Take This Tune

My pal Jamie from Duward Discussion has reintroduced her wonderful meme.  Take This Tune provides a musical prompt each week, usually a video with the song lyrics.  The task is to write something inspired by the song or something in the lyrics.

This week's prompt is the song South Coast of Texas, a song by Guy Clark. 

Reinvention.

That's what comes to mind when I think of coastal cities that are in hurricane zones.  I would imagine that the people living in these areas not only have to be hearty, but extremely adaptable.  You'd never be able to predict when the big storm was going to blow through and change everything.

That happened to the city of Galveston on the Gulf Coast of Texas in September of 1900, when a hurricane made landfall and devastated the region, killing more than 6,000 people and reshaping the Gulf Coast.  You can read the full account of the storm and its aftermath here.

The book Isaac's Storm recounts the early days of the US Weather Bureau and its absolute confidence in the science of the day to understand the vagaries of weather.  American ingenuity and confidence was high at the turn of the century, and part of this confidence was a pride in the ability of science to accurately predict and seemingly control weather.  And Isaac Cline was one of those who thought he could absolutely track a storm and guarantee where it would go and what it would do.


But history teaches us some painful lessons.  We can't predict what weather is going to do.  We can only study it and anticipate the worst.  We prepare for what could happen and hope it doesn't.


And then once the worst is past, we pick up the pieces and start over.


This particular Take This Tune prompt reinforced for me that things are constantly changing.  Sometimes the change is catastrophic...major storms, massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions.  Sometimes the changes is subtle and harder to see...that's the progression of entropy.


It can hurt to lose familiar things and places to time and change.  But that is the way of life.  What you had yesterday is going to be slightly different today.  And you won't be able to exactly recreate what you did today when tomorrow comes.


We can't control time.  We can't really effectively control how things change, although we spend an awful lot of money and effort trying.  


What we can control is our attitude toward change.  We can be part of it and embrace it.  Or we can fight it.


The ubiquitous "they" can drag you kicking and screaming into the future.  Or you can skip gaily downhill toward the excitement of something new.


That's your choice.