Interlude

Written May 1, 2008 

            Someone has been driving my car—it’s the radio that tells me so.  The stations that aren’t mine. But this is funny, because last night, as I drove to the horses after long absence, it was Bach that suddenly filled the car. Familiar Bach, as if shouting out over a good number of decades. None of my people tend toward the classical radio in their off-moments.And I have gone to talk, although I could not tell you why.

            Still, here it was, a music so potent, and me so tired of travel on so many levels, suddenly reminded in the most intimate way of the girl I was, on the far side of a lifetime.  This morning, when I set off for the barn again through the chill, sharp, almost taunting spring air, the music woke as if it had fallen asleep in mid memory.  Not the same piece, but the same anchor in time.  I own this music.  I haven’t listened to it for some thirty years.  Bach in his quiet moments, or Handel or Monteverdi – at their most introspective.  The voice of things I felt I could not then have articulated, cannot now.  Yearning, perhaps.  Hope.  Wonder.  I was left to myself in those days, up here with only young college friends—a lot of silence in the heart, when there is nothing to hide behind, and everything in the balance.

            Funnier still, my phone is ringing.  The studio phone.  I broke these words to check out the call, but opted not to pick it up.  The caller?  Another piece of this oddness, a boy from back then, the one who left white lilacs on my porch on my birthday.  Twenty third birthday?  Twenty fourth?  One of those painfully sweet ones.  And came back later to take me out for breakfast: hot fudge sundae before the sun had quite claimed the day.  His voice now leaving a message for my husband.  The slight boy is now a lanky man with lines on his face.  No longer the boy who I really suspected would never be anything but a nomad.  Still sweet, but grown up and capable of business.  The friendship remains; I had forgotten the rest.

            He once was a poem.  Slight and odd and maybe, in the tenor of my time, Byronic in a pedal-steel sort of way.  He married someone else.  Which was good.  Which was fine.  But at the time, so strange and poignant.  And I, as his best friend in our little world, was asked to make sure the bed in their apartment was properly made up before they got home from their honeymoon.  I walked the student streets of Provo that night, mid-summer, and if I’d known the song, “They’re singing songs of love, but not for me –“ I’d probably have sung it.

            Or maybe not.  Because this Bach was truer to the mark, its hand gentle, its push and pull elemental, its voice my own inarticulate emptiness.

            And why am I hearing this today?  I come home and try to write these things down, and for the first few paragraphs, I had back that isolation, that luxury of pure mood and singular texture. But then G came down and started messing with things, crinkling paper, making breakfast, and the piano tuner is in the studio, playing something nice to test his tempering, but it is not the music I am still just barely holding on to,  cupped in my hand.  Now, the grand-dog is barking, a deep, dark, velvety urgency: he wants in.

            Then this is where all those days since have gone.  From pain and hope to home.  Somehow.

            Perhaps, at this particular moment in my life, this morning was a gift: an echo to give me a fix on exactly where I am, where the journey has taken me, how far into the poem, the hope, the dream.  Dogs and missionaries and the daughter moving to Rhode Island.  Dentists and anthropologists and animators and video producers.  For me, back then, the future stopped with a vision of a quiet evening, two people reading books, sitting comfortably together on a friendly couch in front of a fireplace.  It became so much more.  So much harder.  So much deeper.

            And another phone call that has just suddenly come, right between my typed words: C, now holding his brand, spanking new baby son, hot off the presses.  Eight pounds eleven, twenty inches long.  A significant contribution to the world.

            Just yesterday I made Gin (who was thoroughly humiliated) stop and let me walk up the walk to the house my great grandfather had built, just off Ward Parkway in Kansas City.  A house I once had little interest in, but have, in the last three years, taken many pictures of, wondered over—drawn to the connection.  I have wanted to feel the spaces inside of it, to look out through its windows and see what my greats saw every day as they lived.  So I knocked on the door, just on the chance the folks there would be kind.

            No answer.  I was headed back to the car, then to dinner with my cousins, to bed in Ginna’s just beginning to be packed up house, and then to the airport.  Opportunity lost.  But as I crossed the driveway, the folks came home, and they were more than kind.  They let me see it all, and I was not disappointed.  I kept saying to Max (held on a tight leash and, of course, having to go to the bathroom), “This house was built by your great-great-great grandfather” – as if, by saying it enough, I’d start to understand it myself.

            Now I tell that story to Cam, and I say: from my great grandfather Downey, who gave life to Jim Downey, who gave life to my dad, who gave life to me, who gave life to you –who gave life to this new person in our world.

That’s a lot of people to know.