Out-boxed

"Look, John," she told me, there in her office, on that muggy and rainy afternoon in Florida. "You live inside your head."

Then, I wasn't sure what she meant.

From the window, the palm fronds were waving in the summer storm. The tropical rain falling in a typical Florida torrent. Dark, low skies lurking just over the Live Oaks; the rain blurring everything like a dense fog.

The summer storms always transformed Florida, they changed it, sometimes into a place that was more like Jurassic Park. Like Neverland. Like a Universal Studio set. For me, it was this transformation that felt like escapism. It compelled imagination.

Through the rain and the sound, through the furious otherness, one could imagine sailing on The Ghost, as Humphrey van Weyden in Sea Wolf, toward Pitcairn Island. Or on Bligh's Bounty, at the helm, fighting the furies of the ocean, looking for the whale.

For this I knew - I liked the rain better than the sun.

"John," she advised, "you can't stay in there forever. I want you to meet people, maybe take some chances." She had told me this before, in other ways, that I couldn't be content to push feelings and memories into the background; where they could become lost and harmless and impotent.



The other night, I visited friends in the city, in their eclectic urban condominium. I hadn't seen them in over a year.  Their home was astonishingly filled with the collectibles of a museum. Everywhere, there were tributes; to literature, film, architecture, and history. I could have looked through their shelves and walls for hours.

In the kitchen, on their deep charcoal wall, was a watercolor painting of a Polar Bear. My friend swept her arm out across the wall and cheerfully said, "And doesn't this look so wonderful here?"

At first, I didn't recognize or remember it. But I had painted it and gifted it to them some years before. It was puzzling. It had somehow fallen into the outbox of my mind.

Just like so many other things.

She was right - I was living in my mind. And it was masterful at protecting me, hiding things from me. Sorting and filing and filtering.

I eventually came to understand that the other side of perception and sensitivity - of tuning into music and feelings, of knowledge and words and the metaphysical self - was a vulnerability.  And to me, it's still dangerous.

But I'm trying. When I looked at the Polar Bear, my friend's beaming smile told me that it was OK to remember.

And that's one of the reasons I write these posts. I need to start keeping some of the sweetness and the music from getting pushed into the outbox with everything else.

I can't so easily forget the Polar Bear, lost to Pitcairn Island.

Maybe I need to quit wishing for rain every day.

The hurts that heal

Wish you were here, I wish you could see this place
Wish you were near
wish I could see your face
The weather's nice, it's paradise
it's summertime all year
and some folks we know, they say hello
I miss you so
Wish you were here



I still have a faint mark on my finger - where my older sister nicked me with a butterknife.

I was no older than seven or eight, and we were in the bunkbed at our lake house. From the top bunk, I'd reach down, trying to pull her blankets off or pull her hair or grab her book.

But one time, she was ready for it. She told me later - OK years later - that she was sorry. The crying and ensuing punishments are just faint memories, unimportant in the cosmic time-stream. But I do remember the band-aid. It was way too big for my seven-year-old pinkie and didn't really help.

That butterknife cut left a small, almost indiscernible scar. And I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

Years later, my sister would ask me to show her. Or to show it to one of her boys. Or a niece or nephew.

Sometimes I'd get a hug. Me, as a man in her kitchen, her children and dog watching, bewildered by sympathies from long ago. But her arms around my neck were not for apology or sympathy; they were for the love of our shared childhood; of secrets and memories only we could know.

And that faint scar was a reminder.

A reminder of the days of autumn, when we shared a bunkbed. When we listened to the crickets through the open windows and the muted voices of our parents and grandparents through the bedroom door. A reminder of 1976 and 1977, of summer mornings, riding our bikes to swim lessons at Memorial Park; towels around our necks, bike locks in our baskets. A crumpled dollar bill in someone's pocket.

We were as free as we would ever be - even though we didn't know then. And wouldn't, until many decades would pass. Until then, we would come to know - and share - the joy and sorrow that life would bring us, once we passed beyond those blissful summer days.

Memories that only we could understand. Why we'd hug tightly, there in her kitchen, amidst all those other satellites that circled and filled her life. She would become the center of everyone's universe - just like she had been for me, for as long as I could remember.

She was summertime all year. She brought a kind of beauty into the world like a sunset brings to a beach. Like the crickets bring to a summer evening. Like pumpkins and apples in the fall.

Her kindness was so radiant, her soul so beautiful, that only she could raise a butter knife at me as a father of four and threaten me upon the slightest infraction. She'd be making a sandwich and hear me say something. "Don't think I won't," she'd laugh.

And this afternoon, I wished she was here. I wished that she was still the center of my universe.

I cried and felt better. I looked at my finger and I thought about the hurts that heal.

And I thought about others that seem like they never will.

Citations:
Wish you were here 
Released January 11, 1999
Format CD Single
Length 4:00
Label Mercury Nashville
Songwriter(s) Skip Ewing
Debbie Moore
Bill Anderson
Producer(s) Carson Chamberlain

Wish you were here - Mark Willis

Roy and the Sky Writers

"I haven't seen that before," I said, looking at the rainbow pattern. "You know, those are kinda cool."

I thought she looked wonderfully Bohemian; ready for an adventure in a vintage travel trailer. To Oregon - or down to Baja and beyond. She could fill the soul of a VW van; puttering down the A-1A, all musical and happy and free - and free some more.

They reminded me of things like tie-dyed peace signs, just like the yellow and blue neon hair of that lady selling her shirts at the farmer's market.

They made me think of America, singing "Ventura Highway."
Ventura Highway
Ventura Highway
In the sunshine
Where the days are longer
The nights are stronger
Than moonshine
You're gonna go I know 

So simple and so complex, the rainbow. God's perfect PowerPoint projection of the palette he used to create the living experience. The geeks tell us it's just the visible spectrum of light. The height of wavelengths that shine into our retinas, our rods and cones turing them into colors inside our minds.

But in my Bohemian, tie-dyed worldview of the rainbow? Well, you'd need to know about the sky writers. Roy, G, and Biv.

Roy is the cowboy. On his palette are the pigments of dusty, rusty trails winding through the layered rock in Sedona. Hues infused with the magic of the Apache and Hopi. Like the faded rust of Zuni handprints in high caves.

Roy is all about scarlet sunsets. The tanned leather of rawhide and rein. And he rides a Chestnut brown gelding that kicks up Bell Rock dust, which floats into the sky, bending the spectrum with a cosmic lens that reminds us of the warmth and safety of Roy's campfire.

G is an emerald child, born among the flowers in the spring, among the vibrant green hues that signal new beginnings and innocence. Painting in so many hues and verdant pigments that they each seem just beyond clarity. Tones that breathe, that soothe, that flow. Colors that always - and only - exist between morning and night.

The emerald girl's colors are of the living, never burning and never freezing.



And Biv. To me, he's really Bob Dylan.

Dylan, a soul gifted to the world every few generations, whose role it is to paint the sky in his own special palette. Of chords and ballads that provide color for the most delicate and mysterious of wavelengths.

Colors of the guitar and the harmonica; of words - sometimes in sad, deep indigo tones. Sometimes in peaceful, soulful blue hues. And sometimes in the colors of the world in between; those of mesmerizing and mysterious violets. They are depth and wonder.

His words, his music. Blue, Indigo, violet.

Bob and his "Tangled up in Blue." Nobel-worthy tints.

But all the while I was alone
The past was close behind
I seen a lot of women
But she never escaped my mind, and I just grew
Tangled up in blue

And that's how we remember the rainbow. In my words.

"You should keep those," I told her.

I was thinking about all of these things. But I couldn't express why. Too many hues, too many reasons.

I was thinking about the cowboy, the emerald girl, and Dylan.

And a vintage travel trailer.