A Few Small Risks

A perfect early summer day, 2001, Taylors Falls, Minnesota. My still-newlywed wife is clinging to a vertical rock wall 30 feet off the ground. She makes an aggressive move and doesn’t quite hit the hold. She falls.

Down below, I tighten the rope in my belay device. The rope goes taut, and the elasticity in the rope breaks her fall. She safely catches herself, feet outstretched against the rock face. Reconsidering the line she tries again and makes it, then is “belayed” (lowered) down to the ground.

The risk in rock climbing with a toprope setup is low, provided you do everything right. I was known as “Mr Safety” among my climbing friends as I would go way overkill on my anchor setup, setting up three lines of webbing that go down to a locking carabiner. All my gear was in good shape. Belayers were watching and ready to lock the rope down should a fall occur.

Toprope climbing holds the thrills of a truly dangerous endeavor, but with greatly mitigated risk. Sure, there is more risk than staying on the ground, but the juice is worth the squeeze when you consider the thrills and the scenery and the camaraderie of climbing. The risk is the price of admission.

(Sorry, I don’t have any images of this handy. This was pre smartphone and pre selfie. I probably have a print in a box somewhere.)

Can You Play the Drums? No, But I’ll Try

When I turned 50 last September, my party was a hootenanny. If you’re not familiar with the tradition it’s a gathering of musician friends and people who come to listen, and you play a show.

It’s less formal than a “concert” where everything is practiced and polished and perfect, and there’s a light show. A hootenanny is more about the showing up and the trying. A hootenanny is unpredictable. There will be moments of brilliance and moments of utter failure. It’s deeply human … and risky, if you don’t like to fail in front of people.

And true to form, there were moments of brilliance, and moments of utter failure. I came away thinking “oh my gosh, what did I just do” but as it happened it was a pretty magical evening and the consensus was that we should do it again.

At any rate, a little as-yet-unnamed band formed out of this. My musician friends - special credit to Kim - decided we ought to keep playing. As it happens Paul has built a recording studio in his basement and so we gather there every other Wednesday night in search of a respite from work and Costco and the latest wars.

As I am the singer and acoustic guitarist in this particular band, it was also decided that I be the benevolent dictator to facilitate decision making.

I like to shake things up sometimes. Last Wednesday night, we were three hours into a four hour practice. I decided to break out the old John Prine/Bonnie Raitt tune “Angel From Montgomery” that I knew well, but we had never played before. It’s a simple song, and they picked it up quickly.

My friend Kim, who plays violin, scooted over to the drum kit because she “was a good drummer on Rock Band.” This meant our drummer, Trev, moved over to the second mic and sang harmonies with every molecule of his being, while also playing the vibraslap (it’s the percussion instrument that sounds like a rattlesnake, famously at the 12 second mark on Ozzy Ozbourne’s “Crazy Train.” It goes “aye, aye, aye” then rattlesnake. That’s the vibraslap.).

The results were completely new, unforeseeable, wonderful, and I also laughed harder than I’d laughed in ten years. We all did.

You can’t imagine how good this is for you. How needed. Are we on the brink of WWIII? Perhaps. Is it stupid outside? Yes. Are people I love dealing with end-of-life issues and disabilities that are settling in in significant new ways? Absolutely. Have I lost way too many friends to cancer in the past few months? I have.

And yet, we laughed. Because you can’t not laugh when a stoic Minnesotan finds her inner Animal! at the drum set while another friend is belting out harmonies to a song he doesn’t know while playing the vibraslap. This is healing on a molecular level.

This was a risk but a small one. It took a bit of goading to get Kim to scooch over to drums because she literally doesn’t know what she is doing there. She’s never tried a drumset before and now she’s playing a song she’s never played? Seems like a bad idea.

But she did, and the Rock Band skills took over, and everyone was wowed at the end, and it’s something we will do again. Crucially this also displaced Trev, who improvised with reckless abandon, and we got something magical.

Love You Brother

My friend Tony died this week from pancreatic cancer. He was a founding member of our North Star chapter of Man Up to Cancer. I am a cancer survivor (in the clear for now) and Tony’s cancer was still in the early going when we met.

(Tony is in the center with the Man Up to Cancer hoodie and the Wild hat and the smile. That’s me in front, looking weird, per usual.)

We normalize saying “love you brother” to guys in this group. And we mean it. It’s not normal in our culture for men to say “love you” to another guy. Too squishy. Too feely. Too “emotional.” Too unmanly.

It feels like a risk. It’s hard to do and uncomfortable. It lacks decorum. It means sticking one’s head out of that unbreakable turtle shell of beer and football and work that we sometimes get into. It means vulnerability.

But we do it because we recognize the need. We recognize that we are all vulnerable: such is the nature of cancer. It’s - quite literally - a life or death situation, and people NEED TO KNOW THEY ARE LOVED. This is just as necessary as food, water, and clean air.

And there is often (but not always) a reciprocity. If you love someone, genuinely, they will often love you back. And this means that you become confidants to each other. You become support to each other. You have a person you can count on, someone who cares about you.

And so, we take the risk of falling.

The risk of sounding bad.

The risk of saying “love you brother.”

Small risks, really. But they open doors to larger, more expansive, freer places, and that’s worth the risk in my book.