We played tag with the languid
and then laughed like children as frigid water
washed over our naked feet
making us long for our shoes;
We raced back to the van and its lazy heater,
We snuggled together sharing body warmth…
Don’t fall in love with me, you said,
I won’t, I said, only half-lying,
you would laugh, perhaps just a bit unkindly,
if I told you…if I tried to make you remember…
if I tried to get you to do that dance again;
I shrug, perhaps just a bit ruefully,
I hold my jaded tongue
and acknowledge the obvious…
the memory of your kiss still makes me smile.
The ghost of Maude doesn’t visit me often. But I’m always blessed when she does and last night, in the middle of a particularly active and vaguely unsettling dreamtime, she visited me once more.
My grandmother…Maude (everyone called her Mom)…was 96 years old when she died. I didn’t know her as well as I wanted to but the times we did have together…sitting at the little table by the window in her always delightfully fragrant kitchen as she cleaned green beans and told me wonderful, beguiling, bittersweet stories of her rich life…will linger with me until I pass on back into the light.
“What’s botherin’ you, Buddy?”…my father is no fan of his given name and early on adopted the nickname “Bud”, my grandmother took to calling me, his first born son, “Buddy” almost as a matter of course…she was the only one I allowed to call me that into adulthood.
Mom rarely smiled but her eyes were always bright with savvy and patience and unspoken, but unmistakable mischief…she had proud, angular reddish brown features…she looked like she was as much Native American as she was Black…and she wasn’t smiling as she appeared out of a shadow in my dream.
“Don’t know, Mom,” I lied…I was so pleased to see her that I wasn’t going to waste her time with my navel-gazing even in dreamtime.
“No need to lie to me, child,” she said, drifting close and touching my face, “you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied hanging my head.
Mom put her thin, delicate, red-brown hand on my cheek and lifted my face up to look at hers…with her smiling eyes and unsmiling mouth…and winked. “Gon’ be okay.”
I smiled. The shadows swirled around us. And the ghost of Maude was gone. And I fell…into deeper, unremembered… or dreamless…sleep.
He stood on top of the citadel wall and looked down. The world…the whole wide blue green gold gray black and white world…spread out as far at the eye could see. There were a few people making half-hearted attempts to breach the wall but they couldn’t find it in themselves to care enough to put much effort into it and so they left leaving their expectations and disappointments nailed to the citadel door and went off to find more interesting pastimes to pursue.
Somewhere someone was playing Bach…and someone else was playing Skynyrd…someone was chanting with Coltrane (…a love supreme…a love supreme…)…and someone was mocking him with rueful Paul Simon songs. He shrugged…he’d heard it all before… and slipped back into the citadel where shadows danced for him…and memory played tricks for him…and yesterdays swirled into tomorrows and his heart, mayhap too long dormant, played none of it much heed.
We are community. The community of the boundless ebon heavens…the community of brave and fragile Gaea…the community of borders and city-states and neighborhoods and all the other mortal constructs we pledge fealty to…we are of our fathers’ sweat and our mothers’ tears…we are of our kinfolk’s memories and the collective legacy of beloved strangers who went before….we are of fertile seed and bountiful starlight…we are community.
We are community. The community of the multitude…the community of the chosen few…the community of abiding love and faithful familiarity…and, ultimately, the community of the one…we are joined and ever separate…we are of the same blood and utterly unique…we are heartbeats connected and light years apart…we are many…we are few…we are one…we are community.
We are hope and joy, love and lust, passion and peace and hate and love…children of mercy, parents of reason…we are many…we are few…we are, ultimately, gloriously, one…we are community.
I am filled with hubris and false modesty, with feints and evasions and subversive rage simmering just beneath the surface and erupting in a sudden, cathartic bursts that have as their only audience a cold computer screen, framed snapshots, and slightly bemused cats.
I am filled with dark cynicism that is soothed by loud music, other people’s words in books, other people’s visions in moving pictures, guiltless gothic fantasies, and joyless sex with strangers who think they know me. I am a master and a victim, a fool and a hero,
This is my life.
I am full of dreams and inertia, I am wary and detached and always waiting for the other shoe to fall; I am full of acid bravado in absentia and hollow smiles that go unrecognized by those who are supposedly close to me. I am a disappointment to more than I care to think about and I don’t really care that I am because everybody is a disappointment to me as well.
I am a well-regarded afterthought and I am well used to that.
I am alone and not lonely. I am a would-be romantic who doesn’t believe in love anymore. I am aging and never as old as I feel. I am consumed by a youth that never happened and comforted by phantom love, rock and roll, and comic book super-heroes.
I am consumed by futures that probably won’t happen and sheltered by mazes of words and false laughter and becoming people that I will never reveal to anyone else.
I offer safe harbor and I long ago stopped looking to find the same for myself. I wallow in self-pity and self-regard in oddly equal measure and I find nothing untoward about that. I wallow in imagination and despair in equal measure and I find nothing untoward about that either.
And this is all absolutely true. And this is all absolute nonsense.
This is my life.
Amanda made me smile and then she blew me a kiss and disappeared in a flash (she was quite agile for a big girl)…I shrugged…she was like that…and chuckled.
Even Amanda didn’t know when her whimsy would bring her back to visit me so I didn’t waste time fretting about it. She would turn up…taking a bath at
She made me smile…she was like that…she made me laugh…she made my body sing when she kissed me, when we made love and she sighed my name without it seeming like a tease or a practiced ploy. Amanda always made me smile…and she always left…for days, weeks, months…yeah, she was like that.
The engine purred languidly as the train…azure as the early evening sky…came surely around the bend. My heart sank and rose almost in the same instant as I clutched my bag and fought back acid tears.
“I don’t think I want to go,” I said to the man whose massive, calloused, calming hand was on my shoulder; he was the only person in the world I felt small beside…the only person in the world I truly didn’t mind feeling small beside.
He smiled patiently and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You have to go,” he said, his voice all honey and resonating bass, “you’ll hate yourself if you don’t.”
“Don’t care,” I pouted. But I knew he was right…he was almost always right…and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Will you still be here when I get back?” I asked more plaintively than I had wanted to.
He nodded and bent down and kissed my forehead. “Yep,” he said simply. He straightened my tie as the blue train stopped and its door slid open with a world-weary sigh.
The conductor’s face was impassive but her eyes were kind. “I’ll take your bag, sir,” she said, not waiting for my reply before she gently tugged it out of my hands.
I turned and looked up at the man, memorizing the twinkle in his eyes…the texture of his graying beard…the proud, sun-kissed crags on his forehead. “I’ll miss you.”
He smiled…as much as he smiled…patiently and warmly and stroked my face. “You won’t have to,” he said tapping one of his thick fingers against my chest, “I’ll be right here wherever you go. You understand?”
My face flushed. “Yes, sir,” I said in a small voice.
“There’s a good boy.”
I started to stay a million more things but the train whistle blew and the conductor appeared holding her hand out to me. “All aboard, sir,” she said.
I took her hand and climbed up the stairs as the door sighed shut behind me. Through the glass I saw the man standing, his massive shoulders squared as always, nodding proudly. I waved and he nodded and the blue train pulled out of the station.
I watched as the station…and the man…faded out of sight as we rounded the next curve and then I followed the conductor to my seat. It was, I realized, neither an ending nor a beginning…it was a continuation.
The homes on the Circle were bright and welcoming with festive lights dancing along their eaves and fragrant smoke wafting lazily from their chimneys. The night was cool and crisp with golden stars twinkling in time with a cosmic Christmas carol.
It was the night before Christmas and I was sitting on the bench under the big tree in my yard sipping hot cider…sipping hot cider and waiting.
I didn’t see him arrive; he was just…softly and suddenly…there next to me. “I was wondering when you were going to show up,” I said, not turning towards him, before taking another sip of cider.
He chuckled warmly. “Not surprised to see me, huh?”
I shook my head. “I’ve read my Dickens,” I said with a grin.
“Well there’s just me this time…there are cutbacks all over.”
“Bah, humbug,” I said with a wink.
For a few moments, we sat silently side by side looking up into the endless night sky.
“Are you doing okay?” he asked.
A soft torrent of conflicting reactions and emotions surged through me and I sighed softly. “Yeah…most of the time…sometimes I…”
“I know,” he said.
“I’m sorry I never said…”
“You didn’t have say anything,” he said gently, “I was a clever fellow and you, despite your feints, aren’t nearly as inscrutable as you think you are. Well at least not when you know what to look for and care enough to look for it…and I did.”
“Yeah,” I smiled even as tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “I miss you.”
“Estoy con usted siempre, mi amigo querido.”
I nodded, still fighting back the willful tears. “I know. It’s kept me sane through some of the dark times this year…”
“Good.” He started to say something else but then thought better of it. “I have to go.”
I turned to look at him for the first time. I knew him by heart though he looked more serene than I could ever remember seeing him before. “Will I see you again?”
He winked and smiled. “Yes…it’s a bright circle of life and we’ll all see you again in due course.”
I didn’t need to ask who “we all” were, I just knew. And the knowing warmed me to my soul.
“Feliz Navidad, mi hermano. Feliz Navidad y Feliz Año Nuevo.”
“Merry Christmas, my friend,” I said to the cool Christmas Eve night. He was gone…and yet he wasn’t gone at all.
“Is it because I’m white?”
The question caught me a bit off-guard, as indeed it was supposed to. “No,” I said, a little bit insulted, “you know better than that.”
She frowned…her mouth unconsciously forming the little girl pout on her woman’s mouth that I found so incredibly fetching that I had to look away…as she marshaled her next argument. There was no way I was going to get out this conversation unscathed.
“If you don’t love me, just say so,” she said finally, her dark brown eyes focused so powerfully on mine that I couldn’t turn away again if I tried.
I took a soft breath, sighing almost inaudibly, as I measured my own words. “I do love you, baby,” I replied truthfully. “How could I not love you? You’re smart…you’re funny…you’re giving and warm and caring…you’re so beautiful it takes my breath away…I’d have to be dead not to love you…”
“Then why…”
“Because,” I said, cutting off the question she’d asked me a dozen times before, “I have a strict rule that I don’t get involved with anyone who doesn’t have a favorite Beatles song…and you, pretty girl, weren’t even born until years after the Beatles broke up…”
That was a new one and she sighed with exasperation and frowned. “I don’t care about that…I love you and you love me, what else matters?”
She was so magnificent in her anger that I wanted to pull her into my arms and hold her for the rest of our lives. “It matters that you’re 23 years old…and I’m not of a mind to steal your youth to get through my golden years…I’m not that guy.”
“But…”
“It matters that you have so much living to do…to finish school…to find a job that excites and engages you…to find someone your own age to love and make babies with…so much to do…”
Tears began to pool in her dark eyes but she defiantly refused to let them fall. “I can do all those things with you…I want to do all those things with you!”
“Baby, I’m more than twice your age…I’ve lived a good portion of my life…I’m old and set in my ways and there’s no way in hell that I’m going let you tie yourself down to me…”
She shook her head and sighed. “I know why you call me “baby”…you’re trying to remind me that I’m “too young” for you…”
I smiled and reached out and stroked her cheek. “Partially,” I admitted, “but also because you are my baby…and because you like it when I call you that…”
She grinned and nuzzled against my hand. “You’re not getting rid of me this easily, old man,” she said resolutely. She surged into my arms and buried her head on my shoulder. “When you’re old and gray, I’ll push your wheelchair and make you oatmeal and love you still with all my heart.”
I closed my eyes and held her tight.
“’All You Need is Love’,” she whispered.
“What?”
“My favorite Beatles song….’All You Need is Love’…wise words, don’t you think?”
I chuckled and kissed the top of her head. “There’s my girl.”
“Damn right,” she said, closing her eyes and relaxing unabashedly in our embrace.
Sara folded into the kiss, letting down her studied defenses long enough to let the rest of the world mind its own business and let them be, and she felt, fleetingly anyway, safe and…loved…
“That’s all I wanted to say,” he said, hoping to bring some levity to the longing and the awkwardness of the stolen moment.
She looked into his eyes and then, feeling incredibly exposed and vulnerable, she buried her head against the comforting broadness of his chest. “You said it very nicely,” she said with more coyness than a woman of her age should be comfortable with. “I’m so glad that you’re my friend.”
He nodded and smiled, just a bit ruefully. “We aim to please,” he said kissing the top of her head. That moment was done and this moment…the “you know we’re just friends” moment…had taken its place.
They held each other…together and so far apart…and let the moment speak for itself.
Sometimes moments are all you get.
Sometimes I get so selfish and self-pitying that I find myself getting so angry at you…angry and abandoned and alone…but those moments are few and far between and they pass like the wispy tendrils of a lazy morning mist…
Sometimes I still hear your laugh…sometimes I still look to share some bit of nonsense with you….sometimes I forget that you’ve been gone since a cold spring…you’ve been gone through a hard and heart-wounding summer…sometimes I forget…but those moments are few and far between…
Sometimes I smile wistfully…imagining what you would say…imagining what would make smile…imagining what cock your head to the side and say everything you needed to in a withering, knowing look…
Sometimes I rage against the heavens…sometimes I rage against the injustice…sometimes I rage, crying acid tears, because my friend is gone…sometimes…
Sometimes I remember all that was and not all that there should have been…sometimes I smile for having known you rather than cry for having lost you…
Sometimes I wish I had told you everything you meant to me…and sometimes I know that you already knew that…
Sometimes the gray envelops me…threatens to smother me…but sometimes…most times…the light breaks through and I move forward, healed and whole and so much better for having known you…
Sometimes I still hear your life…and sometimes it makes me cry…and sometimes…most times…it makes me smile.
- for M on what would have been his 62nd birthday -
Memory dims…time heals…life waxes and wanes...
life moves on like it has to do…
And we are here…eight years gone…and moving on with life like we have to do…
Yes I remember where I was…
Yes I remember how scared I felt…
Yes I remember how angry I felt…
Yes I remember how helpless I felt…
Yes I remember finding solace in the smile of a baby girl…
Yes I remember.
Eight years gone…so many yesterdays ago…
And we are here…remembering with comforting buffer of time and tide…
Eight years gone…and moving forward and looking back…moving on with life like we have to…
Flags flying…tear stains long dry…I remember…we all remember…
Eight years gone…so many lifetimes gone….so many lifetimes to go.
It was your song…I wrote it for you…I sang it for you…and you smiled with your eyes and hugged me so tight I thought my heart was going to burst sweetly right there in the bedroom.
I sang it for you…your song…and you looked at me with such love that I had to shy away or be consumed by own passion and joy…I sang it for you…and you swayed to the rhythm and didn’t once make fun of me being so off-key.
It was your song…I wrote it and I rewrote it and I started to toss it out a million times…but I didn’t…I sang it for you…I sang it from my heart…and your heart…your amazing, mighty, mighty heart sang back to me.
It was your song…it is your song still…you kissed me for it…long and slow, sweet as strawberries and electric as thunder…and you made me sing it again…your song…from my heart to yours.
She looked him…her face a study in piety and pity…and nodded plaintively. It was a hollow gesture. “We were good once,” she said in that condescending voice that she slipped into when she was doing something that she didn’t want to be called on, “and we’ll always be friends.”
He suppressed a snicker. “I don’t think so,” he said with more bluntness than he had usually given her during the course of their carnival ride of a relationship.
She winced but then composed herself. “We will…you’ll see…” She opened the door and stepped into the gathering twilight. The big yellow taxi was waiting at the end of the walk. “I will always love you,” she said, pausing first for effect and then for his reaction.
“Uh-huh,” he said.
It was her turn to shrug. She closed the door and went down the walkway, her pinched heels making a familiar clipped click-clack until she climbed into the taxi and drove off towards the airport.
He stood there listening to the sound of the car fading into the distance and waited. He waited to feel the crushing sensation of loss to bend him to his knees and bring acid tears to his eyes. You don’t what you got ‘til it’s gone…Joni said that (and she’s a poet so she should know)…and so he waited. And waited. And…
He shrugged again. Nothing. Hmph, go figure. And then…lightness, not heaviness, surged softly through him and he grunted a bemused laugh.
He realized that he was hungry and he turned towards the kitchen singing idly…”…you don’t what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…” Joni was right (of course she was right…she’s a poet)…but sometimes the revelation is not a bad thing.
(This post...along with the previous two posts...was inspired by reading Girls Like Us by Sheila Weller, a book about Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon)
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I fold into my solitude…fumbling, fading, fencing with life from a distance…and I don’t find it to be disagreeable. It’s easy in fact to be beyond anger…beyond connection…beyond trusting that anyone will be there just because I want…just because I need…them to be there.
My faith wanders looking for new places to plant itself and start reaching for the sun again and I let it go, never truly imagining that it will find safe purchase in scorched fields of broken dreams, foolish fancies, and the naïve belief (sorry, John) that love is all you need.
And still…and still…and still…despite my cowardly hubris…my self-protective hubris…my rational dispassionate hubris…my faith soldiers on and I believe.
I believe in the sureness of the sunrise and the magic of little girls laughing…the magic of kisses from beautiful strangers and the comfort of awkward bear hugs from reticent men who don’t know where to put their feelings they can’t…they won’t…call love.
I believe that every day is gift from the universe…that every day is something that belongs to me just because I claim it…I believe that true love is exceedingly rare but always…always…always worthy of being sought out and embraced.
And still…and still…and still…despite all evidence to the contrary…I believe in possibilities that love is real…that friendship exists beyond mere convenience and happenstance…that pretty lies are always trumped by beautiful truths. I believe…even folded into my solitude…that I am not alone…never alone…never completely alone.
And still…I believe in myself…I believe in my dreams….not matter how silly and extraordinary and crazy they sometimes are…I believe in my friends and my neighbors and my countrymen…yeah, despite having so many reasons not to, I still believe (thanks, Carole) in humanity…
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MKW Pop Culture Stuff (including a review of Girls Like Us):
“Can I get a tight spotlight?” He waited a moment and then he was captured in a stark circle of light. “Thank you.” He looked out into the darkness. “Should I just start?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said, evenly enough to disguise her impatience.
He took a deep breath. “I used to think that the whole world revolved around me. I wondered what it was that people could possibly do when I wasn’t around to watch them.”
He paused, half expecting some kind of response. “I used to imagine that I could fly…that I was the strongest boy in the world…that I was Superman or Hercules…that everybody wanted to be my friend.” He took another pause. “But then I grew up.” Another pause. “Mostly.”
“Interesting,” she said, hoping that he wouldn’t realize that she didn’t think it was interesting at all.
“I used to think that anybody who made an effort to get to know me would realize how great I was and that they would want to be my friend…who would want to be my lover…who would want to walk with me through life forever and ever…”
“Because the whole world revolved around you,” she said dispassionately.
He winced and then nodded. “Yeah.”
“But then you grew up.”
His cheeks grew a bit warm. “Mostly,” he said hoping it would make her chuckle.
She chuckled…but mostly because he was expecting her to. “I think Carly Simon wrote a song about you.”
He smiled. “”Well I always wanted the girls to dream that they’d be my partners…”
“Of course you did,” she said dryly.
He was pretty sure she was making sport of him but he wanted the gig so he let it go. “Well, I’m older now and I know the world doesn’t revolve around me. Hell sometimes the world doesn’t seem to know that I’m even here.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
He paused again. “Yeah,” he lied.
Her right eyebrow arched up knowingly. “Really?”
He grinned wolfishly. “Mostly.”
She chuckled…honestly this time…and nodded. “Thank you,” she said making some notes on her Blackberry, “we’ll be in touch.”
“Okay, cool,” he said.
And then the spotlight went out.
I had a friend who once told of driving cross country…from the northeast to the bohemian expanse of
We played at love, she and I, passionately distant for a brief season…joined by poetry and comic books, by music and chastely humid late night phone calls…and then we stopped pretending and went our separate ways.
She comes into my consciousness…at odd times and from odd angles…even unto today and I choose to remember the sweet moments…a song on a heartfelt mix tape that made me feel loved and connected and safe, a “smile in a whisper” (she didn’t like that Fairground Attraction song but it always reminds me of her) in shared wistful, guileless, passionate dialogues shared in the safety of our distant bedrooms…and take the soft, magical joy those sweet moments can bring when I’m open to it.
I’ve thought about the friend I had often lately as I read a biography of Joni that sends me to my CD collection for Miles of Aisles and Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm (surprising and delighting her with “My Secret Place”...see below... on a tape was a sublimely thrilling moment for me) and, yes, Blue. Joni as a soundtrack…I could drink a case of you and I would still be on my feet…works for me…even unto today.
- for Priscilla -
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MKW's Pop Culture ramblings: Neverending Rainbow
The breeze dances around, mischievously trying to tease me out of my stillness, but I pay it only passing heed. I’m under the tree…the big one that stretches over the roof of my suburban home and reaches humbly for the sky…reading about Joni Mitchell and finding poetry in the expanse of the azure sky. Perhaps, I wonder fleetingly, I am becoming too comfortable in my solitude…but I let that go (if it’s true it’s not a bad thing…for a lingering soft season anyway…and if it’s not there’s no point in letting grayness in on such a glorious summer’s day.)
And so I breathe, the wind tickling the new growth on my recently shaved cheeks, and read about Joni and soak in the sunshine and find poetry and soft symphonies in the cloudless summer sky…and so I breathe, comfortable in my solitude, and let the moment linger as long it will.
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MKW's Pop Culture stuff: Neverending Rainbow
