Cast Your Fate to the Wind

A month of nights, a year of days,

Octobers drifting into Mays;

I set my sail when the tide comes in

And I just cast my fate to the wind.

Late afternoon sunlight danced across the rippled waters of Johnson Lake as Nancy and Bill and I enjoyed our fish and chips one Friday evening last month.  We were upstairs at Medo’s Resort (home of Judy’s Famous Tanq & Tonic—best GT on the High Plains) celebrating the recent rental of my house across the lake on Mallard Bay.  Unfortunately, I had not yet received an Invitation Letter from the Chinese government (see An Invitation, below), so renting out the house without some guarantee of a job teaching abroad felt like setting sail without a destination.

“So what are you going to do?” Nancy asked.

“Well, I guess I’ll just cast my….”  But suddenly I couldn’t remember how the expression went.   

“What’s the line?” I asked.  “What is it you cast to the wind?”

“I don’t know,” she replied offhandedly.  The conversation took a different tack, but I couldn’t shake the question—and googled it as soon as I got home that night.  A bunch of references to Vince Guaraldi came up in the SERP, and I was swept away in a wave of Sixties nostalgia:  The Sandpipers; Schroeder at the piano; the Summer of Love….  With Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto moving into rare triple conjunction, the possibilities had seemed endless back then; unlike today, in which possibilities feel so constrained.

I sat down at the piano and picked out Guaraldi’s 1962 hit, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”  How can such a simple tune evoke such strong emotions?  It seems to me it’s all about the spaces in between.  It’s in Guaraldi’s unique harmonic voicings—the spacious intervals between notes in each chord on the piano.  It’s in his infectious use of expansive jazz rhythms and swing feel—the spacing between notes in time.  Both qualities underlie a simple, almost childlike melody in such a way as to render it sophisticated and evocative yet accessible to all—the very essence of cool.

I shift my course along the breeze;

Won’t sail upwind on memories.

The empty sky is my best friend,

And I just cast my fate to the wind.*

Yeah, man—it’s all about the spaces in between.



*  Lyrics by Carel Werber