In the magical kingdom of happiness, freedom is like playing chess with all queens. No matter where you are on the board, you can go in any direction you want, as far or as little as you want. I don’t play chess, but I used to watch it played by professional gamblers – all kings – gambling illegally in the basement of a bar called Blarney Stone Castle on Vernor Hwy in Detroit. We are all gamblers on the chessboard of life, and happiness depends on playing like a queen.  

So I went in a lot of directions this month. Hiked, biked, swam and kayaked mostly. Even put some miles on one of the four stationary NordicTracks I own, though indoor recreation is a buzzkill for me. Am seriously thinking of carrying the NordicTrack to one of the Three Rivers hiking trails and using it there. Thing is, I don’t want to terrify Bambi & company. Still, they got so used to my T-sax playing in the woods that I started to think of them as hanging out for the concert. Gave a whole new meaning to “party animal” (I hated being the only one that didn’t have four legs). Yeah, a man on a stationary NordicTrack going nowhere on a horse trail might be a tough sell to park police – “No, officer, I haven’t been drinking” – but I’m friends with most of them as well as frequent park users, all of whom expect me to be nuts. The thing I hear most when I go to a park is “when are you going to bring your saxophone out here again?”

And I’ve never been a drinker, but I can get drunk on a sultry breeze (or as the poet Emily Dickinson niced it up, “inebriate of air am I”). Also, Mom Nature mugged me this month. Made me stare at the sky and muse that clouds are God’s sponges for mopping up self-destructive thoughts and bad feelings. If I was to invent a religion, that bit about cloud sponges would be in there somewhere. ‘Cept, I’d call God the Wizard Divine of the Universe, just to distinguish Him/She/It/Them from the other 5,000 man-made religions. Whatever spiritual rites you believe in, drunk on air, mugged by clouds, and free, is a good way to spend a summer. Hope you feel all three while “the livin’ is easy” over the next couple of months.

Even better, share your cloud-staring moments. No surer way to discover people who fit like a key in your lock than to lay an epiphany moment on them. In fact, it would be sacrilege to exclude a soulmate from the stardust in your moments of discovery. Life only gives you one dime to spend in your “special person” account. Spend it all. Loose change in your pocket means you short-changed yourself on both ends of the deal.

So why don’t you practice what you preach, you may ask. I did. Spent my dime in one shot. But life’s ironic wildcards cast me back into the freelance role I know best. Not belonging in any one single place frees you to belong every place, you know. And that biz about keys fitting in locks, I think I was born with the paradoxical hardware of a skeleton key and a one-of-a-kind lock. Futile to describe the custom lock, but a skeleton key, you may know, turns the tumblers of many locks as easily as drawing a breath.

Bless my opposable thumbs, I’d like to claim that as a talent, though I know it has more to do with people regarding me as a non-entity than a guru. Strangers sometimes share confidences with me at the drop of a hat. Waitresses, salespeople, professionals, tradesmen – unfamiliar people all, it can happen within a minute or two of our first exchange. It’s like speed dating without the passion. I’ll close with an anonymous example I’ve shared elsewhere:

This one happens on an 8-mile courtesy shuttle that probably took 20 minutes. A little philosophical glibness on my part seems to lower the drawbridge within a quarter-mile of when the driver picks me up. So now he begins telling me how his mother was on heroin when he was a kid and that her dealer boyfriend would order him around, “…count that money, [racial slur]!” He says he made some bad decisions growing up and served four years for trying to rob a bank, and he is the only one of all his friends who hasn’t wound up back in prison. So now I’m throwing things at him, and we share sketches about how both our sons nearly drowned. But in his case, the boy is still learning to walk and talk again four years later. He says they thought his child was vegetative until the kid laughed one day after someone farted and now here was this room full of adults trying to pass gas. We are all drowning in something, I say, all trying to awaken laughter again. He’s crossing barriers with me like lightning and I’m feeling the reward I get, the respect for what I might say. It’s heady stuff. I tremble with humility whenever this happens, because you can’t buy it, can’t go to school for it, can’t find it by putting a shingle outside your door. Most people prefer to travel on well-paved roads clearly posted and mapped. Me, I like the winding path to nowhere. It ain’t the destination, it’s the journey…

The 17 photos below include: 5 nature shots from kayaking behind my house; 3 pics taken in the wonderful new SeaQuest facility my son Sean manages in Roseville, Minnesota; 3 photos of yours truly celebrating a graduation with Norby Nation; 2 shots taken of my deck areas; and the final 4 are of my grandlad Famous Seamus’ 9^th birthday in Jackson, Michigan.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan