Pebbles in The Stream

 I have been reading about a variety of recent anthropological discoveries that have been raising new questions about who we are as a species, and how we fit on the tree of life here on earth. Those discussions, and a few weird dreams featuring people and places long gone by, have got me thinking about "evolution and identity" from a far more specific and focused perspective - mine.

So here is the metaphor I have been playing with: think of yourself as a pebble in a stream - with a tip of the hat to the old TV series, Kung Fu, “Can you catch the pebble, Grasshopper?" We are not isolated in the stream at any point in our lives; rather we get tossed around with, rubbed up against, tumbled over, all the other pebbles around us.

I remember having, maybe when I was 11 or 12, a "rock tumbler kit." It consisted of a round plastic tub, maybe 3 inches around and 4 or 5 inches deep. You took the top off and dumped in some water and the prepackaged rocks and grit. Then you put the tub onto the electric tumbler that "tumbled" the rocks and grit around and around, for as long as you could stand waiting. 

If you managed to just walk away and let it tumble for a few days or a week, when you opened the tub, the rocks had changed; some just smoothed a bit, but others polished - all significantly changed.

Our lives, as pebbles in the stream, are a lot like an existential rock tumbler with all of life's tossing, rubbing and tumbling codifyingp the people, relationships, beliefs and values of our life at any particular time that we pop the top off and take a look around.

Then the seasons change. The rains come and the stream floods, or they don't and the stream slowly swirls us into new eddies, or maybe a dam gets built downstream making our stream into a lake, or merges our stream with others, becoming a river. A shift in schools, a graduation, new relationships, the arrival of children, the departure of same, the death of a parent, all these sweep us along, jostling the other pebbles of our lives, leaving some behind, sweeping new ones into our next eddy, tossing and rubbing.

The point is change. We are often inclined to resist the inevitability of change, my generation more so than my children's or grand grandchildren's. We were taught to think in terms of "my home town," "I work here." "'Til death do us part." All affirmations of a permanent eddy. No more rides in the tumbler. Stasis.

Which is, I guess, why we are still surprised when life proves us wrong and the tumbler jerks like a rusty merry-go-round and commences on yet another jostle toward new eddies. We, as the Brits would say, "move house" for some planned or unanticipated reason. Friends, suddenly grown old, die on us, as do pets whose shadows still lurk, at the corner of our eyes, in their accustomed places.

But other tumblers, dreams, music and sometimes reality, can send us crashing into ripples of forgotten eddies - breathing new life into memory. I encountered the "reality" version a few years ago in "the city," which here in the burbs means downtown Chicago. I may have shared this with you back when it happened, but I am of the age when I do repeat my favorite stories. Anyhow, I was standing on a corner waiting for a walk light, just minding my own business, when I glanced over at the other "standees" and was stunned to see an old high school girlfriend standing a few feet away! Actually, it was my "young" high school girlfriend - looking just like she did when we were 18!

Yeah, I know, that should have tipped me off sooner than it did. But I just kept staring until the light changed and the crowd swirled us apart. I was most of the way across the intersection when I recalled that said "old" girlfriend had a daughter who was attending Northwestern, and had contacted my sister, who worked there for many years, about some Nothwesternish issue. Being aware of the culture frowning on old guys accosting young women on the street, I did not try to catch up to her and ask, "By the way, is your Mother from Springfield, Ohio?" Rather, I choose to believe I had seen the daughter, not some time-traveling apparition of the mother from a distant eddy in the stream.

Dreams and music are eddies of a different flavor. Dreams, at least mine, reflect a kind of "weird" bipolar realty. As I have shared before, I am always the central figure in the dream, but I am quite comfortable interacting with the various supporting actors in my dreams whom I have never met in real life, yet with whom I am apparently well acquainted. We seem to like each other.

The point is that on those rare occasions when people I actually have known in the real world do enter my dreams, they always appear in their "eddy guise," that is to say they look, act, and sound as they did when I knew them, and I, perhaps in an attempt to "catch the pebble, grasshopper" regress similarly. Weird? I'm not sure - perhaps dreams which do seem quite freeform, actually may be somehow linked to some irrefutable aspects of the time-space continuum.

Music is much more straightforward. It does kick us directly into the WayBack machine - and there we are, hands in dishwater, but somehow are 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago with that same tumbling cluster of pebbles we remember - maybe not well, but as we choose to remember them. The internet gives us wonderful control over these visits back up the stream of our lives:

"Let's see, graduated from college in '71, makes high school about '67. So let me type 1967 into Pandora. Oh, yeah! Hi there pebble!

Mom played all those old World War II songs on the piano. I can type in the dates, or just "popular songs for WWII" Whoa, ho! Pebbles from around the piano!"

So music really does time travel us among the eddies in the stream. But very selectively. A pebble from the late 50s. Pat Boone sang a song with the lyric "Twix 12 and 20 are the years you remember." I think the span is significantly wider than that, but not infinitely so. Music does transport us among the eddies, but we don't necessarily always move down along the contemporary musical eddies. 

Before the Internet we depended on CDs, tapes, TV and the radio to give us music, to play the sounds of the eddies of the moment for the pebbles we were tumbling with.The Internet vastly broadens the musical eddies to which we have access, but the pebbles with whom we share our real life still influence the tunes to which we attend and with which we still identify. 

This is unlike the current celebrities, whose names I only vaguely recognize, who have no relevance to "my music." I do realize, and am somewhat fascinated by, the rise of the "Swifties." But must confess I have never heard an entire Taylor Swift song. Tried - just wasn't anything there for me, but obviously is there for the Swifties.

But here let me play this for you, Blackbird, Beatles, 1968

What? Who are The Beatles? Whose child are you?