TomFlannery.com

It’s Friday night. It’s late. Very late.

I’m listening to music now. Lots of different music. I was tinkering with a melody for a lyric I found in my notebook earlier. Tried it out on the piano and on my Gibson jumbo. Before that I spent some quality time with my wife and my youngest daughter. Both of them are asleep now. The house is quiet. I can hear the wind trying to get in through the windows. It promises to get colder tomorrow and Sunday. It’s the end of a long week. I’m tired but I’m not sleepy. These are 2 different things, as us insomniacs know all too well. My dog is keeping me company now. Abbey is her name. She’s a member of the family. If there’s something going on, she’ll keep you company. I love her for that. My best friend. Never said a bad word about me.

Long gone Friday’s were spent in different places and in different ways. I’m not adverse to the occasional night out, mind you. Even at my advanced age. But mostly this it what I look forward to. Some quiet. Maybe a few late night sips from something cold. A good book. I’m in no danger of having my picture pasted on anybody’s post office wall. Those days are gone. A warm bed. Some music to dream to. My wife and kids tucked in. I long to be Ray Davies’s well respected man.

I write songs. I write plays. I write things such as this, for practice I suppose. Just to keep the fingers moving and to prove that I still have some sort of grasp on the English language. Whenever I write in the wee wee hours I think of my father and miss him terribly. All the good I have in me came from him. All the bad I have in me is from the times when I didn’t listen to what he had to say. If there is goodness in me, it’s from him. What a writer he was. Always playing with words. Sitting on the couch with a yellow legal pad….scribbling in an indecipherable scrawl that even my mother could never decode. Or sitting at the dining room table with his old black Underwood typewriter, using all 10 fingers like a concert pianist. Even in this day of computer geeks, I’ve never seen (or heard) anybody type faster.

I love these memories. They don’t make me sad anymore. They make me smile.

Some days are better than others. The days drive the nights. The nights are paid for with mornings. And so it goes. I’m back to being a 9 to 5’er these days. There’s a whole lotta “Office Space” in my weeks. I try to laugh off the absurdities and otherwise keep my head down. There’s a lot of good people around me. There’s comfort in numbers. Perspective is important. It’s not life and death when you sit in a cubicle.

*** I woke up this morning. Laptop was open next to me. I dropped off to sleep  between thoughts….the nightly Ambien surely helping. Another Friday night in the books. And a fine one it was too.