The Winning Side

"Sometimes the old ways no longer work. It's a strong person who realizes this. "To surrender"="To go to the winning side"

The quote above came from a friend of mine, Jay, who finally had to surrender to the cancer that he fought for the last few years. Jay was a fellow musician who played in French Letters, 2nd Skin, Run For Cover, Brilliant Orange, Go Four 3, (Greenhouse) / Happyman, and The Undercovers.

I met him again at the Cascade Room about ten years ago, at the wonderful theme nights that our mutual friends Scott and Shelley organized. The evenings would either feature songs from a specific year, or perhaps a particular album. Jay also played with the sing-a-long version of The Hard Rock Miners, so he was well acquainted with covers. Covers, for anyone who doesn’t know, are songs that musicians perform, that they did not personally write themselves.

In my band the Jazzmanian Devils, we played about 75 % covers, just not anything most people had heard before. I would say,” They’re all originals. (pause) It’s just that some of them we didn’t write ourselves.”

Jay sang and played guitar and knew so many songs. He was a friend to so many, and was so happy when he and his Dawn got together. Then he got the news that he had cancer, and he did all the treatments they could offer, but in the end, his body gave out. In the end, all of our bodies give out. That is what bodies do. There is no Best Before date; it just happens when it happens.

I remember going to a Baptist church with a friend and his mother once. The preacher said we were all sinners and we had to accept Jesus, or we might slip in the bathtub and die. Or a car crash. It was grim, and not the kind of spirituality that I believe in.

I’m not really sure what I believe to be honest. What happens when we go?

I like the thought that Lhasa has in her song, Soon This Space Will Be Too Small.

Soon This Space Will Be Too Small- Lhasa

She would preface the song with the following story that her father told her:

Lhasa De Sela, explaining 'Soon this space will be too small'

'This is a story about my father, because my father is a very philosophical man and he always has an idea going ‘round and ‘round and around in his mind and each idea that he has, its orbit takes several years to go around.

And when he’s really gone all the way through, then he has a new idea

These days he has a new idea

His idea is that when we’re conceived we appear in our mother’s womb, like a little. Tiny. light. Suspended in immense space and, there’s no sound it’s completely dark, and time doesn’t seem to exist. It’s like an ocean of darkness…

And then, we’re growing and we keep growing and growing and as we grow… slowly we begin to feel things touch things and, touch the walls of our world that we’re in

And then we begin to hear sounds and feel shocks that come to us from the outside then as we get bigger and bigger the distance between ourselves and that other outside world becomes smaller and smaller

And this world that were inside that seems so huge in the beginning
And so infinitely welcoming, has become very uncomfortable

And we are obliged to be born. And my father says that birth is so chaotic and violent that he’s sure that at the moment of birth we’re all thinking ’This is it. This is death. This is the end of my life’

And then we’re born and it’s such a surprise because it’s just the beginning..

And in the beginning we’re very small and the world seems infinitely big and time seems infinitely long,

Then we keep on growing and we learn how to use our senses. We learn how to touch one more time the contours of the world that we’re in

And sometimes mixed in with the sounds and sensations of this world, we hear sounds and feel shocks that come from yet another world.

And that other world follows us our whole lives long, as if something is happening on the other side of a very, very thin wall

But we can forget about it for a long time, and then all of a sudden it comes again, and then at the end of our lives…
we’re obliged to die

And at that point, my father says that then we think we’re really smart, and we think- this time, we know for sure that this is death and that this is the end… because everybody knows that.

But my father thinks that, that’s not the end either…
It’s just the beginning of something else. '

Lhasa De Sela

So it’s not the end, Jay. It is just the beginning of something else.

And as you said, “ It's a strong person who realizes this.

To surrender=To go to the winning side"