Midnight Dancing

I didn't see too much that was beautiful in the Army. Mostly, it was being away from home, working till I collapsed, and doing things I still think about at night when the house is too quiet. On occasion though, I was in just the right place at the right time.
There was a night I pulled advance scout duty on an air-dropped resupply. We were in a forest clearing far from any roads. It was my job to watch the lead edge of the field while we waited for a pallet of rations that, when it came, burned into the ground after the parachute failed.   So here I was at the centre of the lead edge of an open grassland. I felt exposed and not ready to be found.  Crawling on my hands and knees, I worked my way beneath a scrub bush no more than two feet high. The air was warm but still that night and stars shown through the miniature gnarled branches that had themselves seen better days. 
I laid there waiting for the plane.  I was hungry and willing it to come.  As the night quietened, I noticed strange patterns in the sand. Tiny prints had been laid down upon the earth between my hands. The prints curved and curled around, no bigger than a match heard.  They disappeared down a tiny burrow less than the cylinder of a cigarette. As I watched, a beetle slowly climbed out and onto the silvery ground. It scuttered up the branches of the shrub, soon joined by it's mate, slowly creeping in line from the tiny underground lair.  They buzzed as they climbed and soon were up to the plant's highest surmountings. In a flash they leapt into the night air to ballet around the shrub in softly buzzing, circular slow motion. The dark stars overhead flowed slowly on with the beetle's circle dance in queue beneath, for all the night to enjoy.

A Year Later

So almost a year later to the day, I'm finally getting ready to rise to college.  I was the last guest to leave an all nighter for me and had gotten good and drunk so I'd look and feel my best for the first day at university. I remember spending the rest of the night packing my belongings, talking quietly about the future and change with my friend Brian Warner as he passed out in a chair. As daylight dragged I was dragging my bags up to the driveway to wait for Ann.
Ann, my friend whom I had met on my way to the jungles of Honduras.  We were inseperable in those days and when it came time to travel away to school, there she was, in the infamous 60's Dodge Dart, pulling into my driveway for us to head to Bellingham together.  I can remember at some point she decided that it was my turn to drive. I had never bothered to get a license then, or learn to drive for that matter. Never needed one; never needed to. But, if Ann wanted me to drive then drive I would. She pulled over and we switched places and I drove us all the to our new home.  I remember her being so excited to sit in the passenger seat for once. We laughed and talked all the way up. 
Finally, at the end of the trip, we pulled into my parking lot where Brian Warner's older brother Jay and I would be sharing a flat. I saw Ann almost every day that year and was friends with her for years after that; but, the moment I always remember was the laughter on the drive.

Happy Talk

My first best friend was Jimmy Spence.  We were only six years old, in the first grade, and lived in the same neighborhood of Oakland, just by College and Clairmont.  Now six, six is a long way off when you're staring down a very short barrel at fifty. But from what I remember we were the best of friends.  At school Jimmy was first to get to class because his mother dropped him off so early to make it on time to her job at the Opportunity shop. The two of them lived by themselves in a stucco rented house on Agamemnon Court; just past Baskin-Robbins and the bank. 
One day in my back yard Jimmy gave me a big button that said Happy Talk, in half-green, half-purple psychedelic colors. Somehow I managed to hold on to it all these years. It sticks out proudly amidst my collage of family/friend artifacts I keep on my wall as I learned from Jenny Jo. But that's another moment. This moment is the surprise secret Jimmy had in his basement. We went down there once to see what he and his mother kept. Two ancient cement sinks for washing lanundry still stood against the wall down there; the type you may remember if you had grown up in a home from before the age of washing machines. When we got up close I leaned over, looked in, and to my six year old happy surprise, saw with a smile the two grey mice Jimmy and his mom had caught in the house and made a soft home for there. Beautiful little house mice...

Night Lights

Rocky and I snuck out of the dorms and off campus every chance we got. Boarding School worked on the hornor system and security consisted of a clipboard hanging on the wall where we'd sign in and out with towns as destinations, as long as we were back by ten.  After ten was another situation entirely.  Since noone ever checked the beds after lights out we'd just wait a few moments and slip out the door into the night. On one such night, we borrowed the Moto-men's bikes and rode across Spyglass and down to the edge of the Sea.  We had several adventures and run-ins that night; but the part I like best was the furthest distance we got.  Just before turning back for the night we stopped at an abandoned Carmel Beach. Not even the surfers were up and we could walk all the way until we stood in the shallow crest of waves with blackness above us, below us, and far out to sea.
Except for the lights.  In the waves as they died and dried into the sand, here and there were cold little fainting stars of bright blue. Phosphorescence it must have been. And though we searched the sand we brought back in a bag to find the little sources we never did.  All there was to prove they had been there at all was the memory of the moment of silent blue stars on the beach.

While I Was Out

Some moments you don't plan on happening: learning old secrets, losing a friend, falling in love. Some times they pass you by unnoticed, waiting years to be uncovered by your contemplating mind. And, when they finally come to bear upon you with the clarity of personal wisdom...there you are, enlightened.
   That's was the shape of things when I first realized that I could never fall out of love. You think there would be an end to it. Feeling strongly about the broken, twinned, connection. You think someone would eventually drift out of mind; emotions wash into corners too dim in consciousness to be relit or rekindled.
So there you have it. By the time I knew the wisdom of this moment, the time had passed years on back, in the twilight edge of memory, between a sunrise and a fall.

Model Behavior

I was thirteen, when I modeled for Tia Claussen.  Tia, to rhyme with Compassion; she was an artist, photographer and older sister to the Whiting brothers in the old neighborhood.  She lived on Mystic street in a room in her mother's house, in a room over the garage where she painted, took photographs and otherwise lived while going to artist's college. She was mellow, had Hippie Wisdom and listened to Rod Stewart from his Trans-Atlantic Crossing, an import one can barely find nowadays.  Magie May was her favorite song and since then has been my favorite song as well. At first, and when I wasn't looking, she took pictures of me while I was hanging out with her brothers.  Later I'd see them, matted and showing qualities of myself I had never noticed before.
I was drawn to her compassion, her consideration, her ability to let me know, for the very first time in my awareness, that I mattered, that I was important. Tia asked me one day if I would model for her. 'Will you model for a pastel for me?'  to rhyme with: you're a beautiful person whom people want know. She told me I should hold something in my hands to describe myself. I brought my lacrosse stick and there, in the basement where she sketched, I sat for hours feeling important, feeling cared about as she recorded who I was in her own eyes.
Each day we'd resume I'd find the exact position I had held the day before. She'd look to me with happy surprise and say 'Wow, that's exactly right!' to rhyme with: you're special for who you are. It was the first moment I knew; I was worth believing in. Thank you Tia. Thank you for my future.

Nineteen Twentyiths of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Some books you never forget and some you never finish. One one occaision it was both. I graduated in the eleventh grade out of spite; but more on that later. It was that eleventh year that we met. You didn't know it at first. Because at first, I was standing in the locker bay and I was looking up the ramp for no particular reason when you walked up to the top of it, looking happily about for a friend. In just as brief a time you turned in a swirl of belt length hair with the warmth of summer straw and were gone. There you had been for just a moment. A moment I caught by accident. An all-the-sound-had-dropped-away moment almost feeling stolen in the out-of-my-league feel of it. It was a moment that lasted months as it wound through my thoughts.
Sometimes I say I believe in Karma because of this. Because there you were a few months later in Spanish Class the last semester I had; just in time to borrow my copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I was so wrapped up in; which I was ten short pages from finishing. Which I was dying to read while you had it. Which of course,  I've never finished in tribute to the unfinished feelings laid down in my past when you left me to go on and grow up.  

D Felony Breakfast

At twenty I was freight hopping to Omak to find my lost cousin Holly, closest in my family to me. My friend and fellow hippie, Bruce from the Big Yellow House, had found someone, who had found her somewhere, and together the two of us had caught the Fern Turn from Bellingham in an open freight car to the Everett Switchyard.
Off the train we nighttime walked the track, careful not to step on the switches as all good hoboes know to avoid. The darkness was loud with rail traffic and the counterpoint of industry trucking, such as was there back then. Smoking factories and highway smog set upon the night, component pieces of Father Industry's plan.
But about breakfast; we walked under a highway bridge that covered the rails several lines wide. In the darkness there were well fed voices and a fire only wanderers would build. The scene was the five of them that had broken into a dairy truck which you could see, door still ajar, in the 5 a.m. just light distance. Their booty was orange juice and milk in school cartons and boiled eggs at the bottom of an ancient coffee can in the ashes of their fire. We were invited into the circle, as the traveling code insists. We ate stolen breakfast, told our tale of the cousin quest and were told stories back that live now only as glows of the emotions they extolled. And there in the dirt and the grime amongst the noblest of the homeless, we were anchored for a moment in the company of friends.

Second Kiss

A first kiss is a youthful and awkward thing. You don't know what to do; you don't even know how to do it. And yet, you talk about it years after as if it sang the smoothest of your romantic personal songs. I was barely there for the first one, being shocked out of mind that it was happening at all.
But the second, that kiss most retrievable, most rememberable, most replayable of my self-history was the one that so subtlely changed life forever. I was a thousand miles north of the scene of the first. I was sitting alone late at night when she showed up at the door. She had a job, and a car, and an interest in going out for pizza that night. We went downtown and I can't quite remember more than sitting at the table and laughing and feeling so good that someone like her wanted to be around someone like me... I can't quite remember more than that, but for ending up outside and walking into the trees across the street. There was a very short trail, a tall old tree, and a great branch reaching out, stretching just over our heads. There was a closening pause that was so pleasant, and so warm, and so right,...and there was a second kiss under the great branch that was the far limit of my, at that moment, universe.
I never forget it. It was just everything nice and good and beatiful; it was co-meditation on wanting to be closer to one another, it was a shared emotion so deep, not a thought crept in on the moment beyond the moment as it happened.

No need for Conversation

I was staying at a woodland house in an ocean nearby field with Crystal and Tito. Tito was a Gypsy Joker on probation and in love with Crystal, who was warmth embodied and kindest of kind. They had driven up and seen me, rainstorm soaked and just so wet, they could only pity me and bring me home. I stayed for some days. Crystal cooked breakfasts that were so hearty and savored of mexican heritage with the smell of spices I couldn't name. At night we drank beer I had bought with my last twenty and she told Tito and I of the Black Bear that lived in the woods behind the house.
On a sunny day me and Tito went out back to trade a door from a wrecked truck to their own of the same model. We spent an hour getting it off. We spent another hour getting the other one off to switch them. And of course, we then spent a third hour taking the correct door off the wreck once we noticed what we'd done. While we were laughing a twig snapped in the forest behind us. And, in the shortest of shared glances, lasting a second or less, we spoke sentences: ~It's a Bear! ~~Yes, I know. We're screwed, arent we? ~Pretty mutch. But I have a plan. ~~What? ~Run! ~~Dude!
And that is exactly what we did.

The Purity of Rain

At boarding school I ran each day. Nothing stopped it. I ran each day because running is what I did. Running was intensity. I had never planned it; it just happened. Each day I would, from a random walk, somewhere, just start; just start to run.
This one day I ran across the green field where we started and ended our races through the great Jack Pine Forest. I ran down the Hill by the Par Course and ran closed mouth breathing, like the indians once did, past the Del Monte Hotel. I sprinted through Carmel and was just getting going when I was kicking up sand on the Carmel Beach. Cloudy and covered by the steady sea wind, the whole stretch was empty of all but the Surfers. They, of course, never left; seeing as they knew.
I sped down the beach and rocketed over the hillock separating beaches Carmel from Indian. Rain was pelting by the time I crested the tidal dunes. Without thought to cloud my mind, I ran straight into the Carmel river that streamed in my way where its muddy mouth kisses the cold sea to this very day. I ran till it got too deep and only the too real and deadly danger of the old river's pulling current on my body washed my consciousness back into a thoughtful mode. With backwards thrashes I barely pulled myself out and staggered at last to the top of the shallow dunes where I stood, soaked and rain washed, watching and then growingly understanding the Lightning as it crashed and thundered into the Far Sea.

Pete's Promise of the Future

Sometimes we'd split up for the day, The three hippies and I. This day Pete and I were sitting in Clint's old VW van. I always kept everything with me then; Pete saw the tassle on the frame of my pack.
"What is that?"
"It's my graduation tassle. From high school."
"Gimme that." I handed Pete the tassle and he held it up and said,
"Get rid of this. You don't need to hang on to it any more. You are going to have so many adventures that over the years you'll forget all about those times." Pete reached up and hung the tassle from a small hook on the side of the van window. If the van still exists then it's probably still there today.

Clint's Guitar

"I had this gig playing guitar at this pizza place. I would come in and sit and play each night and at the end of my gig they'd give me a meal for free. It was good pizza and I liked playing there.
One night I came in to play and it was real busy. I played my set and when I went to get dinner they said, We're running out of ingredients. You can have some bread and cheese but that's it.' I was really bummed out that that's all they thought of me. I left and walked for a long time until I came to this tree. I set down my guitar against the trunk and climbed up and sat for hours.
Finally, I came down from the tree and my guitar was gone. Someone had stolen it while I was up in the tree. But you know, that was really the best thing then that could have happened to me."

The Wisdom of Clint

When I was sixteen three hippies cared for me. Dawn, Pete and Clint. Dawn made sure I always had somewhere to sleep and eat. Pete gave me advice about women and protected me from angry strangers. Clint knew about how the ancients worshipped Oak trees and spoke to me on wisdom, never saying the same story twice. Here's one:
"In the South I was riding the bus across country. I made it into deep Mississippi. There was a night where I had to wait for a connecting line and I was all by myself. I was sitting in this bus station. So the way they had it set up then was that the buiding had a wall in the middle of it and two doors were outside to get in. One side was for blacks and the other side was only for whites. I was all alone on my side and it was completely still.
I could hear music from the other side. There were four guys in there with a guitar; they were singing and laughing and I remember feeling really left out. And I really wanted to go over there and be a part of it."

Only one Thought at a Time

In College at the commune, at the Big Yellow House, we were too poor to have a car. We were too poor to have a car so we walked to the co-op and bought our fine tuned groceries for meals of ornament and grace.
The bags in our hands started to melt in the soft rain that falls in Autumn in far Northwest. The bags started to melt and we both began to laugh at our wet selves in the rain. We both began to laugh and I never forgot your wet haired smile, long after you had forgotten me.

The Wisdom of Exes

I don't remember if it was before or after, when I told you about her. I described her and you listened to me. You listened to all of me in the way that only exes may.
I described us. We stood together talking; we stood together and I spoke of her as you listened. You listened while I spoke. I spoke of her and you listened and you looked at me. You looked at me and said, 'I don't approve'.
I asked you why and you only said, 'I don't know. I just don't approve.' And, you were right, in the way that only exes can be.