March 26, 2001
CYBERCOLUMN:
Chicago, God's grace and the fragility of life
___By Berry D. Simpson
___Blessings--and good memories--often come in surprising ways.
___The other night my brother, Carroll, called me on the telephone and told me to turn the TV to VH-1.
___"Which channel is VH-1?" I asked, being the unhip old guy that I am. While he was laughing at my cultural ineptness, my teenaged daughter came to the rescue by calling out, "Channel 40."
BERRY D. SIMPSON
___ I turned the TV on to channel 40, where I found a VH-1 "Behind the Music" special about the rock band Chicago. Carroll said, "My gift to you," and he hung up his phone.
___ I couldn't believe it. I dragged our rocking chair in front of the TV and camped out for the next hour. Cyndi smiled at me. because she knew I was in nostalgia-land. Even Katie noticed the change. "Wow!" she said. "Dad put down his book just to watch TV."
___ Chicago was my band when I was in high school and college. I bought every single album they made (well, at least the first 14), and I still have them all (even though I don't have a turntable that will play them.) I bought books called "Sketch Scores," which had all of Chicago's songs including their horn lines.
___I remember lying on my bed with a Chicago album playing and studying the horn melodies. I was enchanted. How could they get so much energy out of simple, syncopated, unison parts?
___I still can remember the very first time I heard a song by Chicago. I was pulling weeds in my parent's back yard on Thorpe Street in Hobbs, N.M., and listening to the radio--probably KCRS back when they played pop music. It was the summer of 1971, our family had just moved to Hobbs from Kermit, and I was between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. I was ready for a new identity and a new life. I was ready to discard my old ways and embrace the 1970s in a new town as a new guy.
___ One of the changes I had considered was dropping out of high school band. I played trombone at Kermit for four years before we moved to Hobbs, but I was never very good. I stayed in band only because all my friends were in band. But here, in this new town, I had a chance to start over with new friends, so band had no hold on me. All the cool guys I knew played guitars or drums. They could play rock and roll; I played the trombone.
___ That afternoon I heard a song by Chicago titled "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" The DJ allowed the song to play all the way through that day instead of talking over the ending as they so often do, and when I heard the short trombone solo at the end of the song--well, my life changed.
___ What I mean to say is, my life changed direction. I sat there on my weed-pulling stool and listened to that amazing trombone solo, and I momentarily stopped breathing. I could feel the molecules of my life literally rearranging themselves, morphing me into a musician--right there in the back yard. I'd just heard the coolest musical lick of my life, and I was hooked.
___ Before that week was over, I went to Gibson's Discount Center and bought the Chicago Transit Authority album. I listened to that trombone solo again and again.
___ Thirty years later, I am still playing the trombone. My son and my daughter play too. In fact, over the Christmas holidays, we played together in a trombone quartet in our church. Cyndi isn't a trombonist, but she is a wonderful percussionist, and music is one of our tightest family ties.
___ What made me think about all of this was (actually I thought of it because my kid brother was insightful enough to tell me about the program on VH-1, but what made me want to sit and write about it was) the realization that there are so many important aspects of my life that had very fragile beginnings.
___ So many of the things that define me as an individual started subtly. My hobbies, the fact I fell in love with Cyndi, how I ended up living in Midland, how I got into politics, even how I found Jesus ... it seems the factors that made the biggest differences were very subtle and quiet at the time they happened.
___ I wouldn't have thought it would turn out that way. I expected a planned life with well-considered goals. I didn't expect life to be so improvisational.
___ It would be a scary thought, this fragility, and all this winging it, if I didn't believe in the grace of God--in a sovereign God, in control, who loves me.
___ Oswald Chambers wrote: "One of the most difficult questions to answer in Christian work is, 'What do you expect to do?' You don't know what you are going to do. The only thing you know is that God knows what he is doing."
___ Amen. I'm glad the best blessings of my life--Cyndi and music, to name only two--came from God, and not my well-made plans.
"Come Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace. "
___ Berry Simpson, a Sunday School teacher at First Baptist Church in Midland, is a petroleum engineer, writer, runner and mayor pro-tem of the city of Midland.
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