August and Everything After

Nothing makes me feel as grounded at the close of summer as the melancholy music of the Counting Crows. The fact that their first studio album opens with the following lyric:

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog,

Where no one notices the contrast of white on white.

Inbetween the moon and you,

Angles get a better view of the crumbling difference between wrong and right.

to me, has always felt like a bold proclamation of the importance of the gray areas that make up so much of life.

We have the tendency to look back on our pasts and imbue what we see with the lush technicolor of spring. Our recent highs and outrages are both tinged red by the summer sun and the lows frost over with crystalline blue. The future is lit by the bonfire of autumn, as it reminds us of possibility and the inevitability of aging. But now, right now, is usually gray.

Adam Duritz’s voice always does a good job of reminding me that roses are red and violets are blue, but poetry can be made out of the gray times, too. We don’t need to wait for something incredible to happen to our friends before we celebrate them. We don’t need to achieve ‘x’ amount of ‘y’ before we learn to enjoy our own company. Forgiveness can be quiet and private. We can look at the relative mundanity of our immediate surroundings and stop writing it off as unworthy of display in the tapestry of our lives.

Often, when I’m putting too much pressure on myself (and, believe me, it’s often), I think of what a life’s tapestry would look like if it was all warm-hued and fast-paced and non-stop excitement and punctuated only by blips of blue: a life on the extremes. It’d be striking, but I imagine it would be thin. The thread would shimmer and enchant, but it wouldn’t keep me warm, I couldn’t wrap it around my family and feel confident that they’d be protected from the elements. No, my life’s work is to be woven of thick wool that is equal parts playfulness and penance, just as my ancestors wore before me. If it’s not punishing you at least a little bit, can you even claim it’s Irish? Seriously, wear a cable knit sweater all day and get back to me. Wear it for long enough, and you’ll see the wool age and start to gray. It still fulfills its purpose, though.

I read that August and Everything After was given its name because Adam Duritz was born on August first and the album is about “everything that happened after [that].” Its music is simultaneously upbeat and haunting and so much of it is about feeling out of place in the world one inhabits, there’s so much longing and little to no triumph, but it holds a heartbeat of connection throughout. We’ve all taken the long way home to Sullivan Street and been caught in the rain in Baltimore, even if we’re hundreds of thousands of miles away longing for a rebirth of simplicity in a place we don’t know or understand, like the life we’ve imagined for ourselves in Omaha. Wherever and whenever we are in our lives, though, there’s the potential for art and expression and connecting with every other soul who recognizes living in the gray. Maybe that’s why I can’t help but sing along to Mr. Jones no matter where I am or how I feel.

Yeah, well, you know gray is my favorite color.

I felt so symbolic yesterday.

If I knew Picasso,

I would buy myself a gray guitar and play.