Whistling
I have mentioned a few times over the past several months facts about my shameful past with the art of whistling. In my 28 years on this green rock I was unable to whistle nary a tune. I’ve fought my lips into endless shapes until I have nearly passed out. All of these efforts had previously yielded a staggering sum of nothing. After some lovely instruction while I was home over the summer I took to practicing. By the time I flew back to England I suspected that many people were getting annoyed with my windy sounds.
I haven’t stopped since then. I’ve endlessly experimented in the hopes that one day I will have a small child that I will be able to entertain with this little bit of magic. I’ve taken to practicing at all hours of the day and night. I practice on the field at football practice, while walking down the street, while cooking, while cleaning. Last week I woke up and instantly, without a thought, began to practice my whistle. I really think that it’s starting to come together. The sound is becoming gradually more full, so long as I’m not trying to impress someone with the gains that I have made. I also am sure that people are beginning to think of me as “That Weird Guy Who Keeps Trying to Whistle” or mistaking me for a tea kettle at full tilt. Nathan says that I sound like someone who was in a accident and is having to relearn everything from the beginning.
Somedays I feel like I’m learning everything from the beginning anyway. An example: Sunday I went to church, and afterwards I found out that myself and someone else had the same idea for lunch. The girl gave me a high five and said, “Great minds think alike!”
“Great minds”, I replied, “think for themselves.”
I thought I was being clever, but Natalie just stared at me for several seconds, as if I were an alien life form. She looked it me with eyes that said, “This is why you’re single.”
What she actually said was, “That’s the perfect way to kill it, Tatum.” Yes, it is. But there are many other ways everyday to sound like an idiot. Several times a day I play the fool. Other times I might earn a smile.
That’s the way this life goes. Sometimes you get the girl, the music swells, and the credits roll. Sometimes you find yourself on Facebook on a Saturday night. Sometimes you’re whistling in the early morning’s dark, barely making a sound, but you’re happy that there’s something there at all.
I sometimes dive into these long stories of mine that date back 5, 10, 20 years. I pick through the substance of foggy memories and I usually come away with joy in my voice, I hope, even if I have a dip of regret for what I did not fully know on the day those memories were newborn. I write from the past, saving the present for some other time.
I wonder if, when I remember this Tuesday or that next Wednesday, if I’ll look back with the same nostalgia that wraps me up like my grandfather did when I climbed into his lap when I was a child and he said, “Thank you! I needed that.” And I remember that because I felt like what I did mattered to him in that moment.
Every Friday night I saunter over to the Braden’s house and unwind with some of the others after these long work weeks. I sit around and I laugh with my best friends in this country. Sometimes, I don’t exactly feel like laughing, but I know that I am in need of them now, and I know that in 10 years I’ll tell stories about these nights. I’ll talk about how Robert cooked the nachos every week but I gave the credit to Natalie. How Jenn was probably the most athletic and the way in which Nathan could make me angry by pulling the goalie while we played FIFA soccer on the Playstation. I’ll see Benjamin and I’ll probably sigh at how we would sing him songs for bath time and kiss him before he went to sleep.
As I ran through Peachtree City everyday for years I longed for a day when I ran through the streets of this city. I thought that if I ever lost 5 pounds then I would know joy. There have been times where I have lost 5 pounds in one week and I’ve walked off the scale thinking, “If I could just get down 10 more pounds.” I am often vitamin deficient in terms of grace in my daily life, but my past is glowing in the stuff. I feel a lack of encouragement right now, a certain lack of color in the art of today, but the past can burst open in my mind with colors of a summer’s blue and green.
Right now there’s a guy who was hit by a car by crossing a street. He’s learning to walk like it is his first time and he wonders if he’ll ever meet another crosswalk. Down the 10 floors of the hospital’s physical therapy wing and out into the sidewalk of gray is the Broken Heart who is learning to dream again; learning to risk again; trying to make the blood course through his veins the way they did back when the very mention of her name had this way of lighting his whole being on fire. All of our days are lit up with the glory of God in life and bone and spirit and dust. I think it’s all a matter of how much of it we can see. I wish I could hold all those old moments in a suitcase. Memories have the substances of ghosts, but I want the real thing all over again. I would give up all the words to have back a night hunting for Christmas lights or putting on my shoes with my grandmother to see a giant moon, only to find out that it was a streetlight partially obstructed from view by a tree.
I would give away each of these keystrokes to unpack those lost days, but somewhere in all of this is a miracle that today will bear witness to more stories, more days of making a fool of myself in public. There will be days where I will feel like I matter to someone, where I laugh until I cry. There are days where I learn to do something new or to love all over again. There will be another morning to whistle a tune in the dawn for the very first time.
