Maybe

That's the new word for me.

I was going to begin a new year of blogging with the title "The Slump" and begin by listing all the reasons I haven't been writing and the things that have gone horribly wrong since my last entry.

But last night at the Songwriters Group at Sparkytown, Mark Zane started the night out with a song-in-progress called "Maybe". As I've written here before, there's always one song each month that speaks loudly to me and surprises me. This was the song. No other song of the evening came close. Mark's message was along the line of "maybe we can get it right this time", something so many of us are thinking after the election, and then he included an extremely sarcastic "yeah" in one of his verses, as if to remind us that we're all human and extremely capable of screwing up even the best of situations. He nailed it, I think. The best we can ever hope for is "Maybe."

Somehow, this brought me out of my annual "stuck inside of Syracuse with the Key West blues again" (sorry, Bob) when the dysfunction in my family rages to its finest moments and none of the pieces of the puzzles of my life stay off the floor. It's all a "maybe". Maybe this relationship will work out. Maybe this kid will find the right path. Maybe this job will be the satisfying one. Maybe this agent will like my work. Maybe this time the dog will poop. Maybe this time I'll sleep through the night. Maybe this drug will stop the seizures.

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe not. But we'll never know if we don't at least try, will we?

I think Mark Zane's song has a message for us. Maybe he'll keep working on it and we'll all be humming the chorus as we do our chores someday in the future. Maybe. I hope so.