You would very much like to find out about the main
character of this book. It is expected
that in the first chapter or so you’ll find out who you’re going to be spending
your free moments with for however long it takes to finish this story. This isn’t always the case you know,
sometimes you are treated to a tour of the landscape, the better to picture the
story with. What is assumed but rarely
spelling out clearly is that you, the reader, are a character in the
story. If you invest anything at all in the
reading process then you can’t help but live inside the world of the novel for
a while and so become a part of the fabric of the tale. If you want to take a moment to review your
own pros and cons or explain your desires to yourself go ahead, we’ll wait for
you.
He will tell you this story which is actually many stories
but that’s not unusual is it? Life and stories of life are always many
stories. It is perhaps a most
unrealistic notion to think that stories are linear like walking down a
hallway. Life, and stories are as much
about whatever is going on in the rooms along the hallway as it is about the
pathway.
“Bite me” he said to no one in particular and everyone
indifferent. The fabric of the universe
may quiver with spit but all these days will be cataloged and displayed like
quilts at a county fair. And you have
seen these days before, endless film loops on television monitors in waiting
rooms, at airport gates, at grandmother’s house replaying the same moments
until they begin to seep into your skin.
“The room was dark” he began. You were there but he’ll tell the story
anyhow. My mother was lying on her
hospital bed surrounded by the rest of my family, at least the ones who had
arrived before me. I had driven through
a rainstorm and climbed the stairs two at a time to her floor with the promise
of release pushing me on. I had seen her
the day before but she had changed completely overnight. The weary face was replaced by a skeleton
mask, a mouth gasping for breath and eyes moving quickly following angels. How much she heard or understood I could only
guess but I talked to her as if she was there.
Some part of her was there indeed, but whatever she had been was mostly
gone. Her spirit, which we had often
only glimpsed in life, was starting to crawl out of the body and was probably
too preoccupied with being born to pay much attention to grieving loved
ones.
Someone sang a song and in that moment I saw my mother stop
to listen, she always loved music. The
words filled the room like deep water “When peace like a river restoreth my
soul, when sorrows like sea billows roll…”
He’s trying to paint this picture for you with his words and
the sounds of his words and you are following the story. You can see his mother, but it may be your
mother in your mind’s eye and that may be okay because the story simply
requires a mother not a particular mother.
He knows that you really can’t grasp the powerful moment when his mother
stopped breathing but he tells that part anyhow. In his words you try to feel him falling to
the floor in an anguished scream, a primal howl, a sound too deep for words and
you work on the picture and yes, there is someone falling and you see his uncle
lifting him up off the floor but the uncle is Claude Rains, and that’s okay too
because if he were there he would have played the part. He would have been that caring but slightly
distracted and annoyed father figure he played in The Wolf Man.
The boy was trick or treating on Halloween night. Wrapped in several layers of sweatshirts,
coats and hats his face was covered by the plastic visage of Frankenstein’s
monster. He tells the story with a
certain fond regret, a sadness for the pain of childhood. The mask is remarkable in it’s ability to
trap the wearer’s breath inside so that it may condense and gather in the
chin. He is walking through his
neighborhood, a small cluster of houses outside of a small town but what do
children know of the size of towns? Your
whole world is what you see around you everyday. The world might be ten thousand miles wide
but can you ride your bike that far? What good is distance and scale to a
child? His father guided him to the next
house and he rang the doorbell and stood back ready to receive the next handful
of candy. The woman who appeared at the
door, his great aunt actually shouted to “Get off the porch and get out of here
now!”
At this point he will return to the present to explain that
someone else had apparently been trick or treating earlier in the same mask and
it had been revealed that this child was not from the neighborhood, a fairly
serious breach of small town etiquette and now this elderly woman was incensed
to think that he had come back for more.
You wait for the story to reach a satisfying conclusion,
surely the father steps in and explains the misunderstanding and everyone
enjoys a nice hot cup of coca in the kitchen but he leaves the story there.
There really is nothing else to tell he discovers, because
try as he might he can’t remember anything else from that night after the shock
of being ordered off the porch. He could
invent something to end the story, and chances are that his father, being a
nice man, did step in and explain matters but he has no memory of that. Being an honest person he doesn’t want to
invent something simply for the sake of a good story and you begin to think
about how many stories you’ve told where you probably added a little spice to
the mix here and there and you start to wonder is it honest? Is it fair? Is it
true? Then you think to yourself “It’s
probably best not to let the facts get in the way of the truth”.
About this time you start to wonder if any of these stories
or characters will be of importance in this book. Yes, they will. You might begin to wonder if the narrative
will dance about from topic to topic like a drunken librarian. Quite possible indeed.
You don’t worry about things beginning with the letter “T”
however because you know that many things do although many things don’t and the
title may or may not reference any thing directly but may only imply something
and you are okay with that although you may wish to take your reading more
seriously sometime and demand more from an author who may or may not be leading
you astray.
Picture this: a small
child playing with leaves in the backyard of a small brick house. It is autumn and the young boy is wearing a
light jacket. The leaves are piled up
and he’s made a clearing in the middle where he’s sitting and watching anything
around him. The family dog comes over
and crouches beside him and the boy puts his arm around the dog. He’s not smiling but he feels contented and
satisfied. For this moment there’s
nothing else he needs or knows that he wants.
The boy’s mother takes a picture knowing that this will be important
someday. The photo is printed and is
stored in a box along with many others until it is needed.
He remembers riding a bicycle – thousands of miles have been
logged on bikes over the years, but this time it’s rushing out the door and
grabbing his bike because there’ sounds of kids playing just up the road. He eagerly pedals the bike toward the sounds
when one of the kids shouts “Go away, we don’t want you”. And he turns the bike, in a slow arc on the
grey pavement, the late summer sunlight throwing a shadow ten or twenty feet
out beyond him but the shadow is fuzzy from the tears and his father watches
him ride home.
He is asleep in a car, or rather he’s telling you about
sleeping in a car. It’s the backseat of
his parent’s car and he’s actually not asleep yet because he remembers the
sounds of the trains. He had been to see
his grandparents and their mountain town rang out with train whistles day and
night. He can see the street light
reflection inside the car as it moves slowly down Pearl Street toward Pleasant
Valley Boulevard. There is a warm mix of
sound and feeling, street lights, the radio in the front seat where his parents
are talking, train sounds and the roll of the wheels and motor hum vibrating
through the backseat.
He heard those trains in the night during visits to his
grandparent’s house in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
Those distant sounds were soft, they rolled through the night air and
crept around the corners of windows. Does
everyone love those trains in the night?
Is there anyone who is ever sad at hearing a far-off train? No, trains are always leaving for somewhere
better and you’re always just about to step on and travel into your future.
This feeling comes to him often, or rather the lack of that
feeling. He’s been searching for that
feeling and when he talks about it you start to think that maybe you’ve been
searching for it too but you decide it’s probably just another dead end trip
into some imagined past and there is not likely to be any kind of story in
there, at least not anything you could read late at night, not any kind of
story that would keep you up until you can barely stay awake because it’s so
good, because you care so much about the characters.
But how can you not care about that little boy sitting in
the leaves with his dog, quite possibly his only real friend? How could you not
feel the warmth of that back seat in the car and still smell the coffee from
his grandparent’s kitchen? Okay, he didn’t mention the coffee before, but you
should have assumed that his parents would have had a cup of coffee before
driving home at night.
He hasn’t told you about the ghosts yet but they are
there. His own ghost haunts him
daily. That sudden sadness for no good
reason, and now you’re interested because you’ve felt that feeling too. Sweeping the floor or picking up the morning
newspaper, you know it. It’s a
loneliness for no one and no place that can be named. So you listen a little closer to this
business of ghosts.
“I have spent my life creating ghosts” he says. “My life is full of ghosts and they are all
me”. You’re sophisticated enough to
grasp the idea that ghosts are not always spirits roaming free of dead bodies
although he did tell you that story of his mother and her spirit leaving her
body, and if you had asked a few more questions he might have told you about
talking to her ghost. He might have told
you about going to visit her grave and watching a bird in a tree nearby and
being pretty sure it was his mother’s spirit in that bird. “A cardinal”, he tells you when you ask what
kind of bird he saw. He neglects to fill
in more details about the tall trees and the winding pathway through the
cemetery. Also missing is the small
stream and the moss covered stones as well as the wooden bridge next to the old
white church. Fortunately these details
have been added to this text so you are not stuck imagining a grave floating
somewhere in space or the Sahara desert.
He explains his theory that we are constantly creating our
own ghosts. You both think about how
people talk about what they did in a “Former life” when it was really this
life, or appeared to be this life. You
might wander off on a tangent thinking about whether or not we do actually live
multiple lives but decide to stick to the narrative such as it is in hopes of
something to hang on to, although you admit to yourself that this notion of
creating a legion of ghosts that populate our world is pretty interesting.
This might not be a tangent. This may be the central theme
of the story. You have some time to
think about this because he has stopped and appears lost in thought. Is he thinking about what to say next or is
this a ghost visitation? Of course the
answer is yes, it’s almost always yes.
Yes, there are ghosts that we have created and deposited
along life’s pathways although no one is quite sure how and when they
appear. It’s not like every five years
you move into a new life and so a ghost appears as some kind of place- holder
to notate the changes in your life. We
are pretty sure that they sometimes merge as years go on and so you might be
left with a childhood ghost who was different from your infant ghost but has
merged into one. The teenage years
apparition is always a unique character, un-paralleled in angst and spiritual
distress. Scientists have worked for
years in top - secret laboratories to develop some kind of cosmic antibody that
will keep these particular ghosts at bay but as yet have been
unsuccessful. Fortunately these
characters are generally too absorbed in their own issues to be much of a bother
or much help for that matter.
Because wouldn’t you like to ask one of these former life
representatives some questions? The obvious ones like “Did Mom really throw out
my baseball cards including the 1955 Roberto Clemente rookie card because they
looked old?” would be first on the list but you might want to delve into some
deeper topics later on like those crazy rants of your father when it looked
like the blood vessels were about to burst on his forehead and he would become
so angry he literally couldn’t speak and he would reach out as if to grab
something to strangle. Those moments are
locked in your head pretty tight, but did it actually happen? You might want to learn something there.
Interestingly though, our ghosts tend to be quiet on
anything of real importance.
Their voices are familiar, they sound like radio at
night. You remember radio stations that
came in at night from far away. Of
course when you’re ten years old most places outside of your neighborhood are
far away but some of these did come dancing along the stars for hundreds of
miles or maybe more. Static filled AM
signals that felt so warm and true through a two-inch speaker pulsing with all
the energy of warm transistors and a nine-volt battery. To satisfy that endless need to hear the
latest sounds the radio was your fix, the necessary item to get by. You couldn’t possibly buy all those records
and you wouldn’t even know where to find them.
And so you turned the dial ever so slightly, small steps to scan the
night sky in search of rock and roll.
Pulling in the sounds on a fragile thread of a wavelength the heavenly
sound was there amid the ragged crackle of the atmosphere, the static that wove
around the guitars and voices but could never cover the chords of truth.
But what about the time (and there were many times actually)
the spirits of Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi and Michael Jackson met at a
coffee shop?
“Still drinking that chai MG? Are you sure you don’t want
some coffee? Michael will join me in some coffee I know.” Abe Lincoln sauntered
across the tile floor of the coffee shop, his tall frame casting a long shadow
as the morning light slanted in the large plate glass windows.
“Cream and sugar this time you old rail-splitter” the King
of Pop laughed as he put down the sports section of the morning paper.
“Such strong drink, how do you keep your wits about you
sir?” the author of Indian independence observed.
The conversation migrates between the weather, mild for
November, sports, the NFL western division looks good this year and whatever
political cartoons are on the editorial page.
The 16th president often points out that he’s still regularly
used as an icon in political commentary and that usually prompts much eye
rolling from Gandhi and Jackson.
Other patrons of the coffee shop see only three strange
looking characters, possibly homeless, maybe artists who show up every morning
and read the discarded newspapers because after all nobody looks like
themselves after they’ve died. And who
would believe it if they did?
Perhaps the biggest failure of the National Enquirer and
other fellow travelers is to always include a picture that appears to have been
aged showing Elvis as he’d look at seventy to accompany those stories about
seeing him at a donut shop in Memphis.
The fact that Elvis still haunts donut shops and fast food joints around
the southern United States should come as no surprise, it’s just that he now
has red hair and is known as Randy.
Being something of a tease he occasionally lets his true identity slip
and hence the stories in the tabloids.
He doesn’t want to talk about ghosts anymore, at least not
right now and so you wait to see what story unfolds next.
He talks about fields and a forest that are part of the farm
where he lived for many years. “There is
a path” he says and tells you about walking in every season and trying to
notice how different plants would appear at the various times of year. He might point out the rock formations he
painted many years ago in oranges and blues that bore no resemblance to
anything you see today. Somewhere in the
story would be the wind. The farm being
in a long valley always felt the wind moving south to north, north to south
singing through trees and caressing the old farm house bringing out the song of
old wood that creaked and shuddered in the night. Quiet, yes the heartbeat of quiet, he would
talk about that. Still moments inside
that old house searching and dreaming waiting for anything to come along and
change the world, his world and you listen and smile knowing the feelings
too. And isn’t that what stories do?
Take us home again? Perhaps a new route,
but always coming home. We don’t want to
go someplace we’ve never been really, we want to come home.
You think about this for a while, and this book rests on your
lap while you dream a little inside the story.
While you’re dreaming, he’s still walking. The sun is in a late afternoon slant and the
light is coming through late autumn trees where only the most stubborn leaves
remain. Brittle vines, weeds and ferns
are paper thin and crumbling at his touch.
Deep rotting plant life covers the forest floor, soft under foot soaking
up the last sunlight of autumn.
He walks quiet through this land and carries loneliness in
his heart on a journey to home and although he’s walking though the place where
he lives he’s still looking for the fields of home. And this is not surprising. He knows this and expects that you the reader
will follow him because you’re looking for home as well.
You’re hoping that he meets someone on this journey of the
heart and things are looking up because his father is walking across a field
alongside the tall trees, where the trail breaks out into the open.
“See anything on the trail?” the father asks.
“Trees and grass, sunlight and air”
“The tall trees tell you anything?”
“Which way the wind blows” the son responds but this is in
some kind of alternate universe because the father wouldn’t have asked anything
so profound. We love this kind of story,
and the sunset orange sky over the rolling mountains would make a perfect movie
shot but we know this doesn’t happen. No
matter what poetic illusions have seized the son, this is a father who doesn’t
look beyond the crops in the field and why should he?
And where is the son looking, what does he see?
He is the one telling you the story and you’ve made up your
mind to follow.
“Remember that picture?” he asks.
“The one your mother took, of you in the leaves with the
dog?”
“Yes, we’re going to use that” he says and then begins to
explain how you might use a photograph like a talisman to travel to that
time. Only you won’t be moving through
time and space as you might expect but your heart, your spirit, one of the
ghosts you carry around with you will experience that moment and you will share
in the emotions, in the feelings, as real as can be imagined.
It was a rather unexpected discovery that minerals that had
previously been discarded during the coal mining process could be used to
create a supplement that when taken in capsule form allowed your brain, if not
your entire body to experience a landscape or situation pictured in a
photograph. Some thought it was pure
escapism to float off into some other world, or more accurately some other part
of this world at some other point in time.
Some argued that there might be some scientific applications or perhaps
it would be used by law enforcement. The
thing is, when you’re traveling through this kind of experience everything is
subjective. Feelings are more important
than facts, or what we believed facts to be or to suggest. For example if you were traveling through a
photograph of a murder scene one would assume the emotions would be sadness or
even terror, but suppose the first thing that caught your eye was the lovely
sunshine on a November afternoon and you never looked around to see the man
being shot in the car passing by. Of
course we could go all philosophical here and question what is reality but I
think that section is two aisles over in the bookstore. The essential information here is that most
of what we think of as history is memory and memories are not carved in stone
as the expression goes. This should not
be seen as problematic because memories are much richer, more colorful and more
meaningful than facts or statistics. You
want the truth? Don’t ask for numbers, ask about the color of the sky.
He picks up the photograph and holding it in front of
himself he partly closes his eyes the way an artist will do trying to sort out
the value of a painting in progress. He
quiets his breathing and slows his heart rate looking closely at the
photograph, looking as if through the picture.
“It’s cool in this shadow” he says slowly and you assume
that there must be trees around, the source of the leaves on the ground. Gently, as if carrying a piece of fine lace
his hands move in space turning a dried leaf over in the sunlight and then
reaching out with his left hand he rests it on the head of a dog who moves
closer. If he were able to share this
moment you would feel the leaves crackling under foot and the soft dance of new
falling leaves to the ground, landing on the pair, the boy and the dog. You would feel the curled hair on the dog’s
back, white with brown orange ticking and might stretch out into the light
making sharp shadows among the fallen leaves and brown dying grass in the yard,
resting in a peaceful still moment of autumn where sunlight begins and
afternoon is forever.
And what would you do with this
feeling? Would it help you know him
better to have this experience from his childhood? Would you be locked in as soul mates
having shared this soft autumn
afternoon?
Maybe he’s just avoiding you and
that’s why he’s drifted off into this picture but you probably don’t want to
think about this even though your best friend from college who you never talk
to anymore once told you that you were about as interesting as a bag of
nails. True, this was right before she
climaxed a night of drinking by puking in spectacular fashion all the way from
the living room through the kitchen and finally landing on your bed. This was either the most honest feedback or
the most ridiculous alcohol fueled ranting anyone has ever given you.
The scene shifts back to that
coffee shop with Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln and Michael Jackson. It’s not a corporate coffee shop but one of
those funky independent venues where the walls are rough with many years of
re-painting and less than aggressive cleaning.
Tables and chairs are randomly arranged and the lighting is well, not
really well lit. But since they’re on their
way out of the shop it’s not worth spending much time describing the place.
The trio walks down the street
together admiring the shops along the block before heading into the park at the
center of town. Strolling along the
long winding sidewalk past lakes and under the leafy canopy of vintage trees
the conversation begins with results from last night’s sports events re-told
with enthusiastic detail by Michael Jackson who was never that interested in
sports when he was alive, but being dead is an excellent chance to take up new
interests what with so much time on your hands and all.
Bobby hated his father. He knew this was wrong, or at least he felt
it was wrong. How could you hate someone
who was indeed part of you, someone who shared the same DNA. As he’s telling you this story you strongly
suspect that Bobby is not the character’s real name, that it’s more
autobiographical than not and he’s just using another name to… to what? Make it
easier to tell? Avoid hurting anyone? No matter, you can keep your suspicions
to yourself for now and just listen.
The old man didn’t love his
son. He didn’t hate him either, or at
least wouldn’t admit it. In his world he
didn’t even have the words that would describe hatred for a son, it was so
foreign to his world of neat and tidy orderly observance of traditions that he
wouldn’t even know what to say.
Bobby confused him though, that
much is certain. When he was a child he
said his fondest wish was to please his own father, Bobby’s fondest wishes as a
young teenager didn’t seem to have anything to do with his father. He was pretty normal in that way.
You’re wondering why he used the
word hate. Upset, annoyed, frustrated
all might be better choices why such a strong adjective.
You’re thinking out loud “I
wonder why Bobby hates his father, and does he really hate him?”
“Let me paint you a little
picture” he says and proceeds to tell a little story. The scene is a winter night. It’s a cold and wet northeastern winter night
with snow that has been on the ground for the past three months and won’t be
gone for another month at the least. The
father wants the son to do something and he doesn’t want to do that. Angry the father yells at him “At least when
my father died I knew I had been a good son which is more than I can say for
you!” and stomped out the door. Okay,
that’s pretty awful and you’re thinking that maybe hate is a reasonable word to
use.
Our civilization has progressed
to such an extent that we’ve created popular culture of such power that people
regularly not only care about what happens to celebrities that they do not know
personally but feel that they do indeed know them as friends, sometimes closer
friends than those they actually know, better even than members of their own
family.
With this in mind it should come
as no surprise that eventually the United States of America elected a president
who wasn’t actually a living person. The
skill of projecting our wishes, hopes and dreams upon a fictional character played
by an actor developed to such as perfect state that the country was able to
plausibly vote for an idealized image.
Of course historians will quickly point out that several presidents in
American history have been more or less idealized characters, or at least are
portrayed that way in the history books and once it’s written down, let’s face
it, that’s the truth. Whatever Abraham
Lincoln might have been like on a day to day basis, however much of a pain in
the ass he might have been from time to time he’s forever powerfully carved in
granite staring out at the reflecting pool in Washington DC. There’s even been an actor who was elected
president and any quick glance at history will show that the reverence he’s
accorded has little to no connection to anything he actually accomplished.
The first election in which
fictional characters ran against each other was the most dynamic debate season
in recent memory. The characters were
acting out our images of them, our expectations for who they should be and what
they should say. It was much easier to
be excited about a candidate you were sure would follow through on campaign
promises. There was no chance of
embarrassing revelations of scandalous affairs with interns or anonymous social
media contacts. Fictional characters
don’t hide anything do they? You know up front everything there is to know
about someone. True, it may be a little
shallow but safe. We often talk about
how wonderful it is to know someone complex and interesting where you’re always
learning new things about them.
Politicians however at their best are like potatoes, simple, sturdy and
providing sustenance.
With fictional characters all the
drama is on the surface and so we’re free to support the candidate of our
choice without fear of let down later on.
And so at the end of an exciting
election season that scored ratings that went through the roof as they say in
the business, that Fred MacMurray in his character Steve Douglas from My Three
Sons won a hard fought election over Carrol O’Connor as Archie Bunker from All
in the Family. There was indeed great
rejoicing in the streets as many people realized that the United States had at
last elected a president who could truly represent the country. It was
recognized that the American potential for self delusion and ultimate devotion
to all things trivial would best be projected to the world by fictional
characters who may or may not have had any connection to the actors who played those
parts.
It probably goes without saying
that the running mate of Steve Douglas/Fred MacMurrary was William Demerest as
Uncle Charlie. Once again the American
tradition of a harmless yet often funny and unpredictable Vice President
carried on. Whenever the Senate wasn’t
getting their work done Uncle Charlie could send them to their rooms without
dinner, the progress in passing bills was astounding.
We ran before the plague like
nomads on the storm, nightriders on the verge of dawn, always expecting, always
demanding resolution, absolution, direction and salvation. The world collapsed around us and expanded
beyond our dreams. What were we making?
What was the dream that pushed us on? We
stood in city streets and fields of gold, mountains and valleys wandering and
dreaming, always asking why?
The moments were days, time was and is something liquid. And life was something that once was measured
with numbers instead of words.
Jenny watched the sun casting
shadows long into the morning while the tawny coon dog stretched out at her
feet shifted herself, resting more completely on Jenny’s foot. A faint string of steam danced from her
coffee cup into the New Mexico morning.
If there was any breeze she might have watched the movement going one
way or the other and it would have given her some direction but the air was
still, even if the day was restless.
“What do you think Annie?” she
asked the dog “Is this a traveling day?”
Jenny was the kind of person who liked to have some support for her
decisions, if a deck of Tarot cards wasn’t handy, her dog, Annie would do. The dog let out a long slow snort which she
took to be a “No” and so settled back against the kitchen chair and held the
coffee cup with both hands. This would
not be a day for making decisions no matter what the rest of the world would be
doing.
We invited the plague, we dreamed
it’s parameters, we drew the maps and still marveled at it’s arrival even if it
was just what we had planned all along.
Even if it was not a day for
decisions, it was a day that could include dreaming and Jenny dreamed of him.
The fields of Pennsylvania have a
warm deep brown that pours out of them into your heart. You can’t exactly touch it and you can’t even
say where it’s coming from, it’s just there.
It’s like a memory that you can’t remember but can’t forget either.
He walked those fields daily for
years. After they were long deserted and
barren he still saw the marvelous tangle of weeds that embraced fence posts and
gave birth to dreamers. He was a
dreamer. How much of what we see is
colored by dreams? How much of life is memory? How much do we actually live in
the present? Where does the veil part?
In those fields where the deep colors of autumn mornings surround and
comfort the world was beautiful.
Expanding and limitless and yet so easy to hold. How could it be wrong to want to stay here
forever?
You hold up your hand calling
“Time out”. “You just threw a new
character, actually two, into the story.” You say. “Who is Jenny? Do I need to
pay attention to her? Should I care about her?”
He looks at your for a moment and
replies “I can’t tell you what you should do, but why not care about everyone?”
“In answer to your first
question, she’s the great love of my life and if this story takes a Wuthering
Heights direction at the next intersection then she might well be an important
character to remember.”
“Someone once told me that I
never grew up” he said. “I never gave
up, that would be more accurate, never gave up believing in magic and in
possibility”. This sounds poetic and so
you make a note to remember this line.
“You want to talk about growing
up” he said looking off toward the sunset, or where a sunset would be if it was
the right time of day for such things.
People rarely look off towards some spot in the sky or some cloud
because you’d think, “What the hell are they looking at?” It’s not like staring at a sunset is any more
profound it’s just prettier as a rule than the average spot in the sky and so
we’re given a certain lee way to let our minds drift a bit if there’s something
picturesque in front of us. You might
still be the same drooling idiot, but if you’ve got a sunset, it’s cool, you’re
covered for now.
“I learned about growing up from
reading the Bible while listening to Alice Cooper”
You listen closer because this
might be interesting. “Both have their fair share of sex and mayhem and both
appeal to the misunderstood and outcasts.
Seriously, John the Baptist was the original punk rocker, talk about
three chords and the truth, Dude was rocking the Jordan River man.” You notice
that he’s getting pretty animated here so you sit back and just enjoy the
show. “Turning over the tables of the
money changers in the temple, I can hear “Billion Dollar Babies” as the
soundtrack. Book of Revelation? I think
Alice copped some lyrics for “I Love The Dead” from that bad boy!” You think about this and it makes sense. You often hear the line “I learned about
life…” and fill in the blank, “In the back seat of a 1970 Chevy Nova, listening
to Miles Davis, behind the plow, at the five and dime, etc.” but it’s never
just one thing is it? Because life is not just one thing, it’s an endless
stream of ghost making events. You might
as well say the Atlantic Ocean is just that stretch of sand and water right in
front of the boardwalk at your favorite beach in New Jersey. If, however, you did learn about life under
the boardwalk at a Jersey beach then you do have a special pass, you don’t need
to list anything else, because you really can learn anything and everything
about life at a New Jersey boardwalk and if it’s late in the summer then you’re
good for the next three or four lifetimes actually. Just remember that the next time you hear the
Drifters singing “Under The Boardwalk” for some people that’s a sacred hymn, a spiritual
roadmap to revelation and salvation.
“What is revealed is rarely
saved” you say, and we recognize that you haven’t said much, mostly been
observing which is fine actually because that’s a good way to learn. In some situations it is also a good way not
to get smacked in the face. Since you’ve
spoken up we’re listening and you have the floor.
“What is revealed is often take
advantage of, used up and forgotten” you said as if you were an expert on the
subject of using and forgetting.
You have felt forgotten before
and you want to make sure he knows that.
There’s nothing to be done about it now and those empty feelings don’t
magically become filled by telling someone your sad story. The sadness isn’t like concrete, it won’t
become thinner the more you spread it around but that’s what we do, we’ve been
taught to share since we were kids and so we share. Mostly sadness or anger, but it’s still
sharing isn’t it.
You could explain further but
choose not to. You could talk about just
what it was that was revealed and then taken for granted, or forgotten but that
doesn’t matter as long as he knows there is something there he might come back
and dig for it later on. You’ve given
him a map and that’s all you’re willing to give and all he’ll need at the
moment.
And so you lay back in the sand
because you’ve decided to join him in that picture of the boardwalk in late
August on a New Jersey night. In that
picture the two of you are lost in a moment that might last for hours and
that’s okay, that’s what you want right now.
The sound of the ocean is coming in clearer as you enter the world of
this old photograph and how perfect that he happened to have just the picture
after you read that part about boardwalks and salvation. The air is thick and soft as it begins to
wrap around you. He wraps around you and
you feel his weight as you settle further into the sand that is still holding a
small touch of sunlight even though it’s long dark. The uneven sand is creased by light from
between the boards above you cast down from street lamps and whatever starlight
has broken through the city light skies.
You wonder how far you can go into this dream picture that only showed a
boardwalk casting it’s shadow over a sandy beach at nighttime, there was no one
you could see in the picture and yet here or there you are. Surely you would have seen someone in the
picture if they were there, surely you would have seen the embrace and the
kiss. Were they kissing in the picture?
Those people you couldn’t see but could imagine. Were they touching and caressing? How much
can you imagine? Were they making love as the sand cooled in the nighttime air
and the sounds of waves on the beach matched sighs? How much can you
imagine? It’s your dream, and these are
only words on a page. The moon might
rise and cast a long stream of white over the ocean but that’s not necessary.
Who is he? Who is this guy you’ve
just wandered into a photograph with? Because you’re in some sort of alternate
reality, pseudo reality or somewhere that’s not here and now maybe it doesn’t
matter. Introductions might not be
necessary. Miss Manners never really
touched on this sort of thing but don’t worry, no one is talking now, the sand
is still soft and you can listen to the ocean until you fall asleep and no, you
won’t be lost in the photograph forever if you go to sleep there. This is a very forgiving alternate reality,
something like Iowa.
You remember that he talked about
a great love of his life, Jenny? Yes, that’s her name. You’ve just had this tender moment under the
boardwalk and you’re wondering if it’s all meaningless because he has this
other great love of his life. Well, what
sort of meaning do you place on a tender moment that happens outside of this
world? And has it ever occurred to you that you might be Jenny?
When you read a novel, don’t you
often become that character you love? Maybe there’s a reason why people say “I
really identified with that character” Maybe they were, or are, that
character. They say that all the world
is a stage and we are but actors or something like that, but what if we’re not
actors but rather the manifestations of characters from stories? Maybe all
stories and life and fiction and maybe we’d just follow a feedback loop back to
the beginning again going around and around getting nowhere if we tried to
follow that one.
You’re looking for salvation so
you wait for nighttime to listen to the radio because that’s when the static is
the richest. The sounds within the
sounds are where the story lies. That
night time sound from a small transistor radio with a two inch speaker pouring
out all the mystery and magic of the world.
Voices from the other side of the world or from the other side of your
town it doesn’t matter, they are somewhere other than here and yet they are
here and speaking to you and when the singer hits that perfect chord you are moved
to tears, you know every word of what they’re saying is true and you think that
you could live forever in nighttime radio.
