Free Bird, Part Two

So like I said.  These are weird times, and I've been sitting and thinking about that Big Thing I Did going on three weeks ago.  It feels like yesterday, and it also feels like another life.  Even though statistically, the drive to the airport is more dangerous than the flight (maybe that's only true for commercial flights, but it's an adage I always told my Friends Who Worry, which, in hindsight, probably wasn't the right thing to say).

But back to Free Bird, and all the Thoughts.  I've just felt as though it could be any of our time, at any time.  You just never know.  One day you're cheating Death by flying a plane or driving too fast or riding a motorbike or mouthing off to the wrong person at the bar, and the next day you're taken out by a virus that's sweeping through the population.

Or complications from a tick-bite.  I hate ticks.  Gross.

But all this existential dread swirling around in the cosmic cocktail around us has had the opening line from "Free Bird" on a continuous loop lately.  And please don't think I'm fixin' to do anything imprudently permanent like slip out the back door and never be heard from again.  It's just in times like these, I don't think it's out of line to wonder:

If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me?

It's a fair enough question.  Humans have had a drive to be immortal since before Beowulf.  We want to be remembered.  Some of us do become immortal, legend, remembered for thousands of years.  The rest of us become memories only in the ether, and in the blood and bones of generations of our successors.

The more concerning thing to me is, if I leave here tomorrow, how will you remember me?

The day my whole life flashed before my eyes in the plane, I saw my highs and my lows both.  I saw myself as hero and villain.  In my own narrative, of course I play the hero, but I have enough of a jaundiced eye to know that I can and do feature as the Big Bad in the personal narratives of others.  I wish I could say in the ten years since that day, I've thrown the balance more in favor of being on the good side rather than the big bad, but sometimes you can be a villain and not even know.  Or you can do the wrong things for the right reasons.  And when I read Harry Potter, I of course identified first and strongest with Hermione, but Snape was a close second.  A White Hat looking like a Black Hat because he had a job to do. 

There was a meme going around Facebook a few days back that sort of asked this question- If I leave here tomorrow, how will you remember me? but it was worded a little differently: "You're sitting in a bar.  All of a sudden a song comes on and you think of me.  What song is playing?"  It's a reaching out while we're all still here, isn't it? 

I don't know how you'd remember me if I left here tomorrow.  It's probably none of my business.  I hope I leave a mark.  I hope you remember that my heart was in the right place, that I tried to make sure that if you were down when you met me, you walked away with maybe a smile on your face.  I hope you remember that I always tried to be a better person, whether I failed or succeeded.  I always tried.

Anyway, relax.  I'm not planning on leaving here tomorrow.  I feel uncertain, but not morbid.  I am not staring longingly into the Void.  It does not beckon me.  My face is looking up at the sky with wonder, and my feet are tethered to the ground.  I always come back down to earth. 

These are strange times we're living in.  None of us has seen anything like what we're all living through.  We're living through it, though.  Some day, hopefully soon, these weird times will be just a story we tell and a lesson we learned. I do feel like there's this great shifting of the ground beneath all our feet, and in times when there are great shifts, maybe it doesn't hurt to tell the people who are important to you what they mean to you. 

All of us Free Birds are part of a larger flock. And that, you'll never change!