“I’m blowing away, these shadows keep taking my love and leaving me”— Linda Ronstadt music and lyrics Eric Kaz
“Bell bottom blues, you made me cry, i don’t want to lose this feeling…And if i could choose a place to die, it would be in your arms..”~~~Eric Clapton “Bell Bottom Blues”
She had thick curly black hair down her shoulders and rounded red lips expressive of a certain tolerance of her own hesitant awkward gait (she exclaimed “ooops!" alot as she bumped into objects with a shy endearing lilt) holding her tray out in front of her in the dining hall freshman year at college in Vermont all thoise veiled decades ago and her appearance nightly there, legs pale and shapely smooth arresting and i never saw her in pants once and the shuffling of ungainly clogs gave them motion like a streamer fly in water entices trout each time she walked past my table and god knows there were myriad other distractions that one full year of college but Lynn was special.
Admittedly as i have slept with my fair share of women since and can replay at will and in over-active reaching mind now that my passport photos are ghostly rebuttals of even what charisma there was she doesn’t come up in my mind’s mix-tape so much each time (when sex opened a pathway to love and not just a validation, an excuse, an instinctive desire) i fell hard and the circumstances around which they were courted or seduced in turn but this connection was unique not just for being drawn out by a particular aura of innocence but for her immunity it seemed to me and of what i’m still not sure.
By late spring when i finally asked her to stay a weekend at a vacated condo my step-mother had access to over by a ski area and our interactions always seemingly chaperoned and chaste enough amongst mutual friends to arouse no real threat she accepted. We found ourselves in an awkward stand-off when it came time to sharing a bed as it was her first time and she assumed i had plenty of experience but i was a virgin like her and it was basically a case of the blind leading the blind but not so bad as to deter us from an intense relationship after that abbreviated shock. It included daily sex without birth control and a pregnancy scare in the midst of final exams. I encountered her 10 years later by chance on the streets of the back bay in Boston and she took me to an elementary school nearby she was teaching at and she was glowing with kids and a partner, a child or two grounded and apparently effortlessly fertile. She even stumbled over a desk as she showed me some kid’s artwork and we both laughed and she did mutter “ooops!”.
That summer the last to follow a full year of college as it turned out for me because the world beckoned requiring more of the solitude from noise for me to apprehend its ways or meaning and we parted company on the basis of my own insecurities as she was so less selfish by nature. and for the next 4 summers in a row i found inexplicably almost miraculously deep connection with four uniquely different if alluring women each of whom found a way to end it come autumn and it left me reeling each time as fully realised eroticised love when it ends is a small death of sorts and not the kind where you feel like dozing off after if accomplished and satisfactorily for all concerned. That was the state of emotional affairs and battered resilient ones at that when the earliest photo above was taken at 24 for a passport to meet my older sister to hitchhike around Ireland. In one of my earliest posts i may have described how the third day there on the Ring of Kerry perhaps in some castle converted to a youth hostel my sister had befriended the very same girl, german with henna hair and green eyes and she was 17 but worldly enough and had to meet her parents in Cork and brother in week as she spoke several languages and had some boy friend from back in Koln already on her trail. We had memorable days in discussion while thumbing rides and nights in pubs and tussles in creaking expressive beds (in one through the walls she heard one older sister, the proprietor hissing to her sister “that german whooor!!”) and long story short after i had picked grapes in Lyon and kissed a French girl who left me notes at dinner on napkins in envelope addressed “L’English” as she worked in kitchen we met up by fate in her hometown a city of a million people where i’d come to search for her and entirely by chance in a railroad station and wrote letters for 2 years hers in pale blue exotic air-mail envelopes and she came to see me in Vermont where there for both of us there had been changes in the interim, other arms, painful discussions. I actually had to get her back on a marriage somewhere along the way as she got caught illegally selling her crafts on street and immigration met me at the apartment door with guns loosely holstered and booted her. Later she met a guy in Boulder taking a trip i guess i should have accompanied her on but we were on different paths and they lived in a school bus for awhile and over the years i heard stayed together and now she is a renowned jewellery maker over by Pacific coast and mother of 3 sons. Not one of the ones i talk with still but i wouldn’t mind.
The insistent whimpering of a young dog tied up outside exhausted from frisking with his own first girlfriend pink tongue lolling down satisfactorily as he awaits the next diversion and so much else reminds that there is the present to consider and more recent losses and not just of love but men and women bound to us by more durable cord than erotic mutual attraction which must need be recalibrated as we age. i have and the phot in center is visual evidence, as i intend to circumnavigate and soon the Lake up north, Superior, in its even starker less travelled shoreline through Canada. Not that i take good photos in the best of times but this one appears even more ghostly given as it was taken minutes after in the parking lot of local courthouse i had learned of the sudden death of a friend and younger than me a month ago. Had talked to him just weeks earlier and we both knew and his wife too for 5 years he had been living on borrowed time for 5 years with the implant of a battery and the only one given his frail arteries. My drivers license photo sucks too but no cop has ever questioned it even as i do as to a complete picture of a person who exists as we all do in a far more complex and complete universe of movement, voices, enthusiasms rendered physical from so much more than what for instance those grainy black and white images from 1904 Marquette or Ishpeming, or Michigamme reveal of woodsmen, settlers and their families gathered in front of cabins wood and snow stacked around them.
I took a much needed balmy ride Sunday up into Alabama and luxuriated in the similarity all rural places offer us with their resilient lived-in silences.
I was reminded of the fine visit last winter here with my best buddy brother practically from birth from the north who had in 20 years never got down to my home here and we revelled in our deep-rooted bonds gasping for air with hilarity drinking in the easy familiarity, absurdity of our shared memories and across so many years and adding new ones. I took him up to Florida’s highest point and needless to say there’s no cog railway necessary as its like 400 feet above sea level.
There is a path ahead and i long to listen longer, accept the beating of other hearts and dreams, restrain compulsion to listen only for the sound of my own voice and instead relinquish the spotlit self which prevents full immersion in hope, joy, the friends disguised as strangers on the road ahead and it comes suddenly and feels like rain and out of the thinning amnesiac and exultant air, a smile, the flash of bared leg like the unexpected thrill of a trout’s darting from cover into sunlit cool clear water, the past has helped me prepare for better to come. The heart if it lives long enough and true enough to its aim finds its desire fulfilled sometimes in the imagining, always in the remembering of the good things.
Warren Zevon recorded his final album “The Wind” after being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2002. This is just one of the songs on it that are so poignantly bravely emoted. The idea we never really die, succumb to the anonymous void until there are none left to whisper our names on this earth is partly what i feel when i listen to it. Other things too. So many other things and they free you to look inside, not out. Hope you are well. I do the best i can, still figuring it out.
Could be I listen to Warren Zevon more than most, and that song is one of those I tend somehow put in each playlist- whatever my intentions when I put one together, but it reminds me that life is so rich. Like recalling a delicious meal with friends I love, or realizing too young that we all live on borrowed time, but I felt as I read this, the places, the relationships (they all are however brief) and its dissolved a wall I didn’t know I built around me since this morning (after dreaming of a funeral that already happened but not in the dream) so thank you for leaving me wide awake right now.
“There is a path ahead and i long to listen longer, accept the beating of other hearts and dreams, restrain compulsion to listen only for the sound of my own voice and instead relinquish the spotlit self which prevents full immersion in hope, joy, the friends disguised as strangers on the road ahead” this the heart of everything, you understand.
I run into everything and continuously apologize 🙃