"Planet Earth is blue."
Well, I know the Heron house was yesterday.
David Bowie is gone.
The Man Who Fell to Earth is back in the heavens. The Thin White Duke has gone silent.
I have this annoying habit. The very first thing I do every morning after my feet hit the floor - even before making coffee - is grab my longtime early morning companion. Not my wife. My old portable transistor radio. It is always tuned to KYW Newsradio 1060-AM. As I head down the steps toward the coffee maker, I flip it on to see what has transpired before I slid into my normal coma the night before.
Yesterday I was stopped dead in my tracks. That's how I learned of Bowie's passing.
And that's when I knew there was something else I had to do. I had to tell my wife.
Mrs. Heron was a huge fan of David Bowie. Still is.
That was not so easily done in the early '70s, when she was barely entering her teens.
It did not make her especially popular in her Catholic high school, when so many of the 'in' crowd wondered what she saw in this 'weird' pop star.
What she saw was genius. And something else she has carried with her through life.
Bowie brought to the forefront lifestyles that certainly were not part and parcel of the American dream up to that point.
Everything about his androgynous hero Ziggy Stardust questioned the way society dealt with sex and gender, to say nothing of music genres.
Oddly enough (maybe a Space Oddity?) my wife and I had similar tastes in music, but only later would we realize we had likely been at many of the same concerts.
That includes her hero Bowie.
She would seek out her grandfather to take her at all hours of the day and night, first to score tickets, then to deliver them to the shows. He did not pretend to understand the music, but he dearly loved the kids.
I see lots of Bowie in my wife, especially when it comes to relating to other people, in particular people whose lifestyle may not necessarily jibe with society's vision of the idyllic life.
She passed those traits along to our children, maybe the best thing she has ever done.
How do I know this?
I'm supposed to be the writer in this family.
But upon learning of Bowie's death, our daughter posted this message on Facebook. It is exquisite.
She is her mother's daughter.
"While Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, the Thin White Duke, the Man Who Sold The World, Aladdin Sane, and so many other voices are deathless, it's deeply sad that we've lost the man who gave soul to all of them.
"Bowie was so many things, but perhaps the plainest (and most moving to me) was that he was a creator of compassion. His personae were often tragic, outré, vice-ridden, or all three. By inhabiting all of them so well and baring their hearts through such stellar music, he brought us all to a deeper place of empathy, beyond the borders of what struck us as comfortable, familiar, or even earthly.
"I am grateful that he fell to Earth and so sorry to see him go."
RIP, Thin White Duke.
Yes, you left a huge legacy after falling to terra firma.
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