monthly musings from JD
Late August 2009 - "Look Both Ways, Pops"
The Summer of 2009 had not been one of the better seasons of his life.
Summer was ‘his’ season. He’d always thought he loved Summer so much because he’d been born in the middle of America on a hot June night, but, for whatever the reason, he always felt alive and warm and happy when the days turned long and balmy.
But this Summer had started slowly, and more then a little bit strangely. It did not get ‘warm’. It rained all the time. The sky was almost always cloudy, and, to him at least, it felt unseasonably cool. It remained this way right up until the day before his birthday.
At around 7:00 PM that evening, the sky had been so odd that he had gone outside to take pictures of the clouds. They really didn’t look like clouds, but more like numerous bubbles in the sky. The shades of their colors were completely beautiful, ranging from pink to orange to red to purple to reddish orange to shades of all those colors. He’d been surprised to find many other people on the street, taking pictures and remarking that they had ‘never seen the sky like this before’, and adding that it made them feel like ‘something is going to happen’.
Something happened.
At just about that exact time, in a hospital in Jersey, the father of his best friend, his musical co-worker, and someone he considered to be one of the most vastly gifted musical souls he had ever met, died.
He got the call early the next morning. His friend was on his way home from Athens, Greece, and called him on a lay-over in Amsterdam.
“My father died last night’.
The next week was spent with the arrangements, the calls, the notifications, the squabbles, the decisions, the absurd paperwork, and all the other necessary duties associated with burying our dead. At the graveside, keeping his jacket and tie on, he assisted his friend in the holy and sacred task of covering the grave. It was the least he could do. Perhaps there is no greater honor we can bestow.
Three weeks from that day his friend’s mother died.
In the final stages of the dreadful ALS, her lungs had finally crashed, and within 12 hours, she was gone.
Thus began a mind-numbing, morally criminal, heartbreaking time. Not only had both parents died so close to each other, but now his friend was given until the first of August to completely empty out the house his parents had lived in for 50 years, the house that he had lived in his entire life. It was to be painted and rented to other ‘living people’.
Ah yes.
The ‘living’.
Profit.
While there were ‘complications’ associated with this edict, while there was an ‘inflexibility’ that should not have been there, there was no other way around this order but to comply. With five generations of possessions and memorabilia stored inside the house, the impossible task had to begin at once.
It did.
This meant that his friend’s mother would have to be ‘held’ until the cleaning of the house was completed. In most cultures on the earth, the reasons behind any such delay would be seriously questioned.
The reason behind this delay was indeed most seriously questioned, yielding nothing.
The ‘decisions’ enforced upon his friend will be addressed by a much higher court.
In nine days of brutally difficult, brutally long, brutally emotional and brutally soul crunching work, assisted by many friends, the house was cleared. The best of people came out. Everyone close to the friend, everyone who mattered, did the right thing. They brought food. They brought water and beer and money, and they brought support that will forever be remembered by all concerned. It was like a ‘barn-raising’ in reverse. They emptied the house.
Finally, sitting on the front porch late that last night, with one of them drinking a beer, they shared a good cry about what a great place it had been to grow up. After he had given his friend as long as he needed to go through the house room by room one last time, they drove off.
“There’s no life on this street anymore’, the beer drinker had said. “There should be kids and bikes and boys playing ball and folks yelling it’s time to come in, but there’s no life here at all.”
And there was not.
Two days later, after a concert the night before, and now on the hottest day of the year, eighteen days after she had slipped her earthly chains, they buried his friend's mother.
It was there in the cemetery that another of his dear friends had come up to him, and, burying his head into his shoulder, had wept as he announced that his 36 year old niece had died two days before and would be buried in two days. She left behind five year old twin boys, an eight year old daughter, and her shattered husband.
All they could do was stand there in the cemetery and hold on to each other and cry.
This has been going on for ten thousand years.
‘Life will break your heart,
and break it once again…….’1
Death was everywhere.
The niece was buried in Pennsylvania that Thursday.
Two days later, as he stared at his computer screen, he actually cried aloud ‘Oh No….’ as he learned that his first musical comrade, the one who had played on so many of his early records and who had done so many concerts with him, had died in Georgia.
Four weeks after his diagnosis, he was gone.
He was buried in Georgia that Wednesday.
This had all become too much.
Surely he would be next, and he was no more ‘ready’ to let go then he supposed any of them had been.
Yet they were gone.
As he does in moments such as these, he became completely sober. Still. Silent. His mind raced with so many thoughts that it was difficult for any one of them to come forward. He found it most useful to simply remain quiet.
He remained, more or less, that way for the next week. He’d traveled out to Jersey to camp over night in a backyard and to sleep on the earth in a tent, and to sit in a hot tub. He’d allowed the swirling warm waters to soothe his battered and bruised spirit. He drank too much, although drunkenness eluded him. He’d questioned and doubted and pondered and watched the clear night sky for ‘answers’.
Of course no answers came.
It was just the way it was.
It was just the way it had always been, and it was just the way it would always be.
One lives.
One dies.
It really is ‘all a part of the living………’.2
Back in the city some days later, still bleeding heavily from all the loss and the sorrow and the grief, on a lovely ‘at last’ Summer night, he headed off to his nearby park to sit quietly with his friend's wife, who had gone down to ‘their place’ before him. In his backpack he had his usual bier, a glass, some ice, and his eternal straw. They would sit there for a while and watch the fireflies and the squirrels and listen to the birds and simply ‘be’ a part of the park. It’s the closest thing a ‘New Yorker’ can get to a patio, and he’d always loved their little patch of the park.
Reaching the intersection of 77th street and Riverside Drive, he’d looked both ways before he’d started to cross. This dangerous intersection always requires caution, and, even on foot, he remembered to respect the potential for accident. Seeing nothing in either direction, he proceeded.
He’d not taken three steps into the street before a large man dressed in black on a black bicycle traveling at very high speed shot past him, barely missing him.
“Look both ways, Pop’s”, the man sneered as he zoomed past at 35 miles an hour.
Insane rage immediately filled his soul.
All of the horrid events of his Summer flooded over him in an instant, and he erupted in a blind roar. Death was not going to get away with something this cheap and tawdry.
“Singer Dies in Freak Bicycle Hit and Run.”
‘FUCK YOU, BOB!,” he screamed at the top of his lungs, cursing through the silent night as only a singer putting the pedal to the metal can.
And he’d frozen, turning toward the now block away idiot dressed in black.
‘FUCK YOU, BOB!”
‘Bob’ was now two blocks away, speeding along in his own imaginary Tour de France. No doubt hoping to sweat off some of the extra weight he carried, ‘Bob’ was just another arrogant, entitled, thirty something jerk wearing all the ‘correct’ gear and riding the ‘correct’ bike and pretending to be a grown up. The only problem was that this was Riverside Drive in Manhattan, and not some lonely hillside in the South of France.
‘Asshole’, he quietly murmured to himself as he walked on to join his friend’s wife.
Although it wasn’t funny, they laughed about his brush with death. Said wife had heard his lurid yell, and had wondered what on earth had happened.
Some days later, he realized that he actually owed ‘Bob’ a note of thanks. ‘Bob’ had delivered the obvious ‘answer’; “Look both ways”. He would look both ways. He always had, and he had that night, but perhaps ‘Bob’ was just a rude messenger sent to remind him. While adding ‘Pops’ was just the usual disrespect lesser men afford gentlemen of a certain age, it really only showed the shallowness of the Tour de France racer. He actually hoped he would ‘run into’ the daring racer at some other point so he could thank him for his timely reminder, and then smack him upside the head in an effort to remind him of the respect his mother no doubt tried to instill in him and failed.
So thanks, ‘Bob’.
SMACK!
Oops.
Look both ways.
And we all will, eh?
Nothing will sneak up on us from either direction for a long, long time.
Peace and health and happiness to all, and may the rest of your summer be filled with love.
We’ll start up again come September.
Hope to see you soon.
Your brother.
James C. Dawson
August 27th, 2009
New York
1): ‘On and On’. James C. Dawson. Copyright 2002.
2): ‘The Livin and the Dyin’. James C. Dawson. Copyright 1976.
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