carol Moore. Maybe you can relate…

Coincidentally (or not) I have a new CD (and T-shirts) with a title song that riffs on this very subject: Analog Brain In A Digital World

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NOTE: By request, I have excerpted this story from my book, Atilla The Gate Agent: Travel Tales and Life Lessons From A Musical Laf-ologist.

During 1990 I lived in the Cayman Islands, working as an entertainer at a posh resort. Despite the laid back, exotic lifestyle, it was a period of great uncertainty in my life, and after a few months there I started experiencing some loneliness and depression. One night I listened to an audio book by Bernie Siegel called Peace, Love, and Healing. In it, Bernie recounted the story of a woman named Evy McDonald, and it had a profound impact on me.

In 1980, Evy was diagnosed with ALS, “Lou Gehrigs Disease.” By the time the doctors had figured out what the problem was, the disease was quite advanced. In Evy’s words, she was “a bowl of jello in a wheelchair.” The doctor came into her hospital room and gave her the news that the best she could hope for would be about six months. Evy had a masters degree in nursing and knew this was a fatal illness.

So she went home and raged about her situation for a couple of days. Then Evy had a thought: even though she was dying, even though her body just barely worked anymore, and even though she only had six months left to live, was there something she could do to make the most out of her last six months?

So she came up with a plan. She sat in front of a mirror naked and looked at herself. She’d had polio as a child, so she had two withered limbs. In addition, she’d been overweight her whole life. And now, she was dying of a wasting disease. She sat there and experienced all the negative thoughts and feelings she was having about her body and her life. She wrote them all down in a list. It was a long list.

Then Evy did three things. First, she started a new list of things she liked about herself. She began with her hair and her hands, because she’d always been proud of them. But this list of good qualities did not come as quickly as the other list. She decided to sit in front of the mirror without any clothes on every day, three times a day, to work on this new list. She would set a little timer for 20 minutes to make herself stay there, because it was hard. All these negative thoughts and feelings were intense and overwhelming at times. But before she would leave, she would find at least one new thing to like about her body or her life that she could add to the good list.

The second thing she did was to accept the negative feelings as her own. She took responsibility for them. She owned them. Then she did something else, a little practice she developed. She would say, “God, these are my feelings and thoughts. I accept them as mine. But I don’t know what to do with them. You take them.” So every day she would accept her feelings as her own, and then give them away to God.

In addition, she decided to forgive anyone and everyone she needed to. She did this daily.

Over time, Evy’s list of positive qualities grew longer, and eventually it became as long as the old list. Still, she kept practicing. Her new list grew longer than the old list, and kept growing.

At some point, she literally crossed a threshold. She wheeled into the mirror room and for the first time, all the negative thoughts and feelings had gone. They simply weren’t there anymore. All she could feel for herself that day was love and compassion. Not only for her body, which she now saw as a miracle of creation and a vehicle that still served her, but also for the person, the soul that she was inside. She was able to see herself as a blessed being who could experience these wonderful feelings and thoughts, and as a person who had done much good in the world.

Still, she kept practicing.

At some point, she began to have more strength in her limbs. Pretty soon after that, she could walk again, feed herself and clothe herself, and do everything normally. Evy became the first person to completely recover from ALS. And when that happened, she realized she must have more work to do in the world.

After listening to her story, I thought that my problem with depression might be from a similar origin: not enough self-love and esteem. I decided to write a song about her, which I did, and to do everything I could to make my life about love.

A few months later, I was back in Kansas City recovering from a ruptured spleen. I was still suffering from depression, and had had been referred to a doctor for counseling about it, an old acquaintance named Bowen White. I had a couple of sessions with Bowen and he helped me a lot. In addition, Bowen is the kind of doctor who becomes your friend as well as your doctor, and his friendship was of great comfort to me.

One night, a friend called to tell me Bowen was giving a talk for the local cancer support group, and asked if I wanted to go hear him speak. I had no idea Bowen ever gave talks, so I said sure. It sounded interesting.

It’s hard to describe what happened that night. Bowen was one of the best speakers I’d ever heard. He had great rapport, a tremendous sense of humor, and fantastic material. But as I listened to him, I kept noticing places in his talk where songs of mine would fit perfectly, like they were written for it.

To my amazement, near the end of his talk, Bowen told the story of Evy McDonald and how she had healed herself through love and forgiveness. Needless to say, I was stunned at the coincidence. It was one of those synchronistic events that makes you feel there are big wheels turning that you don’t know anything about.

The next day I called Bowen and told him he needed to hear some of my songs. We got together, I played him the songs that I “heard” during his talk, including Evy’s song, and he was as amazed as I had been.

But this wasn’t all. It turned out Bowen knew Evy personally, and through him I was able to contact her. I sent her the song I had written about her, and she wrote back a lovely note telling me how she and all her friends had cried when they heard it.

Some months later I was traveling in her vicinity and got to spend a day with her. I experienced first hand what a great soul she is. I noticed how all day long she gave the best of herself away to everybody, indiscriminately.

Evy made a couple of points clear to me during our visit. She emphasized that this “miracle” she experienced was not the miracle she was going for. She’d had a fatal illness. She’d expected to die. All she was trying to do was have some love and compassion for herself before that happened. If she could just get to a place where she accepted and loved herself unconditionally, before she died, than that would be enough for this lifetime.

Secondly, her whole life had been about service. She was a nurse, as I mentioned, and before that she was a candy striper who broke the record for hours volunteered in her local hospital. But when she got sick, she realized all her service had been what she called either Type I or Type II service. That is, service done either for reward and recognition, or service done out of a sense of duty. Evy wondered if there could be a third type: service done purely from love. And she decided that from this point on all her service would be about love. Even if she was sick.

As of this writing, in 2006, Evy has been totally recovered from Lou Gehrig’s disease for 26 years. She has recently gone back to school and changed careers to become a minister. She has her own congregation, loves her “work,” and is as happy as ever. She’s discovered that service done purely from love is as beneficial for the giver as the receiver. She gets filled up on the outflow.

As for me, my depression lifted and hasn’t come back since.

The song Unconditional Love (The Story Of Evy) is available as a single song download, an album download, or on CD here.

Unconditional Love (The Story Of Evy)

© 2006 gregtamblyn.com

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This has nothing to do with bailouts, derivative traders, or sub-prime mortgages. It’s about my little home town bank and how they make me smile.

Every day just inside the front door there’s a table with cookies and coffee for the customers. People can just help themselves. And believe me, they do. They go through those cookies like Walmart shoppers at a blue light special. Like hammerheads schooling for chum in the water. It’s your basic “Feed Them And They Will Come” marketing strategy, and it works like magic. This is a very profitable bank.

It’s also not one of your down-home, blue collar, casual type banks. Sure, it’s locally owned, but it’s definitely a blueblood, upper crust, high rent neighborhood money-changer. The name says it all: Country Club Bank. The thing is, my bank has 20-something branches. That means all day long, in all the posh parts of town, people are bolting down dozens and dozens of free cookies at a whole boatload of banks. That’s a lot of cookies. Every working day of the year.

This means that somewhere in the bowels of this rich, hoity-toity (but friendly) bank, somebody is constantly ordering, counting, scheduling and delivering cookies. They’re thinking about cookies all day long: where to get them, how many, what kind, and how to get the right amounts to each branch so the customers get their cookie hit. Someone’s job description, or part of it, is Cookie Manager.

This is amazing to me. With everything else the bank management has to do, like making car loans to Lexus drivers or foreclosing on their houses, they have made a decision, an absolute commitment, to cookies. Isn’t that weird?

And once you make that commitment, you can’t back out. You can’t have people coming in craving cookies and not have them. They have to be on that tray, in abundance, waiting for the gaping maws of all the people who need a fix. Somebody has to make sure that cookie platter and coffee carafe are loaded. You can’t have customers finding no cookies and going postal. Not at a bank. This isn’t some government office run by third-world level management. Like, say, the drivers license bureau or the US Immigration Service. The cookies have to BE THERE.

The logistics of this fascinate me. How do they do it? Where do they buy them? (Costco? Sam’s Club?) Do they keep them in a special Cookie Vault? Is there a special Cookie Delivery Vehicle for that bank? And does the same person buy and deliver them? Or do they deliver them with other banking-type stuff like rubber bands, hundred dollar bills, and stop-payment notices? Because, in case I didn’t mention it, we’re talking about a LOT of cookies here.

Here’s the other thing. These cookies are not anything special. They’re your basic store-bought, pre-packaged dry cookies. (Why do the English call them biscuits, anyway? Don’t they know what a biscuit is? Haven’t they ever been to Denny’s?) So we’re talking Chips Ahoy and Nabisco here. Nothing like Famous Amos or Mrs. Whats-her-name. Not even the girl scout ones. Nope. Regular out of the box grocery store cookies. But people love them because they’re FREE. And they’re free AT A BANK.

Personally, I never touch ‘em. I’m a cookie snob. But I love the amusement factor. Plus, the coffee’s not bad.

But what I really want is to meet the Cookie Manager and give him or her the Fun Job Of The Year Award.

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn

(NOTE: This piece was published in the June issue of The Funny Times.)

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Yes, amazingly, there’s a correlation. Here’s a short list:

1. Influences Are Important

Or at least count for a lot. For example, there are many great love songs in the world, but there are a lot of other songs — masquerading as love songs — that are really about taking hostages. They say things like:

• “I’m so miserable without you, it’s like you were here.”
• “If you won’t leave me I’ll find someone who will.”
• “Treat me like a fool, treat me cruel, but love me.”
• “You must think I look bad with a smile, ’cause you haven’t let me wear one in quite awhile.”

Whew, that’s some bad training! If we grow up listening to enough songs like that, we might need some therapy. These days I try to pay attention to what I’m paying attention to, and choose good influences.

2. Outbox The Outcome

“Railroad Bill” is a character in a song who tries to take over the song. This leads to shouting, fighting, and eventually being killed by the writer, who needs to take back control. (Since it’s only a song, it’s pretty funny.)

It’s a great reminder that we can’t always control what happens to our efforts. When I try to be too controlling, it’s usually frustrating and counter-productive. (Although so far, no deaths have resulted.) It also reminds me not to take things personally, or myself too seriously.

railroad bill

3. Self-Employment Is Better With A Good Boss

Studies show that the primary factor in employee satisfaction is our relationship with our boss. I have a great boss now, and in my office “more fun” equals “more done.”

(If you have a boss other than yourself, you’re still self-employed. Your boss is just your primary customer!)

4. Everyone Is Creative

Creativity is expression, it’s life-force in action. There are lots of ways to enhance it, including practice. Songwriting is most enjoyable when I have a great idea to play with because the song almost writes itself. But often putting in the work (habit) is where the great idea comes from in the first place.

5. Edison Was Right….to a point

“Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” He also said “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” But it also helps a lot if you love what you do, or can find ways to inject what you love doing into your work.

6. Be Original - Use Your Strengths

Writing romantic love songs for the pop/country market was enjoyable, but not my strength. When I started started writing “life songs” about the attitudes and influences that make life rewarding is when I started loving songwriting and felt the limits come off.

Creative, original self-expression is what makes us interesting and life fun. What makes us successful is figuring out how to use our natural talents and gifts in the service of something larger than ourselves.

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn

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Warning: bathroom humor alert.

Sorry, but I couldn’t let this go unreported.

A company in India is currently developing a soft drink made from cow urine. A major Hindu cultural group wants to market it as a healthy alternative to Coke. (I’m not kidding.) Since marketing is everything, the choice of a great name is a major ingredient in success. So in the interest of being helpful, I and my readers are offering this list.

• Cow Cola
• Pepspi
• Morning Dew
• Whizz!
• Moo-Ade
• Udder Delite
• Ginger (P)ale
• Squirt - For Real!
• Dr. PP
• Second-hand Soda
• Root Peer
• Gladder Bladder
• Bovine Divine
• Cow Power
• Number One
• Urine For A Treat!

And a few from alert readers:

• Moo Dew
• Pistol
• Pee Pop
• Sacred Soda
• Dr. Pisser
• Wee Water
• Pizzy Pop
• Eureka
• Bovine Dew
• Buffalo Springs
• Brahman Brew
• Steer Beer
• Dr.Dogie
• Cow Cider
• Pizzonit
• Tasty Wasty

Now give me yours…

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