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Laughter Vaccine Your protection against taking today too seriously

I drove out of state to visit my mother, but her state’s police wouldn’t let me in, nor would her gated community.  So I headed back home, and my state won’t let me back in.  Oh well, at least I’m maintaining social distance.

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About 5:15 pm take your coffee, sit outside, and watch the army of your locked-down neighbors finally stagger out of their homes in outlandish attire, and blink into the light.  There is no more intriguing people-watching venue on the Champs Elysees in Paris.

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Ten years ago I valet-parked cars in the lot of our local restaurant.  Today, I now wait tables outside on that same lot – and get bigger tips.  Covid’s got me moving up in the world, without changing locations.

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So now my state allows me to dine inside a restaurant where the waiter standing fifty feet from the kitchen takes twenty minutes longer to deliver my food than he did last week, when I was sitting a hundred yards away out in the parking lot.

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‘Tis the electoral season and the candidates are in full spin – literally.  As I understand the speeches, marching protestors are courageous patriots seeking liberty, if the politician believes they will vote for him.  The violent thugs and marauding looters are those carrying banners for the opposition.

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Bart’s elevator pitch is brilliantly clever.  Trouble is, unless the elevator runs from Baltimore to Bangor, he can never finish it.

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 I truly admire everyone efforts to fill us with good cheer during these times, and I’m sure I could pull myself out of the dumps if only my investments would turn around and lead the way.  (When the liquor business booms – beware your portfolio, my friend.)

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Now that the president’s name is printed on the stimulus checks, they may be issued in hopes that, like a small child swallowing a dime, they may quickly pass through, providing no effect on the child, and go on to stimulate the corporations so desperately in need.  (Notice: they were not called “public aid checks.)

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Our office is finally opening up, rotating small groups back in, beginning with the most essential.  Based on my value, looks as if I’ve got a vacation until November.

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I don’t get all this fuss about wearing masks. Most folks I meet put on a mask every day to protect me from discovering their darker side.  So now their being encouraged to mask up and protect themselves from my darker, diseased side.  What’s the big deal?

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Campaigning politicians have gotten so desperate during this lockdown that they have stopped begging for your money and are actually phoning to explain why they’d like your vote.

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Covid-19 lockdown has been particularly tough on the young.  Many teens have become so bored they are reduced to texting their own parents across the dinner table – and not asking for money.

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 If you doubt that this virus has perched every sector of America on the edge of financial ruin – wait a minute.  There’s bound to be a telebeggar calling in who will happily explain it to you.

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I learned that the Rockettes are giving free aerobic classes online.  So I grabbed a cold beer, tuned in, and I must say it really works – my heart hasn’t raced this fast in years.

***

 I truly admire everyone efforts to fill us with good cheer during these times, and I’m sure I could pull myself out of the dumps if only my investments would turn around and lead the way.  (When the liquor business booms – beware your portfolio, my friend.)

***

Now that the president’s name is printed on the stimulus checks, they may be issued in hopes that, like a small child swallowing a dime, they may quickly pass through, providing no effect on the child, and go on to stimulate the corporations so desperately in need.  (Notice: they were not called “public aid checks.)

***

The surest way to avoid the truth is to seek it in a survey.  Do you a) strongly agree. b) strongly disagree c) don’t give a damn.

***

This morning I knocked on the back door of a store and a man wearing a mask sold me one large pack of toilet paper. I felt half way between the 1950’s Soviet communist shopper and a Prohibition era alcoholic trying to enter a speakeasy.

 

This virus is harsh – I’ve finally learned to handle the social distancing, but it’s the fiscal distancing – watching my money drift ever further away, that’s crushing me.

***

One thing I’ve learned from this virus is gratitude for everything from friendship to toilet paper.  Before it, I was like the farmer so busy praying for rain that I forgot to hold out my cup in a thunderstorm.

 ***

Social Media is a mask that allows you to scream to an audience of thousands tales that would make you blush crimson if told to one friend in a bar room.

Time to Rethatch Our Teahouse

Twenty some years ago my wife Lorraine awoke and assured me that I was craving to build an authentic Japanese Teahouse in our back meadow.  So I did – and the original thatch has lasted a quarter century.  These pictures show the new bundles of thatch I scythed down, hauled up, and tied down onto the roof, with a lot of help from my buddy – Thanks Marvin.  Everyone should have a retreat, be it for solitude and/or contemplation with a few close friends.

 

The Harmonies of our World – From Costa Rica’s Bellbird To Joshua Bell

‘Twas a dizzyingly moveable feast of music.   Within barely more than one brief rotation of our terrestrial orb I have had my soul opened to the finest music that we humans and the Divine have to offer.

The morning sun’s lifting over the Osa Peninsula in southern Costa Rica once again orchestrates a fugal flood of God’s most elegant song birds.  Our guide Abraham slings his scope and tripod over shoulder, leading Lorraine and me down slender trails through the leafy jungle.  Somewhere, amidst this dense ramage, bellbirds cello, pink-legged woodrails trill, tanagers staccato, and the clay-colored thrush lets loose the sweet stab of a call that has won him the honor of Costa Rica’s National bird.  Thousands join the chorus – even sun-dappled pairs of macaws lend their raucous cries to this symphonic surge of life.

Compared to Abraham, Lorraine and I cannot find a lion in our living room, but with his tutelage and our binoculars we try to poke our eyes where bodies could not possibly penetrate – to spy the sources of this symphony in the bush.  With each bird sighted comes an almost disenchanting ease at their songs.  Such magnificent rhapsodies so effortlessly, so spontaneously brought forth – and yet enchanting beyond telling.

Then, suddenly – thanks to the near-magical mechanics of today’s travel, and scores unseen assisting hands –  here Lorraine and I sit: a mere tanager’s swoop from virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell and the Academy of St. Martins in the Fields Orchestra performing Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1.  (After landing at Newark airport, a friend raced us home with enough time to pick up our tickets and arrive back at Newark’s NJ Performing Arts Center for the 8 p.m. curtain.) Poised concentration etched Bell’s face and passion poured through his agile fingers and on into the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius which delivered his mastery.  That same awe of the Avian’s morning’s symphony returned.  Again, we paused, still, amazed that such beauty was ours for the hearing…reveling in the sounds and letting our souls crescendo and descend with the moment of the music.

But with this second concerto an additional emotion kept creeping in: admiration.  Joshua Bell had labored admirably, astoundingly, to achieve this pinnacle of performance.  The untold thousands of hours of practice, the hundreds of thousands of hours of his fellow musicians in the orchestra, had prepared them for this soul-enriching experience we were sharing.  And even during the performance, each measure of music hung precariously on that instant’s expertise.

The entire house rose to its feet and applauded the artists – none more enthusiastically than Lorraine and I.  To compare the morning’s vs. the evening’s symphony would be ludicrous.  Both transformed and uplifted me.  Both were divinely inspired.  Yet walking out of NJPAC into the evening air, the truth of this beauty became clear: whatever the source we are better for seeking it; we should accept it with gratitude; and while beauty’s creation comes with easy spontaneity for some and only with sweat for others, it always God’s best within us.

             – Bart Jackson

Bid Our Sad Divisions Cease: A 2020 Recipe- Happy New Year

So this knee-jerk, flaming liberal walks into a biker bar and turns to the guy wearing the “Trump for 2020” leather jacket and says…..

December 28; on Del/MD’s the eastern shore flatlands.  It looked like a homey tavern, with just enough mild dilapidation on its clapboard front to seem inviting.  So my wife Lorraine and I parked our hybrid beside a long row of shining Harleys and entered in search of some good, home made chow.  The busy waitress at the bar frantically served under fluttering dome of dollar bills – each individually clipped to some carefully strung web overhead.  The fabulous home cooked food was richly appreciated by us and by the leather-clad bikers heartily hunkered down on all the bar stools and around most of the small tables.

At meal’s end and Lorraine headed for the restroom, I began chatting with a few of the bikers.  Most of the men, like the majority of club riders I’ve recently encountered sported white or graying hair and jackets with an array of intriguing emblems.  Turning to the “Trump for 2020” biker, I thought of Dr. Dale Caldwell, a guest on our The Art of the CEO radio show and author of Intelligent Influence.  Dale insists that we all formulate our aims and opinions based on that array of influences which surround us from birth, and until you gain some understandings of a person’s influences, you will never be able to work with him.

“So where’d ya ride from today,” I asked the biker as he sipped his beer.  Eric told me of his home down on eastern shore Virginia.  We chatted briefly.  He fixed engines for bikes and cars.  I told him fix words for books.   We shared a few nods of commiseration on the hassle of working for someone else – and the almost-as-bad hassle of working for yourself.  Before leaving, I asked if he thought President Trump was giving him a good deal.  Warily, he answered in the affirmative – giving a couple of reasons.  Then he asked what I thought.  In a sentence I replied.  I bid him a good new year and hoped that he didn’t run into anything large on his bike.  “Back atcha,” he smiled.  Neither of us did, or could have, converted the other, but a few seeds of understanding from that other side got planted.  Gotta start somewhere.

Oh, and the dollar bills?  Back in the day when most of these bikers sported their original hair color, the R&R Grill & Bar had developed a justified reputation as a rowdy biker & hard-bitten local bar. Finally, the new owner, I was told, decided to keep folks in line by announcing, “The first time I hear you use the ‘F-word’ or the ‘N-word’ you are going to have to hand over a dollar and I’ll pin it above.  The second time I hear you employing those words, you will be invited to leave.”  The idea stuck; tolerance came to R&R; and now folks have gotten into the habit of signing and posting dollar bills in support of keeping this watering hole on friendly terms.

As wished for in the haunting verse of O Come O Come Emmanuel:

O come desire of nations bind

In one the hearts of humankind

Bid thou our sad divisions cease

And let us join the Prince of Peace.

May we sample a bite of hopeful idealism this coming year,

– Bart Jackson

 

2018 Governor’s Cup Garden State Wine Awards

Friday, November 16 Bart and Lorraine joined the guests as Governor Phil Murphy and his wife Tammy as they opened the doors of their Drumthwacket residence to celebrate Governor’s Cup Garden State Wine Awards.  ‘Twas a glorious opportunity to celebrate & sample New Jersey’s exploding, world class wine industry, and for Bart & Lo to meet so many old friends they made in authoring The Garden State Wineries Guide.

Bart & Garry Pavlis  NJ’s Prime Wine Judge and Guru toast the state’s winery explosion – now up to 50. Gary, who penned the forward for The Garden State Wineries Guide, runs tours statewide.  

Bart congratulates Louis Caracciolo, wizard vintner of world class Amalthea Cellars for winning the Best Red and Best Wine Overall in 2018

NJ Secretary of Agriculture Doug Fisher (left) and Bart prepare a bottle swap of their own homegrown wines.

Bart & Lorraine enjoy Drumthwacket’s gubernatorial hospitality, and celebrate The Governor’s Cup Awards with many wine-making friends.