Opinion

INT. SPORTS BAR - DAY

With the warmer weather, the opportunity to get outdoors more often, and enjoy the spaces that surround us has been more frequent. Likewise, the melting of the snow (what little we did have), has also revealed what we haven’t seen in awhile.

It’s been cold. An engaged audience might ask: How cold was it? A type of punchline: It was so cold the ice was complaining about the temperature! The reality is more mundane. It was so cold they cancelled school. This has happened before. I grew up in Texas, a geography not known for cold temperatures. One winter day was so cold that they cancelled schools. They were concerned the HVAC wasn’t up to the job. No school administrator wants to take in warm bodied children and spit them out blue. It was 29 degrees Fahrenheit.

I recently went on a date with my six-year-old daughter. It was an elegant affair. She wore a gown. I donned a suit. My daughter kept referring to the event as “the ball,” though technically it’s a Father Daughter Dance. Elaborate chandelier, ornate sconces and superfluous fleur-de-lis decorated the country club ballroom. A DJ spun an array of danceable, kid-friendly tunes. Yes, it was mostly Taylor Swift.

I recently read about a new museum opening in Brainerd that celebrates all things pop culture. The museum features a variety of rooms that center on various interests, including rooms that have fully functioning gaming consoles from throughout the years, where visitors can actually sit down and enjoy a round of Pac Man, or a round of Oregon Trail on an old green and black screen PC.

Last weekend, my first born child returned from a deployment overseas, arriving from a warm, sandy place to upstate New York, only to be greeted with a large amount of snow, and very cold temperatures. It’s strange to be grateful for cold weather and snow, but he was.

I seldom invite friends to come to church with me and, after Sunday’s morning service that was so deeply moving, I don’t know why. If you knew a great bakery, you’d tell people. If you read a great book, you wouldn’t keep it a secret. But off I truck to the West Side of Manhattan and in the big door past the greeters, drop my two cents in the offering plate, head altarward, stop at my pew, genuflect and bow, and take my seat.

While it’s very hard to convince the blind of the fact, the importance of visual art in this life cannot be overstated. Visual art is as limitless as the human imagination, seen with the eyes but felt in the bones, speaks to the mind but beats with a heart. Some say the visual art of Mark Rothko were made for the soul.

Las Vegas, Nevada. The Little White Wedding Chapel. Rob waits in his car in the drive-thru. The driver of the convertible ahead of him honks several times, excited, joyous. The couple shares a kiss, takes a handful of selfies, pops open a bottle of champagne, and drives off.

I’ve just finished a ten-day solo tour down South as the World’s Oldest Stand-Up and it was a major adventure for an old guy with memory issues who keeps forgetting the word “cognitive” and other words of a similar sort, walking onstage every night to do ninety minutes or more freestyle in front of a big crowd, most of whom probably voted the wrong way last November, and make them laugh a lot.