Tuesday February 26th, 2002 @ 8:53 PM
Walking around the bend in the road I looked back up the hill. Pink luminescence glowed through the thickness of forest. Sunset in an Arkansas summer is long and luxurious like a rich woman’s bath. I came upon a dirt side road disappearing into the long shadows of evening. A hummingbird whirred by my ear and vanished down the side road. A squirrel scolded me from an unseen perch and the first cricket of the evening beckoned me from the gloaming.
I hesitated, looking around to make sure I could find my way back. But the woods were lovely. I entered. I smelled the rot of bark mixed with wildflowers and moss. The sun brushed the treetops with strokes of brilliant gold and I found myself mesmerized by nature’s intimacies. I strolled further and further down the dirt road paying no mind to my steps until roots begin to present themselves and my way narrowed to a crooked path.
I was walking to ease my mind from years of troubles. I once had a wife, a family, a career–much promise, much hope. It was 1994 and I had nothing left but the blues. On my shoulders was a decade of guilt, remorse, and regret. Instead of using my sorrows to find illumination and strength, I wallowed in self-pity and self-incrimination. The loveliness of these woods was giving me solace.
The rays overhead gleamed intensely before the far horizon cut off the last vestiges of the sinking globe. I was surprised at how fast the forest darkened. I no longer heard the sounds of birds and squirrels. From far away came a chorus of frogs to replace them. Crickets answered in counterpoint and a firefly appeared, and then another. But even with the night creatures stirring to life, the woods seemed ominously silent.
My eyes adjusted quickly to the loss of light while a red glow still painted the space between the branches, though dull now, and benign. Still I wandered on, the path becoming no more than a deer trail. The woods were deep.
Suddenly I no longer felt alone. Something was in these woods. Had I heard an unnatural sound? I turned and looked back. Nothing. I studied the forest and listened. I continued on but slower. Do we have a sixth sense, I wondered? Can we detect brain waves from intelligent beings in some similar manner to radio waves? Was I detecting something-or someone? The feeling became very strong. I began to focus on whatever was out there and on nothing else.
Should I go back? Yes, definitely. How far had I come into these woods? I realized that I could barely make out the path anymore. Was I lost? If I went back, was whatever or whoever behind me? I stopped again and turned full around. I stared at each tree. Twilight was turning quickly to no light and there would be no moon until later. My eye seemed to catch movement. I stared intently at a large tree where I thought I’d seen it. Something was there. I realized that I was barely breathing. Fireflies danced. The silence of the forest had become large, like the trees had become larger with darkness.
Then I saw something that should not have been there. A great shiver swept through my body. Toes! I could see the toe ends of two shoes standing behind a tree about forty yards away. I was sure of it.
I did nothing. I just stood there and stared at the toes. I believed them to be some kind of running shoes. They did not move. What should I do? Somebody had been following me. Then it occurred to me that it was probably one of the guys in the band. Andy or Jason. It wouldn’t be Chuck– he didn’t like the woods. Andy was a woodsman-a fisherman and hunter, although it would be like Jason to play a joke on me. I decided to call out and let them know I was onto them. “O.K., Jason, or Andy, I know you’re there. Come on out.” My voice startled me given the previous quiet. I waited. Nothing.
I spoke again, only in anger this time, “Listen Andy, or Jason, I don’t think this is funny. Get out here or you’re going to make me mad.” My voice rang through the forest, being the only significant sound. Then I suddenly went cold. I realized that Jason and Andy wore Chuck Taylors and neither had a pair of shoes with the kinds of toes at which I was looking.
Could it just be a pair of shoes someone had left behind that tree? Maybe I was not seeing shoes. Maybe they were rocks or plants that seemed like shoes. The increasing darkness was obscuring the lines and I decided that I was getting paranoid. I couldn’t stay here all night. Still, I decided not to go back along the path by where I thought I had seen shoes. I turned and walked deeper into the trees. The woods were dark.
I walked very slowly feeling fear well up in my throat. I regretted having given up my view of the toes. I knew that if I turned around I would not see them again. Where was I going? Somehow I had to find a way out.
The urge to turn around and look became very strong. What if someone was behind me? How close was he now? How would I know unless I looked? I knew that I had to look. It was driving me crazy. When I turned this time I did it all of a sudden, and there in the path not thirty yards back was a clown.
I heard myself gasp. The clown had stopped when I turned. It stood there staring at me through eyes heavily painted with evil markings. This was not a clown for children. He was dressed in yellow and blue and wore a jester’s cap with three tassels. He was every bit as tall as my six-one and big-boned as well. He had no expression on his face, save the macabre paint. He said nothing. I said nothing. My heart was pounding like a sledge against my ribs. So focused was I on my problem that I could no longer smell anything or hear the sounds of the forest creatures. I could only stare.
Now undoubtedly you are reading this in the comfort and security of your home or office and if you are a self-respecting male, you may be scoffing at me right now as my heart pounds in the forest. Perhaps you are thinking that you’d have put a quick end to such nonsense if it happened to you. But consider this: the clown must have known something I did not. How else could he be so confident? And obviously, his intentions were not good, nor was he of a right mind. What did he know that I didn’t? Maybe that he had a gun, or a knife, or some other weapon. Maybe that he had done this before. Maybe that he was someone who could cover his deed by one means or another. Add it all up and I knew that trouble was on my trail like Robert Johnson’s Hellhound.
I turned and walked faster away from the clown. This time I could hear him behind me. He no longer needed stealth. I stopped and the sound stopped. I began to jog and bushes tore at my pants. I wondered if he were running. I wondered how close he was now. Again I stopped and turned. There he was, stopping when I stopped. Should I talk to him? But to do so may force him to an action. Maybe I could just outrun him. But then I realized I did not know this forest and he undoubtedly did.
“What do you want?” I asked. I tried to say it boldly and with no fear in my voice, but I detected a slight quavering and I’m sure he picked it up. He said nothing. He stood firmly planted in my path with no hint that he would retreat if threatened. I wanted very badly for him to speak. I could begin to form some judgements based on his voice and what he said. “What do you want?” I repeated. My voice sounding lonely under the tall trees.
It is easy, I imagine, to think of yourself as being brave and decisive as you read this story. However, standing alone in those woods with an evil clown, darkness falling all about me, I began to think of death. The clown hadn’t followed me as a lark, of that I was certain. I thought of being shot and incapacitated or paralyzed and then being buried alive. I thought of various tortures. I wondered if I would be sodomized or humiliated before I died. The clown was bold and confident and that meant he knew he could defeat me.
I fought panic. All of this was happening rapidly. Only seconds were passing while thoughts raced through my head. At such a time a man’s mind begins to prioritize the components of his life. Values come under a giant mental microscope. What he loves and whom he loves becomes starkly clear. So much else that seemed important becomes trivialized. A vision of values is presented and seared into ones soul. Courage often follows resolution.
All of a sudden I had become alert and aware of myself as a fighter and a strategist. I would make my move and take the offensive. Boldly I strode forward and marched straight at the clown with the imagined feel of his neck in my hands, savagery in my muscles, and intent to do unkind things to his evil face. I figured that he would either run or make a stand. He did neither. Casually he sidestepped off the path and walked slowly into the darkest part of the forest. When I reached the spot where he had stood, he was twenty yards or more into the deep and I could no longer define his outline. He seemed to glow yellow and blue faintly in the stygian dark of the thickets. Then for the first time he smiled a sardonic smirk and motioned with his head in a sidelong movement that meant: “come this way.”
I was mad now and ready for combat. He had not shot me or knifed me or clubbed me. Perhaps I should follow him and beat him bad and drag him out of the forest and turn him in to the police. Yet still I trembled with fear and he stood waiting. Once again he motioned, almost imperceptibly.
The game had taken a new twist. He was no longer standing between the road and me. He had given me an out. Now he was tempting me.
If he wanted me to follow him into the density of that forest he had evil intentions, then again he had running shoes. Would he run? I analyzed my future. There is more to such an episode than merely escape and survival. There is also who you have become in the process. Could I live with myself as a coward or as prey to the hunter? Would I have to live my life wondering what I was made of? Or worse yet, knowing I lacked faith in myself and in what I believed? I decided this was a test of who I was on this earth.
I stared into the black barely making out that painted face. The eyes of the clown somehow gleamed in the dark. They hadn’t gleamed before. I figured that maybe he had them open wider now to see without light-or maybe he was eager. I have always been competitive, an athlete, a combatant. As a boy I’d been Galihad in search of the Grail, Lancelot who feared no man, and Arthur himself who lived in an enchanted world of wizards and mystery and evil. Every manly instinct I possessed was urging me to overcome my fear and win this game. My pulse pounded like a bass drum in the quiet of this ghastly dusk.
I started toward him and he nodded. I stopped. I began to think about my children, my friends and loved ones, my unfulfilled life, my need to contribute something meaningful on this earth. Would I throw it all away on the gamble that this clown couldn’t back up his bravado?
I thought of the poem by Robert Frost. I loved the words and memorized them from the first and only time I ever read them back in High School: “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…”
“Promises to keep…”
“Promises to keep…”
“Promises to keep…”
There is a phrase we use: he or she “has so much promise.” Each of us is born with a certain amount of promise. Much of this promise is tacit and never written down or spoken, yet expected nonetheless. Our parents see promise in us as we play out our childhood dreams. Our spouses have great expectations when they lovingly say, “I do.” Our children believe us when we tell them we love them and will always be there for them. They look to our successes as pathways for their own. Our teachers hope that their efforts to instill in us the tools of tomorrow are not in vain. Our society turns its hard-earned money back into the system to seed the future with promise. However one defines his creator, it cannot be lost on that person the tremendous opportunity that is life, and the tragedy of squandering this most rare and precious gift. But most of all, we have promised ourselves, all our lives, that we would do that or become this or somehow live up to our perceived and believed potential.
The balance began to tip. On one hand I could defeat this clown or perhaps die alone in these woods having failed, or on the other hand, I could shake myself free from the guilt, lethargy, and self-incrimination that had brought me here this day, and walk back out to fulfill my promises. I had wasted a decade of life in doldrums and I had a lot of promise. I whispered to the clown, “I have miles to go before I sleep.”
I left the stare of the clown fading into the woods behind me. We played in Hot Springs, Arkansas that night in an upstairs room that roaring twenties gangsters once frequented called “The New Ohio Club.” I was very animated, because I knew what it meant to be alive and I savored every moment of it. The incident had shifted my focus from tortured retrospect to carpe diem and wondrous futureview.
I wish life were like the dnouement of a movie. That my illumination would have spawned rapturous change. That bells would ring and birds sing and beautiful ladies would make choreographed dives into fountains and Pegasus would fly above grazing unicorns. That Spring would burst out in a kaleidoscope of flowers. But alas, life demands that we travel the miles before we sleep. Change comes at the habit level. Attitudes are sunk deep into the recesses of the mind. Days come and go and they say nothing.
But what I had was a new direction. I had promises to keep. I had music to create. Stories to tell. Books to write. Philosophy to discover and hone. Poetry to ponder. People to love. A future wife to marry. Grandchildren to dote upon. And many more sunsets for which to give thanks. The courage and discipline to fulfill my promise would be profound in comparison to a blind burst of fury in the woods.
Yet still I wonder. What would have happened if I had followed his beckoning? Had I rationalized my leaving? My vanity sometimes wishes I had dragged that clown out of the woods and onto the front page of the newspaper. What would you have done? Before you answer, remember that conditions were not as you have them at your computer. That night the woods-were dark, and deep.
Carl
Epilogue
The question is of course, what was that clown doing in those woods? I have since concluded that this was a serious player of a grim and morbid game called “ghosting.” Or as some call it “ghousting”, rhyming with house. In some forms it is practiced by stealthily entering a home at night and walking around in the dark. The thrill or high comes from knowing there are people in the house who would be horrified if they detected your presence. It is a silent, but intense exhilaration. To some this benign thrill is no longer sufficient. They need a higher risk. They need your awareness of them. I think this is the status of my clown. I believe that because I was big and strong increased his risk and thus his exhilaration. He dressed as an evil clown because he knew it would terrify his victims.
I never heard anything of such a clown thereafter. The guys in the band tease me unmercifully and laugh whenever a clown appears on TV or in the movies. My nephew painted the Arkansas Clown on the side of our bus and I must say it looks very much like what I remember. If you own our CD, “More Trouble Than Worth,” you will find the story of the Arkansas Clown put to music.
Posted by Carl
Wednesday December 26th, 2001 @ 8:52 PM
I knew there had to be a tunnel ahead because the old country song by C.W. McCall told of wiping out the top of his truck full of chickens, leaving the entrance full of feathers. Wolf Creek Pass is one of those journeys so harrowing that one can’t see the spectacular scenery over his white knuckles. That is if you happen to be driving an old motor home in which your own amateur mechanic self bled the long unused brakes.
My faithful little wife followed behind in the little car that the motor home lacked the power to tow up the mountain. I could see the silhouettes of lampshades, computer parts, and garden tools about her head in the rear view mirror. Linda had lived her entire life in Wyoming and now with everything we owned crammed into our car and the moving van Jason Coomes drove ahead of us, a new and strange world immerged far below in the green valley emptying out into Pagosa Springs.
That day and that Mountain pass were symbolic of the transformation Blinddog Smokin’ was making in its volatile sub-cultural history. A touring band exists in flood-lighted bars and on midnight highways. Until they are famous, they are nothing but a few moments of noise and energy in your town and then gone.
Good bands light up like ascending fireworks in the night sky. They climb as fast and brilliantly as they can, bang hard in search of the ultimate “ahhhhh” from their audience, and then fall in shimmering desperation, lingering as long and gloriously as possible until a new band streaks by them skyward to its own destiny. Very few explode with enough radiance to remain in people’s minds over the years.
BDS spent going on nine years in the vast stretches of Kansas, the back roads of Arkansas, the streets of Podunk, the mountains of Montana, and the empty winterscapes of Wyoming. We realized that the apex had been reached where sagebrush and pine trees serve as quiet surrogates for a listening audience.
Since that inglorious day in July of 1993 when Jason and I had joined forces in a backroom bar in Wheatland, Wyoming, we have seen our fans come and go. The reckless youth are now married with children. The old girlfriends are now just old. The revelers have replaced whiskey with wheatgrass. Some got religion. Some got sick. Some died young. Some moved on. Some see the world differently these days.
Since we recruited Chicago Chuck from the concert hall in early “94″–Andy got hurt. I got married. Chuck’s beloved Great-Grandma died and a million miles of center stripe passed underneath our various vehicles.
All four of my children graduated from college, three got married, now one expects my first grandson in April. I can get into movies and restaurants as a senior citizen now. I first played with Jason Coomes in another band when he was just old enough to get into a bar, now he is thirty-three. Twelve-year-olds from gigs in the city parks who worshipped Jason as a Wyoming guitar god are now old enough to drink in bars.
Gone are the old clubs. The Ohio Club in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where Al Capone gambled and frisky ladies gamboled has burned to the ground. We had special times there. The room was a large Omnibus box. Upstairs in the back. Red lights glowing through the cigarette smoke. All eyes on us. No distractions. The rare spirit of human communication through shared ambience and groove hung in that place like a benign incubus.
The Crow’s Nest in Salina, burned. Yahoo’s in Cherryvale, of which I wrote the Cherryvale Transcendence, sold and changed. Panama Red’s, our first gig in Wichita, long gone and most forgotten, as is PJ’s in Idaho Falls. The Bar Bizarre in Ft. Collins is now an old folks home.
This is a fast changing world we live in. Faster than ever before in history. One hundred years ago the entire society rode horses and walked much as they’d done for the previous 5900 years of recorded human existence. Now we bitch if our computer memory isn’t upgraded yearly and fantastic machines fly into tall buildings and people worldwide can watch each other by transforming images into dots and sending them at the speed of light to be reassembled on a TV screen in someone’s living room.
When I was a boy no one had a television. When I became an adult, no one had a computer. When I first played music with Jason Coomes at the Buckhorn bar in Laramie, there was no Internet.
I thought of these things as I approached that singular horrifying hairpin curve on the downslope of Wolfcreek pass. To miss it is too be airborne on your way to a spectacular death. A chilling metaphor of the BDS career path–change direction, or die.
Wolfcreek pass was the veil through which we passed to the other side. Once at the bottom, Wyoming and the past seemed far away and our decision irreversible. We entered a small lonely road to the enchanting but ghostly Four Corners country. The sun set as we left Pagosa Springs and headed into the backcountry. Darkness swallowed our caravan consisting of a large yellow moving van, a small black car, the Ford Van and trailer, and the motorhome, now towing the little blue car again.
That moonless night we played our last gig before California, a wild biker rally on an Indian Reservation. Several thousand people waited. We had been traveling for thirteen hours, but the unruly and excited crowd filled us with adrenaline.
Something happened at that gig. Our weariness made us sort of crazy. The huge crowd pumped us up like Kamikazes. With the knowledge that we were done with nearly a decade of winter roads and a closed chapter in our book and sensing California on a new Horizon, we exploded on the giant Camel Stage and drove the masses into a crazed state of being. Women showed their breasts and hidden tattoos and threw panties, and guards pulled them off the stage. Men reached to slap our hands vigorously, almost maniacally. It verged on spiraling out of control. The noise was deafening, and people’s eyes were scary. It was frightening, dizzy, and delicious. We’d never played a gig with that kind of frenzy.
The morrow brought the desert sun. Miles of barren earth formed a vast purgatory that further removed us from the past. The exotic majesty of Ship Rock presented itself as the bellwether of the high desert, helping define direction and distance for our little cavalcade as we lost ourselves in heat and thought, memories and anticipation. Through the day we all became separated by the distance and that night each band member was on his own. We would awake knowing that nighttime would bring–California. No gigs. No fans. No home.
The gateway was Needles where it was 117 degrees and the natives were glad that it was at last “cooling down.” I ate a dozen of Dole’s sugar-free Popsicle’s and comforted my little wife who stared big-eyed at the shimmering mirages on the California desert. I knew it was not the California she’d been hoping for. She must have been thinking the words of one of Charles Dickens’ characters, “Whatever shall become of us?”
Three and one half months have passed. I live in San Diego now. The band is scattered about Southern California. We brought a high-octane music machine to be launched like a second stage rocket to maintain our ascendance and to magnify our burst and prevent the shimmering fall to obscurity. We had cut our teeth on a brutal decade of touring and honed our wares in Memphis and the Delta where the ghosts of Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy drift in the mists of the Mississippi. We were ready.
But life does not separate its chapters like a novel being written. It demands that the in-betweens be lived and suffered and experienced. No one knows us in California. LA is tinsel town and everyone wants to be a star. Club owners are stoic and unimpressed. A thousand bands wait at their doorsteps like cats wanting an open can of tuna. The best clubs cater to the nationally famous acts and treat the rest with indifference. Bad clubs have bands lined up like cattle at a watering hole, offering to play for nothing. Telephone calls are screened and ignored. No one calls you back. Promotional packs are tossed in the garbage with the ceremony of a dirty diaper.
But we are the ones who threw down this gauntlet and willingly entered the trial by fire. If we have what it takes in the big leagues, we must find out. All else is vanity and provincial thinking. To kick butt in your home town in front of your friends and neighbors may feel good, but it is only a bean in the whole enchilada. To rise to the top in this profession requires that you kick butt in every town or get out of the game and go work in a music store and talk about what you could have been, or perhaps go live with your mother, to be depressed, watch TV, and become bitter.
Now is a time when self-examination is forced on us. I will soon be a grandpa and many of my friends have already retired or live a life of solid security and repose. I have three old friends who are millionaires living within an hour of me. I cast my lot with a blues band from Laramie, Wyoming. The hour is getting late for me to win this game. The security of my future hangs in the balance. They don’t know us out here. None of the wonderful nights of fire and magic that some of you have seen us have are believed. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what everybody says…”
I choke down occasional panic and resign myself to endure and preserver. Slowly we progress. A small fan base has formed in the West LA region, readers of TTW from years past. Southern Cal’s best Blues Club hires us regularly in Long Beach. A club in the heart of San Diego’s entertainment district, jammed with sailors, marines, students, and hardcore blues fans has picked us up in January. A Casino with a stage bigger than most people’s yards is putting us on in February. The schedule that had been choked with gigs for many years is starting to blossom once again.
Chuck entered a huge contest and was declared by Guitar Center, the best drummer in the Southwest United States. They gave him a $4,500 set of Pearl drums. Jason is cutting heads at blues jams around Southern Cal and making quite a name for himself. Roland gets pick-up gigs with high-paying high-powered bands as a bassist. I grind metal and paint and build around the house in this gorgeous weather and glory in the hearing of birds singing once again.
It’s been strange not playing. BDS played over 1600 gigs together. My ears that ring twenty-four hours a day have begun to heal a little. My body, ravaged by road miles and bad sleep and fast food, is feeling restored and vibrant. I can read a book without vehicular draft and I even feel more spiritual and connected to the things of God and nature, which is hard to do in rooms where alcohol is the social matrix.
I feel anxious to get back into performing and recording again. The opportunities in California, while not easily obtainable, are virtually without limit and the rewards are tenfold. We have vowed not to play the shit circuit in this new chapter. We are competing against the best there is. “Iron sharpens iron.” We aren’t starting out here in the garage. We paid enough dues to have earned a ticket to the ball and we are either going to shine and climb, or go out blazing. The arena is not to whimper, or to shrink, but only to test the metal.
So here we are. Climbing a new ladder with its top in the clouds. The bottom of the ladder sits at the end of a road. The road goes way back and disappears on horizons painted on our memory like vistas in a movie set. The road has formed a stable foundation for us–a substructure of love, support, and communication over nearly a decade of time given freely to us by people like you.
I recently looked up an old friend of mine. He has done quite well for himself. We rode around in his elegant car and talked of when we were young, ambitious men, thirty-five years ago. He tried to hide it, but he looked at me with pity in his eyes. I guess being my age and being in a blues band that isn’t famous is about as low as one can get above street person. I knew that out of compassion, he was going to offer me a job. I didn’t want our relationship to come to that so I asked, “How many people do you know who receive an ovation at the end of a day’s work? Not only from their friends and relatives, but from strangers in all walks of life?”
He stopped the car. Looked at me as if for the first time, and replied with resignation, “I can’t buy that. Can I?”
When I drove away in our little blue car with rust on its edges, I thought, “Welcome to the artist’s world, my friend.”
Carl
Posted by Carl
Monday August 20th, 2001 @ 8:52 PM
I sensed the vision before I saw it. I turned and looked down the long sidewalk and beheld what looked like three glorious angels shimmering white in beatific splendor. Statuesque they were, and poised like figurines on a transparent ledge. After a short gasp, I yelled at a nearby photographer, and pointed at the vision. He responded by falling over his camera bag, gathering himself in an ungainly fashion, combing his mop of red hair, racing to a table where he kept his film, cramming the film into one of his cameras, then running down the sidewalk to get a closeup–which is exactly the opposite of what he should have done. The beauty was in the distant image down the lane, under the trees, which in turn were under the summer sky. Only far away would the figures appear so angelic and isolated and singular. It didn’t matter anyway, by the time he took an actual photograph the scene had vanished.
Three sisters began to move down the sidewalk to their destination before the preacher, who waited in a giant tent before five hundred people, and the three young men who would marry them. How often does one witness a wedding of three sisters at one time? Tall and elegant ones whose only rivals for beauty were each other? The flowing gowns gave the illusion of gliding as they slowly descended the steps above and behind the tent. Jason “12 fingers” Coomes played classical music on his guitar and one thousand eyes turned to behold the grand and glorious entry of the three lovely sisters.
Not strange eyes, but the familiar eyes of mothers, fathers, brothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, cousins, aunts and uncles, friends and co-workers, and dear acquaintances of every variety. Almost every eye held a tear, every throat a lump, every heart a tremor. Men and women bit their lips and smiled alternately as the mood changed with every step. Many had known these sisters from infancy and memories flowed through people’s minds in kaleidoscopic delight.
Blinddog Smokin’, as a rule, will not play weddings. But the opportunity to play at such a rare and special event broke our rule. Because of the strange and varied attendees, a band can’t seem to please anyone. The old people want quiet waltzes, and the young people want punk and grunge and hip-hop. The rednecks want country and the white-collars want elevator music. The ten year olds want rap with lyrics like, “I’m gonna take an ax and kill the bitch, that’ll teach her…” I’m not kidding. Add to all this, the favorite uncles and family friends who think they can barge onstage in the middle of any song to make a drunken toast, or sing their version of “Good night Irene…” and you have the musician’s nightmare.
I would not have contracted to play this wedding, despite the singularity, except for my special affinity with the father of the three brides. Being the observer I am, sometimes I seem to rise above a scene and view it from the vantagepoint of a drifting bird on the quiet draft of rising air. I seem to hang there in overview. This is my special gift and always has been, to remove myself in mind’s eye, to intensely observe and learn. So it was this day as I seemed to be watching the father from on high.
He stood tall like a Marine in dress blues. His tuxedo, starch-stiff like his backbone. I could feel the love in his heart as he watched his son bring each sister down the steps outside the tent to his position at the entry.
Love is such a trite and misappropriated and ill-defined word anymore. I hear junior high kids dating for the second time saying “I love you,” to one another. The love this father felt for his daughters was so beautifully honed, so intensely focused, so layered and textured through the years, and acutely tied to his great role in life. These lovely creatures, he had held in his arms as helpless babes, who looked up at him in awe and wonder. He had felt the fierce duty to protect them forever with his life and strength. He had known that to neglect them was a sin beyond reclamation. He had gazed at their tiny perfect bodies in praise to God, watching their miniature fingers bend and grasp for the first time.
He had known a time when the sisters had believed in him with all their hearts. If he said it was going to rain, then it was going to rain. If he didn’t like someone, they didn’t either. He was their hero and their protector and their provider and their source of knowledge. No one on earth could stand in his place. He was their daddy.
He had carried them on his back and umpired their softball games and sat by the pool at their swimming lessons. He had to deal with teaching them about the facts of life and coached them through the trauma of growing breasts. One of them had become lost at two years old in a clothing store. He had been convinced she was kidnapped. Frantically he ran through the parking lot, his heart pounding, visions of finding the perpetrator and beating him into the pavement fought for room in his mad thoughts with the ecstasy of hugging his daughter once again. When she showed up playing house inside a ring of dresses, he almost fell to the ground in relief and love.
As he walked each one down the long aisle of grass, his heart burst in mixed emotions. He was so proud, yet feeling so guilty for all the things he didn’t do and the times he was gone, and the sorrow he had caused by his own problems, and the breakup with their mother. He longed in remorse that he could have been perfect for them. He hated himself, yet his heart poured love into the atmosphere like warm rain on a summer eve. The mind works unbelievably fast at such times–precision and rapidity of thought is amazing. The thoughts are tempered and stirred by erupting emotion, while the face carries out its lifetime of training to remain placid and cool.
Then it finally hits the father straight in the teeth when he looks up at his new son-in-law, or in this case–sons. They stand eager to relieve him of his duty as protector. Their eyes are filled with a different kind of love. The meaning and symbolism of the whole ceremony suddenly comes to fruition in the father’s mind. “I am relieved of my duty. This other man is the new protector. She will leave me and live with this man and be his mate and go where he goes. If he is weak, she will suffer. Oh God that he be strong…” The emotion becomes one of fear for his daughter, then hope fights for a position, then joy enters in. It is enough combined force to fell a tree. For perhaps the first time the father truly examines the young man before him and wonders, almost with a sense of panic: “How can this sapling do my job? How truly deep is his commitment and dedication? What is to become of my daughter?”
Then suddenly the preacher is preaching and the daughters who held so tightly to his arm coming down the aisle are now gazing intently into the eyes of their men. And it is over. People cheer. The celebration begins. Hands are being shook. Laughter is erupting. The dancing will commence. The father, however, is feeling a draining of some part of his being. It is the stripping of a duty that he has had his entire adult life. The role is over. The curtain has fallen. It is as though the heart of his vitality and purpose has been torn out of his chest.
While the party rages and builds, the father must reconstruct himself. Who is he now? He wonders about the hundred ways he could have done better. He fights the remorse and the need to feel sorry for himself. Regret and self-chastisement only hurt and breed more hurt. He must lift his head and find his new role. He must think of the positives. He must sublimate his turmoil of emotions into new energy and direction. He must share the joy with his daughters and feel their hope and exhilaration.
A child grown and mature is a mirror. In it a parent can clearly see who he was during the child’s lifetime. If there is distance, there is a reason for it. If there is a bond, there is a reason for that as well. The child-rearing seeds have born their fruit. You cannot undo what was sown. Every hour well spent with them is somehow a piece of fruit in their modern lives. Every tragic mistake is a mark somewhere in their personality or personal relationship with the parent. It is cause and effect. Or so say I from my perch in the sky as I watch this curious event of three married sisters.
I travel about this world more than 99.999 percent of all human beings. I see life from so many angles, some wondrous, some banal, some ugly. I store my knowledge and strive to turn it into wisdom. When you compare so many lives and places and times like I am able, one forms a private mythology and draws from its lessons to survive, grow, and contribute.
The vision of those three angels shimmering in the shadows of fluttering leaves and sunshine dropping through the branches to bless them in radiance, has taken its place in my mythology. The vision will become more glorious as time passes–ethereal and mystical. It represents a gift that a man gave to the world. A gift of his daughters who he loved and labored to shape as a sculpture beholds his clay and strives to bring out the beauty and art and ecstasy.
He gives them to the world to make their mark, that the world be a better place in their passing. He then watches from afar as these little girls who were once his primary reason for being, discover life for themselves and go on to nurture their own children and follow their muses as they write their stories in the ink of tears and laughter.
But unbeknown to them at this time, he, the father, is still their greatest champion. For if the world turns against them, and even the one to whom he gave them in matrimony, turns as well, and would hurt them or hate them, he will be there waiting. His love is a great tempered sword of steel and cannot be broken or bent–it is Excaliber and as pure as the quest for the Grail. He will come, he will always come. Only death can stay his rescue, but it cannot remove his will.
Blinddog Smokin’ has played some rare and special gigs, but that night will never be forgotten, for these, as you have probably already guessed, were my own beloved daughters, and the vision is mine forever.
Carl
Posted by Carl