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The other day — Saturday, Dec. 19, 2020, in fact — I woke up dead. I knew I was dead because it was way past when I normally get up and I couldn’t feel or sense anything as I lay there in bed.

Surprisingly, being dead was not that much different than being alive. It was actually very relaxing, in a trance-like way. Kind of like being at a zoning board meeting.

There was one big difference about waking up dead. What happened was a movie started playing in my head. It was like the credits at the end of a movie, not the movie itself.

It started to list all the clubs I was a member of back when I was alive. Here’s the thing, though: I’ve been in a lot of clubs over the years, but the screen in my head was listing clubs I never knew I’d been a member of.

The first club listed was People who Blame their Parents for not being Perfect. Turns out this is a huge club (they listed the membership at the time I died and it was a big, long number with a lot of commas in it).

Among the reasons I was a member of this club was that I never got music lessons or swimming lessons or went to Disneyland or even had a yard or basement to play in. Still, I grew up in a loving Italian family and we ate like royalty every Sunday, so I was surprised I was in this club.

The things you find out when you wake up dead!

The movie kept scrolling. The next club listed was People who think they could have Done So Much More. This was strange as well.

I mean, when I was alive, I was a college graduate with a good job, a beautiful wife, and three educated, working, successful children. I had a lot of friends, tried to be a good person, and helped out whenever I could.

Then it pointed out that I at one time had a full scholarship to one of the best engineering schools in the country, but that I threw it away to live like I was in my own daily “Animal House” movie from my teens to my early twenties. Ouch.

I try not to think about that so much, because it really did happen. Somehow things turned out OK anyway, despite my best attempts otherwise.

Finding out when you’re dead what clubs you were a member of when you were alive isn’t always that great.

The movie screen kept scrolling. The next club I had been a member of was People who don't know when to Shut Up. Oddly, I had known all along when I was alive that I had been a member of this club, but that didn’t stop me from putting my foot in my mouth on a regular basis.

This is a really interesting club to be in. Why? Imagine you’re at a party and you ask the hostess, who is, shall we say, not slim, when she’s due. She then gives you The Eye and says “I’m not pregnant.”

From that moment on, for the rest of your life, you will be known in that circle as The Jerk Who Thought She Was Pregnant. That's why the People who don’t know when to Shut Up club is so extraordinary. It’s benefits never go away, even when you very much want them to.

I could go on but I’m sure you get the drift. Other clubs I had been a member of when I was alive, without even knowing it, kept on scrolling by:

— People who really don't want to know what's under those kilts;

— People who get suckered into political arguments on Facebook;

— People who wonder why men no longer have chest hair;

— People who are not as funny as they think they are;

— People who should listen more;

— People who shop at Walmart and then complain that nothing is made in the USA;

— People who think nobody can hear them passing gas;

— People who actually think the Minnesota Vikings will win a Super Bowl someday;

— People who hold grudges, like, for a long time;

— People who don't "get" cats even though the rest of the world is crazy about them;

— People who think pineapple on pizza should be a crime; and

— People with toenails that are in fact weapons.

Then the very last club appeared. It was called People who can Still Learn to Forgive.

The membership count for this club was, unfortunately, very small. This one was accompanied by a really deep, heavenly voice, like the guy in the Allstate commercial (“You're in good hands”).

The voice said, and I’m not making this up: “Frank, you did indeed wake up dead today but, if you agree to join this club — People who can Still Learn to Forgive — we'll agree to let you live so you can see your grandson again and ride your motorcycle and learn to play a few songs on the guitar. But you must promise to really make an effort to learn to forgive. It’s that important.”

The next thing I knew, my eyes opened, I reached over to feel if my lovely wife was still there (she was), and I realized that I was going to be allowed to live again. Hot dawg!

Waking up dead turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I’ve already forgiven David Chase for ending “The Sopranos” (spoiler alert) with a blank screen, and I’m working on forgiving Stewart’s for getting rid of Star Gazer Lite ice cream.

Who knows who or what I’ll forgive next!

This scribe was a little under the weather this week but is fine now so did not contact any of the OFs. This scribe did call a couple just to see how they were doing and only got to talk to a machine.

The machine on the OFs’ behalf advised they would return the call as soon as they returned. These calls did not come.

So, as of right now, there is nothing to report that would be new; however, there is always the old notebooks where the scribe can research if anything happened a few years ago. Well, here it is and it was when times were more normal, if anything can be called normal.

We have one OF who maintains we can’t call anyone crazy; this OF thinks the ones we call crazy may be the sane ones. This OF would counter anyone mentioning the strange behavior of someone with the comment that maybe running around naked is the sane thing to do and wearing clothes in the insane thing to do.

This OF would always respond, “Who determines what is sane and what is not?” That is always a good question to get any conversation started.

Many a psychologist’s and psychiatrist’s job would depend on the answer to that question.

This brings the scribe to relate that, for some years in his art class, there were at one time four or five members in the field of mental behavior, or teaching the “unteachable.” A variation of this topic would occasionally pop up as they just routinely talked as they were painting.

One thing the scribe noticed was that never once did the professionals mention cases or people — it was all so general. Just like stories and topics of conversations that a group of mechanics, or electricians, or plumbers would have if there were a group of them talking in a hobby group outside of their trade situation, say a book club, or writers’ class, or a local band, or orchestra, or for that matter a meeting of “old men.”

Weather redux

One of the notes this scribe ran across was for December 2010. It was a carbon copy of this exact time of the weather in 2020. The OFs in 2010 were complaining how cold it was on Tuesday, compared to the days before when it was in the forties and fifties.

As time goes by, nothing seems to change — not even the weather. The OFs then were 10 years younger and more of them went out hunting, and 10 years ago they were talking about how nice it was to be out in the woods even if they did not get a chance to shoot anything.

That would be true today with the same words, only adding 10 years to many of the OFs and getting the gun out of the case would be more of an effort than going out. Also, there is the matter of getting dressed, and by the time all that was done it would be almost time to come home.

If the OF now didn’t have a YF with him to haul back whatever he bagged, the OF would be almost dead by the time he got whatever it was to the truck or car.

The sport of hunting is not every OF’s cup of tea. One OF at one time said he would really be leery going into the woods with these OFs and a loaded gun. One would have a cane in one hand, and the gun slung over the shoulder of the other arm.

His partner OF wouldn’t be any better. He would be carrying a gun but only one eye worked, and that one was not that good. Who knows what ailments would beset the others.

One, because of arthritis, would have to drag a leg. The OF thought, with a hunting party like this, the deer and turkey are pretty safe but the hunters would be the ones in peril.

Also in the archives of this scribe’s notebooks is a notation of the OFs commenting more than once on the beauty of the outdoors in the Northeast during hunting season and the fall with one OF observing: Why do we appreciate it so much more as we get older — and by older, the OF meant older.

The OF said, when they were younger, the seasons were the seasons and just another part of the year. But, in their sixties, the OFs began to notice the beauty of winter, the smells of spring, the sounds of summer, and the whole pot of senses in the fall.

The scribe did notice a note from the OMOTM discussing what it would be like with a year of constant weather, and the word “boring” in parentheses. The scribe seems to remember most of the OFs saying they would be bored out of their skulls if the seasons did not change.

Even as challenging as that can be, with heat in the one-hundreds or snow up to the OFs’ eyeballs, the OFs would rather put up with this than have it 72 degrees and sunny every day.

One OF commented he had constant temperatures like this for over a year when he was stationed on Guam. For a while, it was nice but then it got just too darn hot, and he longed for a snowflake.

Soon the OFs will have to start singing their theme song: 

Oh, the weather outside is frightful,

And our joints are not delightful,

Since it’s got so dang cold, 

We feel old, we feel old, we feel old!

One of the most famous Old Testament stories is that of the Tower of Babel. It goes like this: After the Great Flood, all people spoke the same language. Then they got the idea to build a city with a tower as high as Heaven.

When God got wind of this, he didn’t like it at all. Maybe he hadn’t had his coffee that day. Truth be told, the Old Testament God was often a little cranky, to put it mildly. So he scattered all the people throughout the Earth, and as an extra bonus he made everyone speak different languages as well. Was he having a bad day or what?

I’ve always wondered how different it would be if one could approach someone from another place or culture and speak their language. Can you imagine how transformative that would be? It would be so easy to establish a rapport with them.

There is actually a language called Esperanto that was created to be one common world language but it never really took off. No one except language junkies has the time to learn an entire new language that hardly anyone else is speaking.

I was giving this some thought the other day when it occurred to me there is after all a universal language that many people from all over the world can understand. Can you guess what it is?

Hint: I’ve been learning to play the guitar, which means if you guessed the answer is written musical notation, you got it right. Yes, the notes and staffs from music class or the hymn book are indeed a universal language.

Though I never had any formal musical training, I always knew about written music. It was mostly where you got the words to the hymns in church (you got the tune from following the stronger singers). All those lines and funny little markings were cute in their own way, but it may as well have been Greek to me.

Then I married a world-class piano teacher, organist, and choir director. Over the years, she slowly got me to where I had some idea of what was going on with written music. That was great. But it was only recently, when I started learning to play guitar, that I finally understood the true power of this universal language.

A lot of guitar players — even some very famous ones — don’t know how to read music. Many of them just want to “jam,” as they say, and some go very far using various fret-board tricks and techniques. Still, there is real power in understanding written music.

Here’s one example: Once I was outside running during my lunch break at work. All of a sudden, I don’t know from where, this tune popped into my head. It was a really pleasant tune. So I stopped running and pulled out my flip-phone (this was a while ago), called my wife, and hummed the tune to her over the phone.

Would you believe she was able to take that tune and write it out, using music notation, such that it could easily be played on the piano? Man, that was so great. If you play any kind of music, why wouldn’t you want this awesome ability?

The real power of music notation is that anyone, anywhere in the Western world who knows even the rudiments of music notation can pick up a piece of sheet music or a hymn book and at the least get a feel for the piece or even play or sing it outright.

What is really incredible about music notation is how simple and straightforward it really is: You have just seven notes from A to G that repeat to give us the musical sounds; the staffs with horizontal lines and vertical bars, where each note fits on a line or on a space between the lines; the clefs (treble, bass, or other) to identify what kind of staff it is; the key (the tone or “pitch”) to tell us what musical range it’s in; the time signature (the beat); and various other markings to indicate speed (tempo) and dynamics (soft to loud).

Oh, one more thing: There are also sharps and flats, which are notes that are a semitone above (sharp) or below (flat) another note. Don’t get confused by sharps and flats; they are just the black keys on the piano (though some can be white keys as well).

Music notation is really not that complicated, yet what you can achieve with it is simply amazing. From “Happy Birthday to You” to Beethoven’s “Symphony #3 in E-flat Major” (the famous “Eroica” symphony), to everything in between, it can all be written out and played back in a language that many disparate people all over the world can easily understand, even if they don’t speak the same language. Wow!

It’s easy to extend written music from the foundation I’ve described above. You can indicate to play a note in an abrupt or disconnected fashion. This is known as “staccato.” Or you can make the notes long and continuous. This is “legato.” Or you can accent a note. This is “sforzando.” You can also play a bunch of notes smoothly and without separation. This is known as a “slur” (and it’s not a bad thing).

Have you noticed that many of these words sound very Italian? It’s because they are. Italy was where music notation really developed and took off. Just one more thing to thank us Italians for (as if great food, literature, science, music, painting, sculpting, and such warm, heartfelt, joyous and beautiful people weren’t enough).

In fact, from studying music notation, I discovered that very, very loud music in notation is called “fortississimo.” If you know me personally, you know that kind of describes me to a T, for better or worse. Oh well, I just like to have fun.

Another interesting part of music notation is the “rest.” It’s like a note except you don’t play or sing it. Turns out a lot of music depends on what you leave out.

You’d think this would be great for a beginner like me — fewer actual notes to play wrong — but you have to be careful to get your rests in at just the right time or it screws everything up. That’s right, it even takes skill to play well what you don’t actually play.

If you have any interest in music notation or music theory, I highly recommend the book “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Music Theory,” second edition, by Michael Miller, Alpha Books, 2005. This book is easy to read and makes what many find rather boring or tedious very fun and exciting.

I’m basically reading it over and over in the hope that it’ll really sink in. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll be able to write the tunes in my head down on paper myself without having to call my beautiful wife. She has enough to do as it is.

The Old Testament God was really having a bad day when he scattered folks all over the world and made them speak many different languages. However, not long after that we got the gift of music and it’s incredibly versatile notation system that to this day is shared all over the world by people of different cultures to allow us to enjoy the supreme gift of music. Maybe that was God’s plan after all.