Shelley Hobson never really intended to jump.
Nevertheless, there she found herself, plummeting backward down the rabbit hole, defying gravity - into the underground maze of narrowly tunneled switchbacks and false passageways that were the 1970’s counterculture. And even in the crystal clear blackness of night, nothing was as it seemed . . .
While the novel "Corners" features some real historic figures, it is historical fiction.
"All things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to His purpose." - Romans 8:28
Definition of word up: "I comprehend what you are saying and verify that what you are saying is true, my good brother." - Urban Dictionary
Romans 8:28. Word up, for my life. Thank God. Glory to God.
I have recently been going over my lifetime balance sheet again and again, classifying major events as blessings or hardships. Somehow, after everything hits the list, no matter how many things I put on the hardship side, the blessing side keeps winning.
Oddly, things I put on the hardship list keep popping over to the blessing side somehow. How can this be?
Here. Look.
I'll start with the hardships, just because.
HARDSHIP LIST
1. Get autoimmune disorder which causes complete hair loss. Hair still gone. (1996)
2. Get new boss. (2008)
3. Reassigned to lower position from dream job I've held for 25 years. (2008)
4. Sent to teach at a school for the highest risk teens in the school district. (2009)
5. One third cut in pay. (2009)
6. Other driver nearly totals my car with me in it. (2010)
7. Husband leaves me. (2011)
8. Lose the home my children grew up in. (2012)
Hmm. Bad scene.
Now here come the blessings over the same time period.
BLESSING LIST
1. Both of my children become believing Christians. Still are. (1996)
2. Profoundly discover my own inner beauty and the accepting love of my fellow humans. (1996)
Wait a minute - that last one was because of the hair. So that makes the hair a blessing. Check off one hardship.
3. Get a whole year off with executive pay. (2008-09)
4. Sit down and write a novel which considers how the arc of a life story is impacted by the love of God. (2008-09)
5. Feel the tangible hand of God upon me through the writing process, which renews me from the inside out. (2009)
Sheesh. Those three were a direct result of the "new boss" and "reassigned from my dream job" hardships. And of course those hardships directly caused the "cut in pay" hardship, but the blessings were worth every penny in lost pay. So check 'em off. All three, check - check - check.
I think we're almost even. Next blessing:
6. Sent to teach at a school for the highest risk teens in the school district. (2009)
Wait a minute - that was on the hardship list! But the students - they're so smart and so passionate, and at the same time so neglected and so sad, that all one can possibly do in their presence is love them. And when you love them, the love they return to you is from a heart of gratitude, deep and rare.
BIG time blessing. Check it off the hardship list.
7. Had car completely rebuilt and got a new paint job. Improved my relationship with insurance company and super nice people at the body shop. (2010)
This one's obvious. Check off the car crash hardship. Besides, it's only a car, and we met an angel on the roadside when we should have been dead instead (but that's another column).
8. Find complete peace alone in the presence of God while enjoying a nearly drama-free life. (2011)
'Nuff said. You can guess which hardship gets checked off for that.
9. Find viable opportunity to move out of a property which is financially breaking me, just two years in advance of my retirement. This leaves me free to move wherever I please as soon as I retire without the burden of selling. (2012)
Besides, the house was only a shell. The love has always been separate from the bare walls, and our collected stuff which makes the house a home comes with us. That, and the love. Besides, the kids are in their twenties anyway. Check it off.
10. Add the blessing of deeply embracing the fact that love is more important than things, even though we have always known this. Now we know it better.
Winning.
Hardships, 8. Blessings, 10. And most, if not all, of the hardships were blessings in the first place anyway.
Who but God can see what is for our good? His view is high and wide, while we lie on our bellies in this world, under His care. All we can know is one thing: He took on the ultimate hardship because He loves us passionately. He has promised to never leave us nor forsake us, and I believe Him when He says that He won't.
Sometimes, when we are at our weakest, what we value most is safe haven.
But just as often, that which appears safe, isn't really all that safe anyway.
In real life, I'm a teacher to at-risk teens, and in truth I learn way more from them than they have ever learned from me. Many of them have never experienced genuine safety a single day of their lives, except perhaps at school. Yet they believe, because they are children, that those who are in charge of them are at least a little bit good, and that they are safe because of this.
The world is in fact a very dangerous place, more so for some than for others. Because of this, discernment and a fervent commitment to purpose are key. The last thing we need is an overweening thirst for safety.
Now, I am not talking about the safety that we seek from common sense, because we want to live to serve another day. I am talking about bad safety, the safety that puts you to sleep, that makes you lazy, the safety that makes you too comfy to see the wolf crouching behind the door. The safety you seek because you are afraid to live.
This is the kind of safety we are tempted to seek when our lives have been thrown into chaos, such as by cancer, or a shocking childhood, or an exceedingly bad marriage.
If we're more fortunate, it's the safety we snuggle into when life is better than we have a right to expect, and we have become lazy out of habit. Shame on us for that.
Now, for many of my students, danger unfolds right under their noses as a matter of course. I am talking about real danger, the kind that can cost you your life in the middle of the night when the rest of us are sleeping. And yet, wherever they see strength, my students, especially when that strength professes love, they seek shelter there with a childlike faith. Sometimes they can't tell the good safety from the bad any more; other times they simply have no choice but to sit in it, because they are children. And they get burned, and they never knew what hit them. They see the wound, and they don't know how they got it.
What's our excuse?
In my real life, it has become about praying for their souls and minds all the while I am high-school-English-teacher-ing the dickens out of them. This is partly because my judgment in my own life has not always been a whole lot better than theirs, and I know where things could head for them.
Safe haven is not where it's at. It's about asking a few hard questions: What needs doing in this world? What needs building? What outrageous thing needs correcting? What are we driven to do about it?
It's about fearlessly grasping the ember God planted in your soul and fanning it till it catches fire. It's about machete-ing out the unseen trail in front of you and then walking it brazenly, torch held high.
Not all of us, but some of us, look for love in all the wrong places, desperately seeking safety at any cost; or just as wasteful, we find a good safe thing and hitch our wagon to it, and park.
That's not what we were made to do. We were made to burn. We were made to shine. We were made to be a conduit for the love of Someone bigger than ourselves, to leave the world better than we found it. We were not made to hide, not in an alley, not in a gang, not in a dysfunctional relationship, not in a drug. Not even, for the lucky ones, in the bosom of our safe little home, even if it really is pretty safe by comparison.
If we were blessed to find human love in this world, we were meant to use it as fuel, not as a drug. We are the creation of Another, not our own, and it's time to start living that way.
I feel like sharing a chapter from my novel Corners today, one in which the misbegotten Shelley is again looking for love in decidedly unsafe places, all because she is desperate to feel safe. In this chapter, you can see the stupid coming; you can see the wreck before it ever happens. These are the lessons we learn, when we choose to learn them the hard way. Such is life. Mistakes, we make. But then we get up, and we forgive, including ourselves, and do it for the right reasons the next time.
Because at the end of the day, if we don't do the good work we were put here to do, all because we were busy groveling our way to safety, then we haven't done what we came to do. And that, good friend, would be a terrible waste.
* * *
The store was empty except for me and Bruno one December Saturday night, with lights already turned out everywhere but the kitchen, the loft, and the night lights in the front window. It was starting to get cold, and you could almost see your breath in front of your face even inside the store now that the heat was off for the day. I was hurrying to finish up for closing, lost in thought over my work, picking out recipes for the next day so I could grab the freshest ingredients early before the customers came in. Bruno and I had been bantering back and forth all day, him “meep meep” -ing around the deli like my shadow; and me noticing his antics more than he realized, tracking his every movement with my eyes, smiling my Mona Lisa smile whenever he noticed me noticing him.
“Merry Christmas, Tranquilla,” he whispered, suddenly out of nowhere, his lips barely touching the back of my hair.
I gasped and wheeled around, the shock of his unexpected presence, the unfamiliar heat of his breath near my ear, and his granite body behind me causing the fine hairs on the side of my face to stand up.
He laughed as my chestnut mop whipped into his face, catching him in the mouth. I had been leaning over a little file box in front of the pass through, studying a recipe card, when he had sneaked up and abruptly planted his hands on the counter around me, sheltering me in the space he created. He let go of the counter as I turned, and backed up, grinning at me.
“You smell nice, bella,” he said. “What is that?”
“Irish Spring and Tide,” I flirted. “If it smells like more than that, it must be my natural sweetness.”
“Awwh, you beat me to it,” he joked, pressing his clenched fist into his heart like I’d shot him there. “So tell me, Tranquilla, do you still have to stop and think about Graham whenever you see me?”
We stood there staring at each other for a moment, the air between us thick with surprise and the electricity of emerging connection. I looked him over thoroughly as he calmly observed me, waiting for me, while I took in his skin, the thick, loose black hair that he was constantly smoothing out of his eyes, those eyes, like ice but somehow warm, eyes that penetrated deep to the center of me and melted there, leaving something of his behind that didn’t go away. And the well muscled frame that I didn’t dare look at, not yet.
“No,” I said simply. “No, I don’t.”
“Well, good for me,” he said huskily, a slow smile still playing around his lips as he held my gaze. He cleared his throat. “So here I go. Can I take you out for a drink tonight, bella? You know I missed your birthday, and I have something to give you I’ve been keeping. I’ve been waiting, you know, until you didn’t, you know, have anything on your mind any more. You know what I mean.”
I knew exactly what he meant. My 21st birthday had been in October, and even though he and I never talked about Graham, he knew that my heart still ached from something back then, from whatever that thing was that had been hovering over me when he and I shared the bottle of Chianti months ago, the thing I couldn’t tell him about. And he had waited for my eyes to clear and my heart to lighten all this time. He had known just the right moment, to the day and hour, when it was time, not a moment too soon, or too late.
I took in a breath. “OK. Right now?”
“No, next week. Yes, hippie girl, right now. Can I help you clean up?”
“No, you goof, we’re already clean. I’ll think about recipes later. I want a Kahlua and cream. Two.” I fake-punched him in the jaw, and he craned over backwards like I’d really jabbed him.
“Oww, Tranquilla, you knock me out. You can have as many as you want. I got you.”
We walked the grocery aisles together, looking for items out of place or fallen; then he locked down all of the outside doors and turned out the lights in the kitchen and the loft. He came back out to grocery, where I was still waiting between the canned fruits and vegetables and the bread aisle, up by the cash register. He stopped about eight feet back and stood, hands in his pockets looking at me. His left eye twitched a little, and a smile broke across his face. He approached me slowly, reaching up and weaving his hand into my hair as soon as the length of his arm would allow. His fingers came gently around the back of my head, pulling me toward him, bringing my face to within inches of his, his eyes boring into mine.
“I’ll arm the store and meet you at the truck,” he whispered.
Once we were bouncing along in the little red market pickup, the newness melted away again, giving us the respite of our old easy friendship and gossipy chatter to fall back on. The conversation came in a flood, almost like a reaction to the intense silences of moments ago: what were Ray and Nannette doing for Christmas; was he giving bonuses, or a party at his big house in San Bruno. We all loved parties at Ray’s house because he had a home version of Pong, a computer ping pong game that was built into a game table where the top should be. We would sit around that thing for hours until our brains shut down. He was going to add Pac Man to it for his two little ones for Christmas, and we were trying to talk him into putting one up in the loft.
As we got closer to the wharf and could see Alioto’s Restaurant in the distance, Bruno told me word was that two Italians were going to run for mayor, and we debated who our favorite of the two likely contenders would be, Moscone or Barbagelata. We were kind of leaning toward Moscone, a man of the people who didn’t hide out in his St. Francis Wood home, but spent time in the stores and cafes of the city’s neighborhoods, keeping tabs on people. Plus he had been majority leader of the State Senate, while Barbagelata had just been a Supervisor, and Willie Brown liked him. And I liked Willie. He used to give parties for us poster factory kids, since we worked for his friend Jeff, another man of the people.
Solidly back in our comfort zone together, we pulled into the narrow alley beside The Tide, a little bar right down on the wharf where it turned out Bruno was connected. That meant when he walked through the door, the owner came out and said, “Eeyyy, Bruno, goombah, come stai?” and patted Bruno on both shoulders with his hands. It also seemed to mean that Bruno could park wherever he wanted, avoiding the need to circle the block countless times to wait for a space to open on the street, or to pay the freight for a garage space and walk.
“Eeyyy, Pietro, non c’è male,” he replied, gathering up the broad-chested barman in a bear hug and patting him on the back.
“So who’s da dish, my friend?” our host asked, wiping his hands on his apron as Dean Martin sang “C’e la luna, mezz’o mare” from the little nickel jukebox in the booth next to where we stood.
“This, my friend, is Tranquilla, of whom I have spoken many times. Or Shelley, to you. Shelley Hobson. Shelley, this is Pietro. You can call him Petey if you want, or whatever.”
I extended my hand to shake, and Pietro took it in his and turned it, backside up, raising it halfway to his lips and bending down as if to kiss it, but just bowing low over it instead.
“My honor, Miss Shelley.”
“You’re a gentleman, Pietro. So nice to meet you,” I said lowering my eyes shyly.
“It’s good you didn’t kiss, goombah, cause you should not be gettin’ spit on the lady,” Bruno cracked, and they both chattered off something in Italian, laughing and punching each other in the chest, faking heart attacks in turn.
“OK, Tranquilla, let’s sit. Petey, can we sit here?” Bruno asked, nodding his head to where Dean – no, Dino – was crooning.
“Be my guest. My house is yours,” Pietro replied, sweeping his arm across the front of himself like a doorman.
“You are too kind. No, exactly kind enough – meep meep!” said Bruno, taking my hand and ushering me into the booth. “One large White Russian for the lady, and a Michelob for me.”
“You 21, paisan? Just kidding,” joked Pietro, laughing in strange little barks.
“Shaddup, stunad. Bring a frosted glass, OK?” Bruno smiled and shook his head. “We love each other like brothers,” he said to me as Pietro went for the drinks. “We went to high school together and he graduated a coupla years before me so he likes to bust my balls. Excuse me, give me a hard time. You look beautiful, by the way, deli girl. But that little aroma of mortadella behind your ear I like the best.”
I wadded up a napkin and threw it at him, just as Pietro brought the drinks.
“Kids, kids, let’s keep it quiet in the house now or I’ll have to call the authorities.”
“Funny guy. This is a funny guy,” remarked Bruno winking, cocking his thumb toward Pietro. “You make me laugh, Petey. Now make like a tree.”
“You are a tree,” said Pietro, snapping Bruno on the shoulder with a kitchen towel and scuttling back over behind the bar, with that same rolling shuffle Bruno meep-meeped around the market with.
“You guys almost look like brothers,” I observed, looking around the place and taking in the waterfront paisano ambience. The tables were thick with lacquer over brightly colored Italian ads for Campari, Galliano, Coca-Cola, San Pellegrino, and Bolla Valpolicella and Soave. The entire back wall was tight with bottles stuffed into shelves, with liquers, syrups of every flavor and color, and sparkling waters packed in alongside the Johnny Walker Red and Black and the Wild Turkey. There were mirrors all the way around, making the tiny space look three times its size, and the booths along both walls were upholstered in alternating tufted stripes of shiny, thick red and green vinyl. The little juke boxes on each table top had a mix of current hits and Italian standards, including C’e la Luna, Volare, and Oh Marie, Bruno’s favorites. I knew this because he liked to sing little bits from them when he was meep-meeping around.
But the best part was the sidewalk outside, now dark and covered over with canvas for the night, where the crab pots boiled during the day on either side of the glass cases, filled with whole cracked Dungeness, shrimp, calamari, oysters, clams, and whatever came back fresh from the traps and nets that morning. Wooden barrels full of French loaves, Colombo and Boudin and Francisco, stood out front, inviting you to grab something in white paper with a plastic cup of wine along with your loaf, and dine by the water. I had only ever walked this sidewalk as an outsider, but being here with Bruno made me feel like I had more cousins on a new side of town now, where I never had before.
Pietro walked up with a tray. “Here’s your drinks. Enjoy, brother. You call if you need me, Shelley, OK? Don’t you let this one give you a hard time.”
“I can take care of myself. Besides, he’s a good boy for me,” I replied.
“We’ll see,” said Pietro, winking and walking away, Bruno whacking him on the forearm as he turned.
“A character,” said Bruno. “Is that good, bella?”
“Wow! It’s strong. Is that what Kahlua and cream is, a White Russian?”
“Pretty much,” Bruno answered, taking a swig of his beer, eyeing me. “Do you like it?”
“It gets better with every sip. Better order another one because this one’s going down.”
“You got it, Tranquilla,” and he raised his arm over his head without turning around. In seconds I had another one with a fresh tiny red straw and a little square napkin sitting in front of me. I almost didn’t notice Pietro come up.
“So, Tranquilla, I have a little belated birthday gift for you.” Bruno took a small square box out of his jacket pocket and slid it across the table. I felt a little intimidated at the sight of it.
I opened gingerly, and inside tacked to a little loop was one half of a heart with a broken edge, very thin delicate gold, and engraved with what looked like Hebrew letters on the back.
“It’s a mizpah,” he said. “When I can’t be around to watch over you, you know I have the other half, and I’m thinking of you. You’ll know I’m always there, always your friend. See? I’ll keep the other half with me.”
He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his wallet, opening up the picture section and showing me where the other half was inside one of the sleeves. “Now you have to give me a picture of you so I can put it in here with my heart. OK?”
I was touched, and uncomfortable, but not so much that I wanted to push it back across the table. “It’s beautiful, Bruno, thank you. I’m going to put it on my chain right now, next to Bob‘s locket. You know Bob . . .”
“Sure, Tranquilla, I know all about Bob. Great guy. I would be proud to share a chain with Bob.”
I took off my chain and added the mizpah, then put it back on and held it up to show Bruno. “I love it. It makes me feel very safe. Thank you.” I was about two-thirds of the way through my second drink by now.
“You want one more of those, Tranquilla?” Bruno asked, holding up his hand. Like magic, another one in front of me. I definitely did not see it arrive this time, and before I knew it, I had finished it. Bruno, I thought, might still be nursing his first beer. Or it might be my imagination.
“Another?”
“Hell, no. I think you’re growing another head. No, it’s a whole twin. I might be ready to go home,” I said, holding my hand up to my cheek, wondering why it felt clammy on the outside when it felt so hot on the inside.
“You bet, Tranquilla. Here, let me help you to the truck,” and he came around beside me and lifted up on my elbow, starting to lead me outside.
“Don’t you have to pay?” I asked wanly.
“No, bella, I have an agreement. You’re always welcome here now too, and come for lunch if you’re ever down here without me. Petey’s treat.” Bruno and Pietro nodded at each other, both of them looking very far away to me, and small.
I was both impressed and impaired. I tripped a little going over the doorstep.
Bruno poured me into the truck and maneuvered it backward out of the alley, then through the narrow, criss-crossing streets around the wharf, and down Beach over to Hyde, making the long pull straight up the cable car tracks, manual transmission and all, without a single slip or grind, the muscles of his forearm rippling under his taut skin. It seemed like only a minute to me before he pulled into the alley beside Lighthouse and turned off the engine, probably because, admittedly, I was out of it. Suddenly it got very quiet in the cab of the pickup, and stuffy.
“Why don’t you come inside with me a while, bella,” he said soothingly. “We can sit in the loft and talk before you go home to Graham.”
I was thinking coffee actually sounded pretty good and had opened the door of the truck, stepping out into the alley ready to go inside for a hot cup. But as soon as my feet hit the pavement, I was hunched over, all my snacks from the dinner hour at the deli and the White Russians in a puddle between my feet.
“Aayyy, madone!” Bruno cried out. “Poor Tranquila. What have I done to you?” He scrambled over the stick shift to the other side of the cab, reaching over to pet my hair. “And to me,” he said to himself more quietly. “It must have been the vodka.”
“Vodka?!!? What vodka? All I had was Kahlua and cream!” I moaned, retching up nothingness.
“Well, really Tranquilla, you had a few White Russians. White Russians have just a drop of vodka in there. Just a drop.”
“A drop of vodka?!!? I can’t drink vodka! Ever since I binged on screwdrivers in high school I can’t drink vodka. It makes me sick.”
“I know,” he mourned. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, me too. But next time don’t do me any favors with drinks, OK? I’d give you a kiss, but I just had vodka. Again.”
Bruno moaned softly, tilting his head back. “Ay, bella. Can I walk you home?”
“What, no ride? Just kidding. Yes, you can. I would appreciate it. Oh, my head,” I groaned.
“Wait, take these.” Bruno pulled out a bottle of Coke from behind the seat and a bottle opener, handed me three aspirin from a bottle in the glove box, and popped open the Coke.
“You take these now, and you won’t feel a thing in the morning, I promise.”
I obeyed, and walked around behind the truck, meeting him in the middle of the alley.
“I had fun anyway,” I said. “And thanks for the drinks.” I poked him a good one in the chest with my free hand and took a swig of Coke with the other.
He took his jacket off and draped it around my shoulders, taking my hand in his and walking me silently all the way to my doorstep, waiting until the door closed behind me. And I only had to stop and bend over the gutter twice on the way there.
The police escort left him as he entered the black Indianapolis neighborhood where his next campaign stop was to be. April 4, 1968. Senator Kennedy knew that Martin Luther King, Jr., had just been felled by an assassin's bullet in Memphis. The crowd did not. Bobby would be the one to tell them.
They were on their own, he and his staff. It fell to him to underscore in his own words what the fallen Reverend had said: darkness does not drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate does not drive out hate; only love can do that. That's what King had said. That's what he had lived. That's what they must now do, that and grieve, as Kennedy still did for the loss of his own brother: grieve, and wait for grace.
"My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus, and he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." - RFK
He gripped his speech in his hand, but he didn't look at it. He looked them straight in the eye.
In the wake of Reverend King's assassination, many communities burned. But not the Indianapolis neighborhood where Kennedy had spoken, where he had watered the seeds of peace that King himself had sown over the months and years previous.
King was not a perfect man, but he had lived a life soaked in light, bathing in it and shedding it. One day while in Atlanta, I walked the whole distance from Peachtree St., around the curve, under the freeway to Auburn Avenue NE, to where King had been born and lived. It was a hot day, a Sunday, and the further I walked, the deeper the legacy soaked into my bones.
The sidewalk is old near the freeway, a channel down the middle where many feet have trod. The businesses appear untouched as you round the corner, restaurants with the menus still painted outside, shoe repair, handyman, tobacco, records and books, as I remember.
The old Ebenezer Baptist Church, the one where King's father preached, is on the right as you come close to his birth home. That was my church that Sunday, the one I chose over the large modern Ebenezer across the street, where the great ladies in their glory, picture hats for crowns, worshipped.
From a hard narrow wooden pew, one of three people, I counted pictures of long passed elders adorning the walls. Steep floor, Victorian carpet, velvet drapery, gilt altar. Smell of must. Taped voice of the young King. "I have a dream . . ." Shed a little light, oh Lord.
King in Memphis, the day before his death
Outside, next door, the eternal flame still burns today, a wreath adorns the monument, murals tell the story. A little further, in a wood frame row home, creaking steps, tiny patch of grass perhaps for a dog, clothesline still hanging, he was born. Born into light, born to shine unto death.
He knew he would die for it, but he gave anyway.
The day before he was killed, he preached in Memphis, before a packed congregation, and said:
"Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about a thing. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." - MLK, Jr.
King's light glowed over that Indianapolis neighborhood on the day of his death, as if from a city on a hill, just as it had shone over Montgomery, and Greensboro, even as it shone in the darkness of Birmingham and in Mississippi. Just as it danced on the Reflecting Pool in the capitol city of this great nation.
It falls to us now to tend the flame, to keep the bushel basket at bay. He dreamed, and he acted, even in the face of death. He knew what freedom looked like, and he lived it. Now we must live it, and remember those who trod there first.
So onward, to the promised land, and take a moment to remember on this beautiful warm Sunday those who went before you.
Leonard Knight's life had taken many directions. As of 1966, at 34, he wasn't entirely sure exactly where he had arrived.
Then one day, to get some space from his sister Irene's relentless prayer and talk of the Lord, he retreated to his car. In there, he found himself repeating The Sinner's Prayer, over and over and over. He was pulled into it inexorably, seemingly by a force outside himself. "Jesus, I'm a sinner. Please come onto my body and into my heart."
And then it came: the revelation. Leonard Knight had been transformed by the renewing of his mind. He asked, and it was given unto him.
After briefly seeking a place unsuccessfully inside the mainstream Christian community, Leonard retreated to the desert - for many more than forty days and forty nights. He tried to sew a hot air balloon stitched with The Sinner's Prayer, but it wouldn't fly. He tried to build a mountain, with his bare hands and found objects, proclaiming the love of God, but the County Board of Supervisors stopped the project. They said it violated the separation of church and state because it rested at the entrance of an abandoned military base which was now a public park. They went after it with claims that the soil was contaminated with toxic waste from years of government dumping.
But Leonard persisted. He had been transformed through the renewing of his mind. He saw nothing but the One Thing.
Leonard's vision by now was visible to others. People came from all around to see Leonard's growing masterwork, a veritable mountain of salvation. Petitions were mounted. Increasingly important folk advocated on public television. And Leonard's vision bore fruit: he had gone into the world and shared the good news to creation. Today, the result is more than a field of dreams. He built it, and still today they come.
Salvation Mountain is Leonard's song, the song God gave him to sing.
Was Henry David Thoreau right, that most men live lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them?
Maybe the more important question is, who among us is "most men"?
No two of us are really the same, are we? NO ONE is most men, not really.
Sure, we can try to generalize. But check the fingerprints. That means you get to be whoever God and you decide you will be. You can be quiet and desperate, or not. You choose. God lets you.
You can choose to choose Him, and He will unleash the song He wrote for you: raw, unvarnished, or impeccably refined, but in all cases viscerally you and incomprehensible to you at the same time. He will mine it from within you and it will bubble up like warm water from underground. He promised. Just ask.
You can also choose not to sing at all, or to make up your own song. Good luck with that.
Since this is my square, I get to say what seems to me. And it seems to me that most people go it alone, without His effervescence of holy inspiration, and are often cranky or sad. Or fussy. Or whatever you want to call it.
Even when we don't choose to go it alone, we spend most of our time trying to grab the wheel from Him and aiming it for the ditch. Good part is, if we have let Him in the car, He will guide it gently to the ditch for us, saving our hides, even if we are in the middle of a full blown tantrum. After which we complain mightily that He didn't deliver the car undented. And He keeps loving us anyway, because God is love. The Bible and Leonard say so, and they are right.
Dents are part of the ride, I'm afraid. That's how we learn to relinquish the wheel. Leonard knows this too.
I hope you will visit Leonard at http://www.salvationmountain.us/bio.html. You can see pictures of his mountain there, and find his physical address. He likes it when you visit, but if you write him, his friend Bob will answer, because Leonard will be busy building.
That's because building is the song God gave Leonard to sing, and he sings it very well.
Are you singing your song today? Is it bubbling up from your soul like magma from deep places? Share, please, and be blessed.
Me too. This is where we all let out a collective, "Wah wah wah."
I feel better now, and I hope you do too.
I know I am normally much more depressed, and depressing, than this, but I have just finished making my New Year's resolutions. I had no plans to make any resolutions until I found myself giving advice on a friend's Facebook post this morning.
I'm not one of those people who comment on everything that moves, but sometimes a post just cries out to me, begging for my unique reply.
My art school alumni friends are extra special to me, because they represent those halcyon days when our hair cascaded lush and thick over our shoulders, when joy and sorrow came and went of its own accord and we counted it all joy. Those days are where my novel "Corners" is set, the Shelley years, the years of possibility and New Year's resolutions (see my '11 blogposts starting with the month of April).
So one of my art school friends had pulled on his sad pants this morning, as I so often do. In fact, I had already done the same myself today, when I saw his post. It's gonna be a bad year, I can tell already, said he. No different from last year. I want a refund.
"You're just stuck in the border crossing," I said. "Give it time."
Say what? No sooner had I pressed the button on this nugget of wisdom than I had to ask myself, what the heck did I mean by that?
So I got in the shower. And I thought, and I thought, and I thought. And I arrived at the conclusion, this advice was meant for me, my own self, most of all.
I pondered the border crossing metaphor, as the water tattooed my skin, whoosh whoosh, thrum thrum. If you think about it, a border crossing requires a toll. Dollars and cents, or feats of strength, or acts of courage, if you're waxing metaphorical. You don't just get to cross over scot free.
So since we were waxing metaphorical, I decided the toll was two coins, and the coins were feats of strength and acts of courage.
The feat of strength would involve the act of correcting one obvious error in the way I think every day. The act of courage would be following through on at least one behavioral change that would naturally flow from that correction.
Conclusions such as these can only be drawn in the shower.
So how in the world did I get from here to there, other than through the steady drilling of hot water?
I have absolutely no idea. Nor do I have the slightest clue as to how I will begin to identify which thought error I must correct, let alone the behavioral change that will follow.
This is where faith comes in. And here comes the gift that comes with it.
"Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is." Romans 12:2.
Now, as a believing Christian, I have no doubt that God the Father both commands and comprises the scintillating force field which generates, animates, and maintains the construct of all spiritual, intellectual, and physical existence. I have no doubt that in the smallness of our individual minds we can only conceive Him as what Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck describes as "the Great Mind which is the matrix of all matter." And I have no doubt that the Holy Ghost of Christ breathes His wholeness into the sub-atomic fabric of our personal beings as we allow it, transforming us if we don't cry uncle.
In a way, for me, this is almost not faith, but just my experience.
My faith and my experience tell me that He will continue to transform my mind only as I continue to ask Him to. I don't know how He does this. I only know that He promises to do it, and I watch Him do it day by day as I allow Him to do it.
He does it by leaving me small gifts in places where, in my ham-handed awkwardness, I can find them. Gifts like the Facebook posts of friends; gifts like life experiences that change the everyday fabric of my existence, even when I don't want them to. Gifts that drive me to stand in the shower for great lengths of time, pondering whatever metaphor He has decided to show me today for a guidepost.
As a created thing, I am physical and weak - selfish, greedy, and all of that kind of stuff. Prone to tantrums. Prone to wanting my way. Guideposts, I need. It's a good day if I don't ignore them.
The twelfth chapter of Romans - the same chapter that prescribes being transformed through the renewing of my mind - tells me what to do to make the transforming happen, if I quiet my mind long enough to listen.
Do not think more highly of myself than I ought, but think of myself with sober judgment. Serve in accordance with my gifts, not gifts I wish I had but don't. Let others serve in accordance with theirs.
Honor one another - this crowd I've been given to live in and travel this world with - above myself.
Be joyful in hope; patient in affliction - underline that; faithful in prayer.
If I did even ONE of these things, it would surely begin the process of transforming my mind.
The feat of strength is beginning. The act of courage is continuing. He will do the rest. The rest is all faith, and Him.
So here is my New Year's resolution: Since I have no strength but to take a single step, I will take just one: to watch my thoughts, and reflect on the criteria above. Then I will give Him my mind to transform, minute by minute, His way.
He will do the rest. At least, that is, as much as I will let Him, and no more than I can stand.
And I will try my best not to cry uncle any more than I absolutely have to.
Funny how, as much as things change, they ultimately remain the same.
The holidays conjure fever dreams of holidays past, stirring reminders of how we became who we are right now.
One day last week, lost in a really nice bottle of Chardonnay, I contemplated out loud with friends how, from the very first days of my youth, the handprints of my earliest decisions have continued to remain visible on all of my decisions to this very day - all of the good, and all of the bad.
Do we ever escape which way we decided to turn when we stood on our very first corner? Consider this, before you start running your maze today: no turn is ever fully undone, no matter how hard we try to go back. Even if we only turn left, or right, forever, Thomas Wolfe is still right: you can't go home again.
This does not stop us from trying. The steps we take daily are painfully predictable. The ground beneath us changes relentlessly, uncompromisingly, even if we stand still and nothing else changes except the passage of time - yet still we strive to reconstruct the womb, that place of rest we huddled in before we knew the world would force us to dance for our lives.
Fact is, we just can't go back there, because the there that was there is not there any more.
Embrace the wave. It will drop you. You will fall in the trough. You will learn to swim on the fly. You will not drown. You haven't so far - have you? If you had, you would not be reading this.
Pray a prayer of thanks today, for the long and winding road that is right now taking you to who knows where. You can't go back. The road to back was washed away a long time ago. You really don't want to go there anyway.
You know me by now, so you know what I am telling you. I am telling you now to let Jesus choreograph your dance, instead of predictably turning the same corner day after day after day. He can see the stage you're dancing on a whole lot better than you can. After all, He built it. So let Him have His way. Trust, and be thankful.
Here is the Christmas chapter of "Corners" for you below. I wrote this not too long ago, but I'm a whole lot older now than I was when I wrote it. I can't go back even that far, let alone to who I was when I lived it.
Merry Christmas, my friend. Let go, and rejoice.
Shattuck and University
“An eye is blind in another man’s corner.” – Irish Proverb
I
The year I dropped out of Berkeley, Graham and I found a third floor Victorian apartment on Hyde Street, just three blocks down from the corner of Union Street on Russian Hill. Graham was now a college dropout too, a corporate jock working for the man full time at the gas and electric company.
Our apartment had become Bob’s crash pad of choice rather than his family home in Moraga, the pressure from the aging mistress he had been maintaining across the street having become too great. Her 19-year-old, Stacy, had finally discovered the affair - she had found a desperate letter her mother was in the midst of writing to her barely legal lover, bemoaning the fact that they could spend so little time together as a result of Bob being busy with work and school. Stacy descended into a drastic state of depression, exacerbated by the funk she had already been in as a result of having aborted a child she had herself conceived with Bob the previous spring, without having told him.
Barb and the Ethiopian boy, Yonas, were an item now. As it turned out, Roger’s trip to prison had been the greatest gift she had ever received, since she would never have chosen to walk away from him on her own. On her own, she had ignored voices both silent and audible, allowing the present warmth of Roger’s eyes to muffle them. Still, she had been rescued, in spite of herself. Since thinking of Roger now caused her to feel a stabbing pain dead in the notch of her throat, the place where things get stuck for a moment if you are choking, she thought of him rarely, and this caused her some guilt, but not a great deal.
And so it was I began my second year at Cal in fall of 1973 already set apart, having taken a year away to heal. And I was tied with tighter knots than before to home and to Graham, separate from the maelstrom of the counterculture. Graham was now a born-again corporate lifer at 20, never to make another steel drum as long as he lived.
II
Seemingly by magic, Bob had become natively fluent in both Spanish and Italian after a year of immersing himself in a Romance Languages major, during my year away. He now strived for only one goal as our 1973 year began: to be European. He had a plan to become first a vagabond on the Continent, and then to find simple employment there, living on little, slipping quietly out of the American cataclysm and into the deep mysterious green pool of the beckoning unfamiliar.
The two of us had signed up together for the whole tour: French I, II, and III, 8:00 am to 9:30 am, Monday through Friday, every single day for a year. Our fellow travelers on this imaginary trans-Atlantic voyage were an impish nineteen year old named Jacki, kind of a cross between the Mona Lisa and Peter Pan; and our teacher/tour guide, a graduate student in French Language and Literature named Scott Winfrey. Scott couldn’t have been more than 23 himself, with deep marine blue eyes, and a leonine mane of flax blond hair framing his face. Originally from Montana, he exuded the essence of a genu-ine Frenchman, not only in his fluency and inflections, but in his mannerisms, the tilt of his head, the way his lips pouted when framing his “oeu’s,” the way he draped his hand like a divo and sidestepped the length of the room when speaking passionately and at length, which was often. He had traveled in France every summer since he was eighteen. Jacki and I found him devastatingly handsome, and he appeared to return the favor.
Jacki and I commuted together by bus, and together rode the 7:22 from the AC Transit stop on Shattuck up University Ave. to the Tolman Hall side of campus every single morning, rain or shine, like clockwork. We became bus sisters, nestled together like sardines in a can or twins in the womb, depending on our mood, pressed into the same seat, the same routine, the same hot bosom of the same family of commuters every single day for a whole year. We knew things about each other that nobody else knew, the things that made us who we were at 7:22 in the morning, still loose and groggy from having studied until 3:00 am, combined with the lack of urgency to operate a motor vehicle. Our hair was still a little unkempt and our guard a little down, enough to free us to share the human things that show who someone really is at the core.
Over the first three or four weeks of our daily ritual, I learned that Jacki had been an Air Force brat who had struck out on her own to see the world. Her dad was a high-ranking officer, and he was, from her perspective, a force to be reckoned with, as he would be for any child. But Jacki was not intimidated by his stature, having been born her own woman, and possessing a natural, smart-assed cynicism that constituted both her armor and her means of connecting to those she chose to let in. Yet still alive inside her were the small, lonely girl who never believed her Daddy loved her, and the girl whose fundamentalist mother had tried to break her rebel spirit by locking her in solitary confinement for long hours at a time, so painfully long that she was still afraid of the dark.
At nineteen she had just finished hitchhiking through the verdant Redwood Valley area of Northern California, through Ukiah and the Russian River, having also finished a side trip through “a far Eastern religious type thing.” Whatever was not Air Force, whatever was not capitalist, whatever was simply NOT – that was what Jacki was seeking.
Up there by the river, she had stumbled upon an evangelical church community with a fired up Indiana preacher who taught peace, freedom, equality, and the full integration of all races, all colors, all people, man and woman alike, worldly goods and all. The core of their membership had migrated there from Indiana to plant the little church, coming to California to escape right-wing persecution and to be closer to the poor, in addition to finding a geomorphically safe haven in case of nuclear holocaust, according to people who study such things. Once there, their numbers had grown quickly. The group was an eclectic mix, from the county Deputy District Attorney, to the poorest of the poor who had found their home, including food and clothing, inside the congregation.
A number of them lived together as a family in a little village off the road, safely battened down each night to protect them from the rednecks and back woods folk that populated the immediate area. The pastor was a genuine faith healer, had a broken heart for children in need, and spoke strange, unknown languages of Heaven that flowed from his lips like water from underground, languages that had never been heard on earth before, except from the lips of those touched by God.
Jacki was now employed at the church in their newer San Francisco congregation, the big one, handling finances for its overseas work and all of the pastor’s public relations. This was no small deal because the church had become very important in the City, and had hosted such dignitaries as State Senator George Moscone, Assemblyman Willie Brown, Art Agnos, Joseph Alioto, Angela Davis, and the Rev. Cecil B. Williams. The protocol involved in her position was considerable, and the relationships she made critical, because it was through these relationships that the church would save the poor of San Francisco from desperation, just as they had done in Ukiah.
“Why don’t you come to church with me sometime?” Jacki asked. “It’s over on Geary at Fillmore. The 38 bus goes right to it, the Peoples Temple. You’d like it.”
A vague memory of a Berkeley school bus bound for Strawberry Canyon buzzed around me like a fly. I swatted at it unsuccessfully.
I frowned, trying to think of when I could make room in my day for anything new at all. “Well, I get pretty busy on the weekends. I just got a job at a bookstore, on top of staying on part-time at the power company. But I’m not ruling it out yet.”
But I had ruled it out, albeit unconsciously, because something in the middle of the warm, sticky harmony of the space between us was tiny and hard and cold, and – empty. Whether that was wisdom or neglect, I still haven’t sorted out.
II
Everywhere you go in Berkeley, you see tulip trees. Liriodendron tulipifera. I had learned the Latin name for them from the herpetologists, who also loved botany. Sometimes, on the bus in the morning while Jacki and I were riding to French class, we would just sit quietly, looking out the window at the trees and the street life they sheltered. Other times, we would show each other things and places that had been part of our lives, like the massage parlor with Barb’s flat on top, once Barb’s and Roger’s, and the sign lettered in Olde English, “Herein Lies the Rub.”
One day we were talking about our majors. Jacki told me she was taking French because her financial work with the overseas projects required her to travel to Europe, and sometimes to other places where French was spoken, like the Bahamas and French Guiana, sometimes even Paris. She didn’t have a major picked out yet, but she knew her future was somehow connected to Peoples Temple.
“Maybe I’ll take some business classes later when I know more about what’s in the cards for me, but right now I’m just enjoying the ride, so to speak. Jim looked at me one day and told me I have a special gift. He said I was someone who can be trusted with many things. No one had ever told me that before. I guess I’d been told I was smart enough, even pretty, in a boyish sort of way, or funny. But no one had ever told me I was special. That I could be trusted, with things that mattered to them. Not even my own father – well, especially not my own father. I would go to the ends of the earth for Jim Jones, and back. And I believe he would do the same for me.”
III
Attendance was light as usual that morning as Jacki and I walked into class, with seven or eight of the 35 or so chairs, each equipped with its own right-armed note table, occupied only by the dust that floated in the flood of 8:00 am light that hovered above them. There were two left-armed chairs in the room, and Bob always got there on time so he could nab one of them.
The light was beautiful in the side rooms at Dwinelle Hall at 8:00 am, especially in fall, the sun slanting at just the right angle through the high, narrow windows along the corniced ceiling, illuminating the surfaces that still carried the scuffs and carvings of decades gone by, traces of who knew what great scholar or poet or villain had shared this space with us.
Bob was already there, and he and Scott stood inches apart, eye to eye, while the rest of the sparse group looked on. Scott was showing Bob a large format brochure of some sort, the color pictures of rough hewn stone houses and rolling hills and the Arc de Triomphe brilliant enough to capture attention even from a distance. Scott spied Jacki as she entered and accosted her immediately.
“Ma petite Jacqueline, this is for you aussi,” he bubbled, fully in character as always. “Robért is going to travel to France with me before Christmas, and you’re coming too. We have scholarships every winter break for four epatant beginning French students to travel and practice abroad, and the two of you are my choice. You may not say no! Quelle est tienne réponse?”
“My response is yes! But can I ask my boss?” Jacki asked, looking pleased and worried at the same time. “I think he’ll like the idea. But is he allowed to say no?”
“Absolument non! And you tell him I said so.”
“Oui, monsieur. I’ll check,” she answered, lips smiling, eyes frowning. Bob walked past my arm-chair on the way to his left-handed one, raking his fingertips across my desktop as he passed. “I’ll miss you, ma petite. No Christmas caroling this year.”
“Je sais, je sais,” I sighed, feeling abandoned, a great grey expanse of emptiness spreading dramatically like a pool around me.
Done for the morning, we came out into the light and headed across the quad toward the Life Science Building, where the songbirds were doing their free-fall dance, skyrocketing in pairs to heights at least two human body lengths above the five story structure, then diving twice as fast to within inches of the ground, passing each other in a tantalizingly close arc. Then they ascended again, passing in midair, flirting, practicing for next spring’s avian love dance. Bob grabbed my hand and swung it up in the air, then back down, then up again, and winked at me. Smiling broadly, I suddenly felt very sad, and very, very alone, knowing that Bob and I would never be together, but totally failing to understand why. And having Graham back at home, slaving away as the financial head of our informal family day in, day out, didn’t make me feel any better.
So Bob flew away for the winter, far across the farthest pond, and laughed and drank Bordeaux and met new people and learned to speak fluently in a language I almost didn’t understand. When he came home, he was a newer, deeper, shinier, more joyful Bob than ever, one that I would love even more than I had before.
IV
Bob arrived back from Paris the morning of Christmas Eve, and I knew as soon as I saw him that he had not really just come home, but instead had just left it. A faraway joy shone at the back of his dappled blue-green eyes, and the taut cords of muscle that had always coiled just under his skin like a hyperactive spring had smoothed out and loosened their grip, leaving what appeared to me to be a man occupying the space where the boy had lived before. I could have sworn his voice was slightly deeper, too, but with more - flair.
Graham and I met him at the shuttle stop, where the bus had just brought him back from SFO. He had left with one back pack and one giant Samsonite suitcase, and come back with an extra backpack, full, hinting at the trouble he had taken to bring home the perfect thing for everyone. He chattered all the way up the hill on the 41 Union, a new French accent coloring everything he said.
“Do you really speak French now?” I asked, the electric arms that tethered the bus to the lines overhead clacking against each other as we pulled to the curb for a stop. “You sound like a transplanted Frenchman! And you look like one, too!” His hair was a little fuller, his shirt had that je ne c’est quois, and his hands floated like birds, inflecting important phrases avec l’emphase. And he smelled good.
A flood of rapid French flowed from his lips in response, more and faster than I had the capacity to hear, given the almost two weeks I had just gone with virtually no French in my head whatsoever. “Well, I didn’t understand a word you just said, so I guess you speak French,” I replied, starting to unzip his extra backpack.
“Not so fast, ma cherie. There’ll be time for that later. Let me tell you about nôtre petite Jacqueline, though, and how much fun she had.”
“C’est vrai? Tell me more.”
“She flew the coop, twice. Once all afternoon, and once all night.”
The bus hissed as it came to a stop at the red light.
“The afternoon she ran off was the day Scott took us to sidewalk cafés so we could practice ordering everything in French, and then strike up conversations with the waiters about how to get around Paris and whatever else they would agree to talk to us about. So we were at Les Deux Magots near the Quai, and you could see directly into Café de Flore on the opposite corner. She was sitting over there with her back to us with a guy in a grey business suit, which in no way matched what Jacqueline was wearing, being Jacqueline, as you know.”
“I know indeed. Go on.”
“She had had a little flat case with her on the plane that she kept under her seat, and she never got up that we saw, so she must have used the bathroom when we were sleeping, because those were two of the longest flights I have EVER been on. She never took off her sweatshirt, either. Quel horreur.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep going –“
“Well, in the café, she had the case by her foot. The two of them were talking, and the man was making notes in a little book. He tore out a page from the book and handed it to Jacki, and she put it in the back pocket of her jeans. When they had finished their drinks, she picked the case up off the ground and laid it flat on the table. He took it, and they both got up and walked off toward the Champs Elysees. We watched them until they disappeared in the trees. What do you think about that?”
“Well, she said she did financial business for the church that took her overseas,” I speculated. “That sounds like business.”
“Actually, there’s a Swiss bank in that direction, across the Quai.”
“Well, that’s probably it. It’s part of her mission work,” I said matter-of-factly, flagrantly ignoring at least two separate voices proposing less friendly explanations, one of them in French. “That’s probably why the pastor let her go.”
“That’s some mission she’s on then.”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“Peut-être pas - perhaps not, ma belle.”
“Well, here’s our corner anyway,” I noted, as I pulled the cord overhead to ring for the stop, grabbing one of the backpacks and stepping out into the aisle, reeling a little from the motion.
Graham, a man of few words as always, just smiled slyly at Bob, and hefted the big Samsonite up and over the seat, working it up the aisle toward the front of the bus.
“I missed this place more than I thought,” said Bob, looking at Graham, and then back down the Union Street hill toward North Beach as we climbed out into the veiled wintry light. “We still have a lot to talk about, mes amis. A whole, whole lot.”
V
Bob had parked his car around the corner on Green Street, and our neighbor Al the cable car grip man had moved it for him every couple of days. He was expected at his mom’s house for Christmas Eve dinner, but neither Graham nor I had re-established normal relations with our parents yet since we had moved in together, so we had planned a quiet dinner at home. It was almost time for Bob to load up the Mustang and head for Moraga, but first, we had a few things to share, a couple of gifts, and Christmas chatter. Graham and I had put up a scrawny six foot Douglas fir in our bay window, hung with 99-cents-a-box ornaments from Woolworth’s on Market Street, God’s eyes we had made, cranberry and popcorn garlands, and multicolored lights, one string. It was about three cuts above a Charlie Brown Christmas. I poured everyone a glass of apple cider with a cinnamon stick, and Graham and I curled up on the gold velveteen sectional, Bob in the Cost Plus beanbag chair.
“Hmmm. For me?” asked Bob, pulling out two wrapped gifts from under the tree.
“For you,” Graham replied, twirling the mustache he had been growing since Thanksgiving. It made him look just like a captain of industry.
Bob opened Graham’s gift first, a large flat package wrapped in red foil with two stick-on bows.
“Is it underwear, Dad?”
“No, son,” replied Graham. “Just open it.”
Tearing off the paper, he found a framed 16 x 20 matted black and white print, on Agfa Brovira Rapid glossy, unpressed, of a stand of redwood trees across a clearing in Muir Woods, a place Graham and Bob had often gone alone to hike and breathe and talk about whatever. Graham had taken it himself the last time they were there together, and had printed it in our bathroom while Bob was in Paris. It was signed in the lower right corner. Their friendship was a deep one, and had its own unfathomable identity separate from me, separate from any other combination of the three of us. Bob held the photo at arm’s length, moved.
“Thanks, man,” he finally said in a hushed voice. “Thanks.”
Graham nodded, his eyes moist, and Bob gently set the picture down and reached for the other gift labeled with his name.
“Ma petite,” he said. “What have we here?” He shook the oblong box and held it to his ear.
“You’d better wait till you open it before you decide if you want to shake it, not break it,” I replied, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, mommy,” he sing-songed, and ripped off the paper. “Oh, wow, this is special. Thank you, sweetheart.” He leaned over and gave me a peck on the lips. It was a high-powered tabletop telescope on a tripod stand, one he could use to find the planets we used to lie on our backs and look for on clear nights, which were rare and special in Daly City, over on the high school football field right at the end of the block where Bob lived.
“I will look for Venus just for you, my love. Thank you.” He set it down and reached for his backpack and unzipped it, pulling out a long box and a tiny square one.
“Graham, friend, this is for you.” He handed Graham the long box, and Graham carefully removed the muted tissuey paper, exotic and foreign looking, folding it neatly in four and setting it on the arm of the sectional. He opened the box and pulled out an inlaid wooden kaleidoscope, which he immediately put up to his eye.
“Amazing,” he said, and walked from the lamp to the Christmas tree, then to the kitchen window, then the bathroom, aiming it into every source of light he could find to see the variations in the colors and shapes, turquoise and rose, purple and sea green, stars and triangles and whorls, both two-dimensional and three, a transforming work of art.
“It’s really far out, man. Thank you.” It did not need to be said that the kaleidoscope was the gift of seeing the world abstractly instead of literally, in motion instead of still, in living color instead of in black and white. Just once in a while, Bob wanted Graham, when the mood struck him, to go to that place and know that Bob had taken him there, and Graham was happy to go if it was with Bob – but never with me.
“Now you, cherie.” He handed me the small box. “But don’t open it just yet. Graham, do you mind if I borrow your imaginary wife for just a minute?” Graham shook his head no, and the two men caught each others’ eyes in some unknown silent communication.
“Walk with me, petite.” And he took my hand and led me outside, down the stairs to the front stoop. “Sit with me. Now open.”
“You are a man of mystery, Bob Bertrand,” I sighed, as I tore away the paper and found the grey jewel box inside. I gingerly popped open the lid.
Inside was a delicate gold locket, with tiny ornate openings cut out around the outer edge of the heart on the face. I rested my hand on my collarbone and took in a small gasp.
“Take it out, open it,” he said anxiously.
I lifted the small heart from its cotton resting place and put it in the palm of my left hand, gently prying back the cover with my right. Inside was a tiny photograph of the Eiffel Tower.
“Bob, I . . ,” and I put my arms around his neck and hugged him.
“Let me,” he said, pulling away, and took the locket from me, turning my shoulders away from him and reaching around my neck to clasp the locket closed. “I stood in front of the Eiffel Tower and thought about you when I was gone, and I wanted to bring it back so you could keep it.” Then he took my shoulders again and turned me to face him.
“Cherie, I have something to tell you.”
We looked at each other for a minute in complete silence, except for the cable revolving on its pulley system under the cable car tracks in front of us.
“When I was in Paris, I met someone.” My heart stopped still, and I didn’t breathe.
I found myself on solid ground because we had both known for some time that something was not aligned with us, something we didn’t understand. And now it looked like somehow, he had found his answer, and I was happy for him, and ready. I was ready, and had been. Still, for him to have found the right person so quickly after all we’d been through together . . .
I stopped myself. “I see. I’m glad for you, sweetie. What’s her name?”
He breathed, one long deep breath.
“Scott. His name is Scott – yeah, Scott the teacher. And you know I didn’t meet him for the first time. I only met him in a new way. I don’t believe he’s the one I’m going to share my life with. And he certainly is not you – no one will ever be you, ever.” There were tears streaming down his face now. “But he helped me find the Bob that I’ve been looking for all this time.”
He waited for me, and then spoke again.
“I love you with all my heart. You’re the other half of me. It’s unfair in a lot of ways. But this is who I am. Do you still love me?”
I was stunned by a sudden peace I didn’t recognize, overcome with perfect love that lifted me high over the street, gave me a lightness of letting go. It was – inexplicable, and sudden, like a recognition.
“Oh my God! Wow. Well, I think I love you more. Are you all better now? Will you be OK?” I stroked his cheek, which was tense again underneath like a coiled spring.
We wrapped our arms around each other and held on for dear life. He was trembling so hard it worried me. “I’ll always be here, always. Don’t ever be afraid of losing me,” I whispered.
“OK,” he gurgled into my hair, right in the same spot where Barb had rested her face, after she had returned from her break with time and space on the bus back from Strawberry Canyon. “Now let’s go back upstairs.”
When we had pulled ourselves together and walked into the apartment, Graham was at the kitchen counter, pouring the filling into the pie shell for the pumpkin pie. He turned, and he and Bob were eye to eye.
“Everyone OK?” Graham asked.
“Yes, OK,” Bob answered, and Graham nodded knowingly and looked back at his task, wiping a spill he had made and rinsing his hands. “I put the chicken in when you were outside, Shel. It’ll be ready at 5:00.”
Here. Look.
7. Had car completely rebuilt and got a new paint job. Improved my relationship with insurance company and super nice people at the body shop. (2010)
