A universal, unchanging mantra: Things change, if we live long enough to see it
A simplistic statement came tumbling into my head the other day as I sipped my first cup of coffee: "Things Change." Did this lie dormant all night only to be activated by caffeine, and had it resided in my subconsciousness for years?
Yet, what often appears to be disarmingly simple, can be surprisingly profound.
As more and more years lie behind me, my once fully-charged ego gets splintered, hardly resembling an ego at all. Garrison Keillor: "There is not much superiority in aging, just good luck." And I've been lucky.
Case in point: In 1956, only one year after the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City giving the town Major League Baseball, my brother took to me to my first game at Municipal Stadium. I walked close by him, startled by the sounds of score card hawkers yelling and the smell of cigar smoke mingling with hot dogs sizzling on flattop grills. A world so unlike my small town that I might have been on Jupiter. Then the long climb up ramps into the upper deck, eventually looking onto a magnificent vista. I exclaimed, "It's green. The grass is green." Our black and white Motorola at home showed baseball fields a dull gray. "It's green," I said again. My brother patted my shoulder. Some things in my life have changed, but not the memory of that astounding green.
A few years ago, for some reason I drove down Kansas City's Brooklyn Avenue where Municipal Stadium once stood — knowing it had been demolished long ago — wondering what was there. A lot of nothing. What was I expecting? The A's moved to Oakland in 1967, leaving KC without Major League Baseball in 1968. A year later the Royals came into existence, playing in Municipal Stadium, which I attended for the last time. Now a place called Kaufman Stadium exists for KC baseball. Still wondering if I should go there. The change might do me good. Or not.
My son and I made a KC pilgrimage to jazz legend Charlie Parker's grave at Lincoln Cemetery. Parker left KC as a young man and established his musical legacy in NYC. On his humble gravestone is etched a tenor saxophone — a seemingly inconsequential detail — but to the jazz world and its aficionados, a near-tragic mistake. With his alto sax he, Dizzy Gillespie and others like Bud Powell changed the course of jazz forever, today a lasting influence. Music was changed. I've been to his grave twice, and each time people from around the world left lots of mementos. And that erroneous tenor carved on the stone remains unchanged. Granted, some things should be left unchanged. But not that damned tenor.
The above reminds me that the curmudgeon in me rears its ever-present head all too often. And about that I'm not always proud. Sometimes I want change, sometimes not. But I must come to terms with change. Photos from the James Webb Space Telescope astound me, gazing back billions of light years at the more-than-ancient galaxies, their constantly changing configurations. My house plants even change, as I observe them with delight.
Perhaps I'll trek to Kaufman Stadium and see what I see, the changes from the old Municipal Stadium on Brooklyn Avenue. And maybe I'll return to Charlie Parker's grave and be delighted to see a freshly carved alto sax there, correcting someone's mistake, an eyesore to jazz history.
Then again, perhaps I won't. Maybe all the while I'll continue waking each morning reciting what has always been a universal and unchanging mantra: Things Change.
Michael Pulley lives in Springfield. He can be reached by email at mpulley634@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Things change, if we're lucky to live long enough to see it
