Suddenly Christian

As I write this, it’s 3:30 in the morning. I went to bed at midnight, and am now up in order to drive my father to the San Diego airport, from which he’ll fly to Atlanta, and then on to his home in North Carolina.

For the last three days he’s been staying at a hotel near my home. The room he’s in has afforded him a commanding view of downtown Encinitas and the pristine ocean just beyond it. It’s also afforded him a keen opportunity to be so aware of the trains that come barreling and howling just below his hotel that I’m pretty sure he thinks I got him that room just to make sure he really has recovered from his various heart attacks.

“Holy cow!” I  yelled the first time one of the trains came thundering by. “I forgot about the train tracks!”

“What?” he said. “I can’t hear you!” He looked at his wristwatch. “That’s the 12:00 express to Los Angeles! It’s running a little late!”

My dad thinks he’s real funny. He’s wrong about that – but it’s nice he thinks it.

As some of you may know (via this piece), I was last night supposed to go with my dad to the San Diego Book Awards, to see if my book “I’m OK-You’re Not” won their “Spirituality” category. We ended up not going to the ceremony, though, because my dad just wasn’t up to it. What he was up to, however, was sitting around with me in his hotel room for twelve hours smoking cigars, sipping bourbon, and listening to the Frank Sinatra I’d brought over to play on my portable CD player.

I had a really, really nice day with him yesterday.

I don’t think I won anything at the SD Book Awards; if I had, I think one of the people I know who did go to the awards would have already emailed congratulate me. No message probably equals no cool little SDBA trophy-thing for me.

I think right about the time they were announcing the winner of the Best Spirituality book, my dad and I were cracking up at the various things we were imagining must have been going through the head of the pretty hotel maid who earlier in the day had cleaned the room while he and I stood around and made exceptionally lame small talk at her.

“We’ve probably prompted her to rethink her life,” said my dad. “Thanks to us, she’ll probably go to college now.”

“Thanks to us, she’ll probably go to the police,” I said.

He laughed. And I laughed. And Frank Sinatra sang to us about what life was like, when he was seventeen.

Yesterday, at Jamul Intermediate School, in Jamul, California, I spoke to fourth and fifth graders about writing.

If you are one of those kids: Hi, kid! Thanks for having me out at your school yesterday! Not that you had a choice! Still, you were very polite, and laughed at all my jokes, and asked intelligent, fun questions, and in general helped me to have an all-around fabulous time.

DON’T FORGET THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING!

Here’s the gist of that again:

Power and respect. That’s what writing well can get you — and nothing can get you more power, and more respect, from more people, than knowing how to write. That’s why you’ve been learning about writing from the moment you started school: It’s that important. If you don’t know how to write well, it will be way too easy for people to think you’re stupid. Not knowing how to write well doesn’t make you stupid, but people can’t help but think that it does. If someone sees something you wrote that’s sloppy, difficult to read, and filled with mistakes, they will  think you’re stupid. At the very least, they’ll think you’re uneducated. And in your life, you do not  want people thinking you’re stupid or uneducated. Because then they might not respect you as much as you want them to.

It’s hard  to get people’s respect; that’s one of the main reasons respect is so valued. You really have to earn respect. When you write well, you show people that you’ve already done the work it takes to earn their respect. And they’ll willingly give you their respect, too, because what your good writing proves to them is that you have a good mind.

If people can’t respect your mind, they can’t respect you at all. The only way people know you at all  is through what they know of your mind. Even if you want to be a famous athlete, it’s not what you can do with your body that people will respect: it’s what, through the power of your mind, you made your body do that people will respect. The quality of a person always comes down to the quality of their mind. You want people to know you’ve got a good mind, a mind that’s done things, a mind you’re proud of, a mind they should respect. The best  way to communicate that is through writing.

There are only two ways to let people know what you think: talking, and writing. You’ve learned how to talk. Now you must learn how to write.  

If you write well, you can have any future you want. You can go to any college you want. You can have any job you want. You can live anywhere you want. If you don’t know how to write — if every time you write something it comes out looking like something that someone who is stupid or uneducated wrote — then, as soon as you’re out of high school, you’re going to end up doing what people who can’t write well always get stuck doing, which is having to take a terrible job working terrible hours for terrible pay with a terrible boss.

You don’t want that. A rotten job is an awful thing. But that’s what you will  be stuck with if you don’t give people a very clear reason to know you deserve better.

Being able to write — a good school essay, a good college paper, a good email, a good letter — gives you power in your life. And you want all the power in your own life you can possibly get, so that you have all the choices in your own life that you could possibly want.

A person is as free in life as they have choices in life. That’s why prison is so bad: Prisoners have less choices in their lives than anyone else in the world. That’s what makes prison so punishing: No choices.

You want choices! You want freedom! You want respect! You want power!

Knowing how to write well is the only thing you can do that guarantees that throughout your life you can have as much of those three things as you could possibly want.

(If you know of a kid whom you think could benefit from the above Big Advice, please forward the url of this blog post to them and/or their parents. Thanks.)

Hey, if you’ve come to help with my MS Word 7 formatting question, I figured it out! And I did so within a half hour of putting up my “Please help me!” post last night. So then I removed that post. But THEN, apparently, that post went out to my RSS/Feedburner subscribers anyway. And so I’ve learned that some good folks have been showing up here, wanting to help me out – but then, alas, not finding the original post that I’d deleted.

Sigh. Blog clog. Sorry!

So right now I’m getting ready to go out to an elementary school, where I’m gonna speak to fourth graders and then fifth graders about writing. So I’ve been trying to think of what to say. So far I’ve come up with, “Writing is good,” and “Writing is a good way to make a living.” After that I get a little fuzzy. Wish me luck. And them.

Every blog post I write appears in three places at more or less the same time: here on my WordPress blog, and on my Christianity.com and Crosswalk.com blogs. Together the three bring me some 40,000 “views” per month. I have no idea how many people that number represents, but I’m guessing I couldn’t fit them into my living room at once.

I’ve been blogging for one year now. It’s become one of my two primary creative outlets: I blog, and I write books. Both are dear to me.

Lately I’ve been doing neither. I’m between books — the editing of one done; the exact structure of the next still in the works — and my last blog post was on May 6, four days ago. Four days isn’t much time in real life, but in Blog Time it’s about four months. My view numbers have plummeted like a toddler on a tight-rope. Posting to a blog is like drinking water: If you don’t do it all the time, you pretty quickly expire.

I like to post a new piece at least every other day, because I know people are showing up to my blog, and I hate the thought of not giving them something for their trouble and precious time. It kills me that people come to my blog. I feel it as an honor. So I want to do my best by the people who show up here; I want to show them, via the quality of what I give them, the same respect they show me by coming here in the first place.

Lately, though, I’ve been having one of the most exceptional writing experiences of my life. I’m writing a three-act play. I figure it’s at most ten hours’ work away from being finished. I expect to have it done by the time my father arrives here this Thursday. (I wrote about my pop’s upcoming visit on my last post, My Dad, My Book, and the 2008 San Diego Book Awards.)

I won’t bore you with why, exactly, I’ve found writing my first play such an … enveloping experience (especially since I know I’ll never fully understand it myself) — but it has meant that lately, whenever I sit down to write a blog post, I instead open the play and work on it. Which is so bizarre I can barely think of it without making funny Martian noises. I never don’t blog. At this point, I don’t even know how not to. I think in blog segments. I’ve felt destined for a daily column since I first learned there were such things. Blogging for me is like swimming for a fish.

Except that lately I’ve been being Joe Playwright.

I’m afraid all I’m saying is that I may not post anything new here until my play’s finished. That might be tomorrow. That might be in two weeks. I have no idea. But somewhere in there, for sure.

You’ll wait for me, yes?

My book, “I’m OK–You’re Not: The Message We’re Sending Nonbelievers, and Why We Should Stop.”, is one of three finalists for a 2008 San Diego Book Award, in the category of Spirituality. (My book “Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang” won that award in 2006.)

If, on the evening of Saturday, May 17, I attend the SDBA awards ceremony/ schmooze-fest, my 80-year-old father will be with me. To me, this is like saying I’ll be accompanied by Popeye, or that on that night I’ll sprout wings and fly to the affair. It’s that unimaginable. As it happens, my father will be visting me that weekend. My father hasn’t stayed overnight in any town I’ve lived in since I moved out of our family home when I was 16 years old, which was 34 years ago. From then until I was 45, I don’t think I saw him five times. I grew from a teenager to a middle-aged man without him.

I became a Christian when I was thirty-eight. Then I wanted to be closer to him: Honor your father, and all like that. So I started writing to him. One day he wrote me back. Then I called him. Then I called him again. Then he invited my wife and me to come to his home for a week and visit with him and his wife, my stepmother. So we did. The following year, he invited us out again, and of course we went again. A lovely time, both times, was had by all.

In February of this year, my dad’s wife of 40 years, my stepmother from way back when, succumbed to cancer, and passed away. (I wrote a little about that here.) Since that sadness, my father and I have grown considerably closer; I would say we have become good friends. My wife and I would like him to come live with or near us. It’s for the purpose of exploring that possibility that he’s coming out to stay with us the weekend of the San Diego Book Awards.

My dad — who is straight from the 1950’s school of Responsible Living — thinks it’s Beyond Bizzare that I’m a writer. To him it’s like I make a living making balloon animals, or … I don’t know … stacking rocks. (Wait. Writing is a lot like those two things….) He doesn’t understand how I can possibly make a living doing something so nebulous and … weird, basically.

And, of course, all I ever wanted my whole life was for the guy to take me seriously. Same as all sons want from their fathers.

I don’t know if my father’s going to be in the mood to go the San Diego Book Awards. I don’t know if I will be. But we’ll probably go. And if we do go, and I do win, I could see, once I’m back in my seat with him, having to take more time than I really should to stop smiling.

The Blind Boys of Alabama. Jimmy Carter’s on the far left. The guy who looks like he’s yawning, Bishop Billy Bowers, has a voice of such arresting intimacy it stops their shows.

My wife Cat and I recently went to see The Blind Boys of Alabama. The group’s lead singer, Jimmy Carter, has a voice like a mint julep infused with the rawest moonshine. (Yes, it is that Jimmy Carter: in between hammering away for Habitat for Humanity and solving the Middle East crisis, our former president is an old blind black man who fronts a gospel singing group. How he pulls this off is a mystery known only to God and Jimmy’s make-up artist.)

Being in the show’s audience was at times a tad uncomfortable, insofar as it was clear just about no one present came into the show knowing that The Blind Boys are a gospel group. Most thought they were going to see hardcore rural blues—acoustic, field holler, juke-joint type stuff. And in a real sense they did get that. But mostly what they got—what in fact they got with every single song — was pure, unabashed gospel.

Oh, no! Young, organically-inclined, ganja-friendly white people adorned with hemp-cloth shoulder bags and wearing sandals, macrame-berets, and yoga pants having Christian songs sung at them!

Not good. Not what they showed up for. Expecting low-down funky blues; getting hands-up joy in the pews.

When the word “Jesus” first came roaring from Jimmy’s reedy, bourbon-cured vocal chords, I could feel people around us sort of freeze in mid-groove. Did he just say, “Jesus”? It was like a record had skipped; for a split second it threw everyone off the rhythm of their happy rasta-hop. Makes sense. If I went to see a gospel group, and they started singin’ about pimpin’ and robbin’ jewelry stores, I, too, would feel a stammer in my step.

But everybody got right back into it. They’d probably misheard the word “Jesus,”, or it didn’t really have much if anything to do with the song. No worries.

Then Jimmy very distinctly sang the word “Jesus” again.

People quit committing so much to the physical expressions of their pleasure, and started listening more, particularly to the lyrics. What the heck was going on? Was this some kind of … Christian show?!

Four songs into the set, the hemp crowd was looking downright disgruntled — whereas the previously clandestine Christians in the crowd were now waving their hands in the air like they were at an old-time travelin’ tent revival. In no time, they had unexpectedly gone from being the old and square ones, to being the hip  ones!

Seven songs into it, nobody cared who was old, or who was hip, or who was Christian, or who wasn’t: All any of us knew was that we were listening to music as rip-roaringly, foot-stompingly, soul-rattlingly fine as music gets. No one resisted the gospel that night. I believe some folks were converted that night.

After the show, Cat and I were invited backstage to meet the BBA. “Now remember,” their manager warned us, “you can’t just stand around and smile. You gotta go right up to ‘em, touch ‘em. They’re blind.”

“Cool,” I said. “Finally, it’s proper  for me to touch people I don’t know.” Cat, sensing I’d probably say something just like that, was already headed back stage.

“Wait up!” I said, waving goodbye to the manager. I totally saw her pick up her pace. “Don’t touch anyone without me!” I hollered. She practically started jogging.

Like most backstage areas, this one was pretty dismal: couple of couches, a mini-fridge, a table holding a little spread of cold cuts, chips, veggies, dip. Nothing you wouldn’t find at a frat party.

I espied Jimmy Carter sitting alone on one side of one of the couches, his folded hands in his lap. He was still wearing the highly stylin’ seersucker suit he’d performed in. I sat down beside him.

“Can you tell I’m here?” I said.

“Not only that,” he said, “I can tell you need to go on a diet. Unless you’re about seven-foot eight, you obvious lardass.”

No, he didn’t say that. He screamed for his manager.

“He told me to touch you,” I said. “Should I do that now, or wait for him?”

But I jest. In reality I put my hand on Mr. Carter’s arm and thanked him for bringing us all a little closer to God that night.

Basically, I went around the room to each one of the guys, and thanked them, and chatted with them a little about the quality of what they do. Cat did the same.

Worked for them. Definitely worked for us.

Related-type posts: My Name Is Not Pato Banton (about the night I went to see reggae star Pato Banton at the same club where we saw Blind Boys) and My Private, Difficult Conversation with Chrissie Hynde.

(Oh, and don’t bother hitting the WordPress-generated “possibly related post” below. All it leads to is three lines saying the Blind Boys are coming to the blogger’s town.)

Okay, they’re not so tough. But on her blog Through My Eyes, Ingrid Moore Curry — Ohioan, music fanatic, snooty people hater, Ving Rhames rebounder, proud member of The Secret Council Of American Negroes — did  ask me a few questions in the course of interviewing me as her Writer of the Month for May.

It is a mystery to me how, in the course of our short e-chat, I went from talking about the difficult relationship between The Great Commission and The Great Commandment to talking getting hunted down by torch-wielding villagers and beaten to death with sticks. Shows Ingrid’s genius as an interviewer, I think.

To anyone else who would like to interview me as their  Writer/Genius of the Month (or of the year, or whatever), I’d like to say do it!  Right now!

Thank you. Thangyaverymuch.

Adam: I sure wish we hadn’t eaten that apple. That was dumb.

Eve: Really? Ya’ think?

Adam: Where are we?

Eve: I dunno. I know where we’re NOT.

[both together, dreamily]: Paradise.

Adam: Paradise! I miss it! I want back there so bad!

Eve: Me, too. Maybe if we begged him to let us back in.

Adam: I don’t know, man. Even though I’m new at … well, being alive, I guess, I HATE begging. Something about it.

Eve: Really? I’ve seen you beg. You’re quite good at it.

Adam [blushing]: Well, that was different.

Eve: Sure was for me.

Adam: Let’s do it again.

Eve: Will you stop? We’ve got real problems here.

Adam: I know. But what can we do?

Eve: Well, maybe if we just asked him to let us back in.

Adam: I don’t think it would work. That was one angry control freak.

Eve: Don’t say that! You know he’s still watching us.

Adam: I don’t care. What’s he going to do to us? Banish us some MORE?

Eve: He still loves us.

Adam: Maybe.

Eve: I think maybe if we just asked him …

Adam: I don’t. He was seriously ticked.

Eve: He really was. I was, like, ”Have a COW about it, why don’t ya’?”

Adam: I know. I LOVED it when you said that!

Eve: He didn’t.

Adam: He has no sense of humor.

Eve: No kidding. Look at this place. What IS this stuff?

Adam: Who knows? We can call it anything. It’s not like HE’S already got a name for it. I had to name everything! I can’t believe I spent all that time coming up with names like ”aardvark,” and ”koala.” And now all those guys are in there, and we’re stuck out HERE.

Eve: That koala is so cute.

Adam: He so totally is. Except for his claws are like … like … what’s the big nose part of that one crazy looking bird? The big black one, with the colorful … nose thing?

Eve: Oh, right! The … toucan!

Adam: Yeah, the toucan. The koala had claws as big as the toucan’s nose thing.

Eve: “Toucan.” What a great word. You’re a genius.

Adam: Thanks. You’d think he’d appreciate it just a LITTLE, wouldn’t you?

Eve: I’m sure he does.

Adam: Really? You think this shows a lot of appreciation? I’m glad he’s not MORE appreciative of us. Who knows what he would have done to us then? Put us on the … what’s that thing called again?

Eve: The moon?

Adam: The moon. He would have put us on the MOON.

Eve: Hey, I just had a thought. I think we should call this stuff “sand.”

Adam: Oh, that is good. I love it. That’s just what this stuff is. Sssslips in, goes irritating on you, and then stays. “Saaaannnd.” Perfect. Good job. It is kind of fun naming stuff, isn’t it?

Eve: It is.

Adam: Well, I hope you enjoyed naming this stuff. Because there’s nothing else out here TO name.

Eve: Hey, do you feel guilty?

Adam: You mean that feeling we had right after we ate the apple? When we were hiding from him? You mean do I still feel that way?

Eve: Yeah. Do you?

Adam: I dunno. A little. It’s hard to feel TOO guilty, given what I think it’s safe to call his slight overreaction.

Eve: Well, he DID say we’d die if we ate from that tree. At least he didn’t kill us.

Adam: Don’t be so sure. Maybe we ARE dead. I mean, look at this place! It’s nothing but … that one new word.

Eve: Sand.

Adam: Sand. It’s nothing but sand. That’s ALL we’ve got! So, I don’t know. I did feel a little guilty. A lot, even. But now, really, I’m just angry. This isn’t fair.

Eve: It does seem a tad harsh. But …

Adam: It was that snake! That stupid SNAKE! I’d like to wring that snake’s neck, if it had one.

Eve: That was my fault. I listened to him.

Adam: Of course you did! Who wouldn’t listen to a talking SNAKE!? I’d probably chew off my FOOT if a talking snake told me to. It’s like, “Whoa! Talking animal! All bets are off now!”

Eve: Still. I should have ignored him.

Adam: Hello? Talking snake! Not exactly easy to ignore.

Eve: He was one smooth talker, I’ll give him that.

Adam: Well, you can’t mate with a snake. So stop right there.

Eve: What are you talking about?

Adam: Oh, please. You were obviously taken with him.

Eve: I was not.

Adam: You were too.

Eve: I was NOT.

Adam: Well, you did what he said, didn’t you? There had to be SOMETHING going on there.

Eve: There WASN’T!

Adam: Then why did you do what he said?

Eve [crying]: I don’t know! I don’t know why I did it! It didn’t have anything to do with him, or what he said. I just … I don’t know! I don’t KNOW why I did it! But I did! I did it! I ate from the forbidden tree! I don’t know why! And now we’re ruined!

Adam [putting his arm around her]: I know why you did it. You did it for the exact same reason I would have done it. We were going to eat from that tree no matter what. We didn’t need a tricky snake to encourage us to do it. You can’t tell people that they can do everything but this ONE special thing — and then expect them not to go crazy until they do that one special thing. It’s not … natural.

Eve: We could have ignored it.

Adam: The snake?

Eve: The tree.

Adam: I couldn’t have. I was probably going to eat from it that day anyway. It was driving me crazy. I used to lay awake at night THINKING about that tree. I almost DID eat from it a couple of times. I’m telling you: I was gonna do it.

Eve: You’re so sweet for saying that.

Adam: I’m not being sweet. I’m telling you. I HATE being told what I can and can’t do. As soon as he told us we couldn’t eat from that tree, that’s the tree I wanted to eat from.

Eve: I know. Me too. And now look at us.

Adam: At least we’re still together.

Eve: Yeah. SEPARATING us would have been unbearable.

Adam: We’ll make it through this. We’ll survive.

Eve: I know. As long as I’m with you, I’m still in paradise.

Adam: And we’ll get there again. We messed up, sure. But sooner or later, he’ll forgive us. I know he will. 

Ahh, Monday Morning. The sun is rising, the birds are singing–and I’m bitterly angry at Adam, Mr. Former Mud, who said, “Oh, sure, I’ll take a bite of this exact fruit God commanded  me not to eat. I’m sure that when he said, ‘Never, ever eat the fruit off this tree,’ what God really meant  was, ‘Never, ever eat too much of the fruit off this tree.’ So yeah, I’ll take a bite! Give it here! What could it hurt?”

What could it hurt. Moron!

I wish we were  descended from apes. Even an ape  wouldn’t have been that stupid. You can train an ape. But the first man? Not so much.

And because, lo those many years ago, Adam wouldn’t listen to God, today I have to listen to my alarm clock. When, like hard-hatted rats attacking my spine with a jackhammer, my alarm clock shrilly bleats at me to get out of bed, it’s only a matter of time before I’m basically forced to think about whatever infernal work I’m going to have to do that day.

Work! The very word is a cuss word to me! How utterly I loathe it! I am decidedly anti-labor. If I were British, I would vote for the Labor Party — then ditch the “Labor” part. I support the Labor Unions — minus the labor part. If I were a doctor, and a woman said she was going into labor, I’d run.

Actual Effort and enjoying my life go together like lowfat soy milk and Cocoa Pebbles. Forget it. And it’s not like I haven’t tried to combine work with having an enjoyable life, either. I have. I know that that the key to a happy life is getting paid to do what you love. Well, what I love to do is lie on my couch and watch Seinfeld, The Office, The Simpsons, and old Jerry Lewis movies. But do you think anyone has the decency to pay me for doing that? Well, think again, Uncle Bucko. You wouldn’t believe all the times I’ve screamed at some neighbor passing by outside my house, “Hey! I’m doing what I love! Fork over some money!” But do they ever stop and pony up? No.

Losers.

Thus have I been forced to learn, yet again, that the proverbial ”they” – whoever “they” even are — are evil liars.

That stupid Adam! Why did he have to eat that apple? And we don’t even know if it was an apple. All we know is it was some kind of produce. Produce! My life has been ruined because Adam couldn’t resist gnawing on some produce!

You know, if the Bible said, “And so did God commandeth unto Adam, ‘Do not ye eat of the fruit of this tree, which produceth the corndog,’” I could maybe understand what happened. I’d eat an aardvark snout if it came deep fried on a stick. But I have to get off my couch for produce? 

It’s just too wrong to contemplate.

I get a fair amount of questions/input around the dynamic of writing in conjunction with God. So I thought I’d burble out a little sumpin’ sumpin’ about that particular phenomenon.

First of all, if you’re trying to do any sort of creative work, do you have any choice but  to access and stay with the divine within you? All creativity is born of the Great Power, however you personally understand or conceive of that. Being Christian, I say that in order to do my best creative work I must tap into and let flow through me the Holy Spirit; I assume if I were a Muslim I’d say the same thing about the spirit of Allah, or maybe Mohammad. However you personally understand The Great Being or Divine Power Within, you’d better  connect to it and let it work through you if you hope to write anything more interesting or substantial than whatever you could scrape together with your normal, everyday brain.

Your normal, everyday brain is great for doing taxes, returning videos on time, and remembering why you shouldn’t attack your boss in an elevator with a stapler. It’s generally useless, though, when it comes to creative work. For creative work, you’ve got to get down and give it up for the source of all creativity.

The key to successfully doing that — to truly divesting yourself of what really does amount to all control over your writing — is trust. You have to trust in the quality of whatever God produces through you. The thing that most often causes writers to choke is thinking too much about the end result of their work: they wonder if it will be good enough, smart enough, clever enough, engaging enough. But thinking about all that sort of stuff is like taking a boat out into the water and then shooting a hole through its floor. You’re sunk before any of the fun can even begin.

Writing has to be about the means, not the end. And the key to experiencing creatively rewarding means is not worrying at all. You can’t create if you’re worrying about being creative. You aren’t creative. God is creative. The creative spirit residing within you is creative. You aren’t: You can barely tie your shoes without accidentally snagging your thumb in a tourniquet. So let The Great Creative Power use you to do his/her/its creative thing. All you have to do is ride the train of blessed phenomenon to wherever in the heck it takes you.

The key is to trust that train will  take you somewhere new, good, and exciting. Don’t worry about the results of what you write: that kind of evaluation is for uptight teachers, loser supervisors, pursed-lipped Church Lady types. Worrying about the quality of creative work is the mortal enemy of creative work. So don’t. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t do it to the creative spirit within you. It can’t be anything but a waste of time.

When you want to write, poise yourself with your pen in hand or keyboard beneath your fingers, close your eyes, open your heart and spirit, keep them open, and then wait.

Pretty soon you hear that distant train whistle blow. Then you hear the train coming closer.

Then it’s upon you, and you catch onto its rail — and then go, cat, go.