We need more Nice!
My wife and I watched “Celtic Woman” tonight. Thank goodness for Public Broadcasting! It was such a pleasure to see something “nice” for a change. Since Donald Trump entered our lives it seems like everything is crude and we’re expected to simply accept it.
When I was a young boy and my Irish grandmothers, Gert and Mae, were still alive I remember the beautiful piano music and their voices singing songs that made me feel “truly joyful”, truly happy. When I remember those days, I think they may have been some of the happiest times of my life.
After Gert and Mae, memories were of Irish men, drinking and yelling about one thing or another but always yelling. I don’t know what it is about Irish men but we always seem to talk three or four decibels above everyone else on the planet. After all, no one else on the planet could have something more important to say than we. When I remember my grandmothers speaking it was always soothing. I always felt safe and comfortable within the caress of their melodic, Irish voices.
It wasn’t too long after Gert and Mae both passed that all of that comfort and safety passed also. It was then that all the Irish bullshit started and I had to grow-up. I had to get good grades and figure-out a sport to play and of course toughen-up. Even if I was tough, and I was as tough as my neighborhood required, I could never let anyone think I wasn’t. It’s not that I was a sissy or anything but I did miss the “nice” with which Gert and Mae always filled my life.
I missed the nice things they gave me. I missed their loving me and telling me the world was a nice place. I guess they were good at it because they had to learn to live with the bullshit of Irish men and simply accept that as long as their kids were good people and safe, life was good and that’s the way the Lord expected them to expect it to be.
But Watching Celtic Women tonight and thinking back to when my wife and I visited Ireland with our two sons I don’t think that’s the way the Lord expected it to be, at least not forever. We have grandchildren now and I don’t think it’s the way it should be for them. I tried to make things better for our children. I tried to make sure there were nice things in their lives.
Every spring my wife and I would take our children to Longwood Gardens, just north of Philadelphia, to see a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. The one I remember the most was “The Pirates of Penzance” but we saw most of them at the time. Those evenings driving home from Chester County were some of the happiest times of my life. Others were driving home from New York City after taking our kids to see the Phantom of the Opera or Les Misérables. We listened to them sing along with Christine and Jean Valjean for weeks after getting home. I often thought Gert and Mae were smiling and singing along with their great grand children because they were “nice” times and they alway wanted things to be “nice” for their families.
My wife and I have grandchildren now and we want there to be “nice” things in their lives also. It’s OK to take them to the beach and Disney World but it’s important for them to see the Nutcracker and hear Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy or better yet, sit in front of Claude Monet’s “Sunrise” with a lunch half eaten because they’ve become so captivated with the beauty of Monet’s imagery. Those are truly “nice” things.
They are the things that make us appreciate what it means to be a human being even if we don’t know we’re appreciating it at the time.
Appreciating our humanity is why it’s important to put nice things in the lives of others and I suspect Gert and Mae knew that . There is nothing more important, nothing nicer, than to help human beings appreciate what it means to be human. That is what beautiful music and art do. Even if we don’t understand it while we’re experiencing the beautiful things, that experience makes us understand what it means to be human. What it means to feel.
I watched my favorite musician, Joe Bonamassa, play “Further On Up The Road” with one of his heroes, Eric Clapton, tonight ( https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=0u03h73ClZ8) I could watch it all night every night because nothing makes me understand what it means to be human more than that video. Maybe the two best guitarists of the 20th century playing in such sync and unison. No machine or computer could achieve that. Only the special ability of human beings to feel and vicariously experience what another human being is experiencing could do it. It’s exactly the same when a great basketball player tells you it always “feels” better to make a great pass to a teammate than to score a basket. There’s something in the connection with another human being that makes the feeling of being human nice. I guess that’s what Gert and Mae always knew.
