Born Again

It's said that you can never go back again, but you can. Some say they wish they knew then what they know now, and it can be so. Dawn brings a chance to live again with all the knowledge and experience that you picked up along the way. Perhaps it is the moment of creation, perhaps we've never actually seen our friends and families at all. God snapped his fingers and brought us into being, programed with all of our memories that seem so real. Don't question it too much, just run with it, celebrate it....this sensuous life where oysters scent the moist air sweeping off the marsh and the touch of your lover is so much more than just that.

Eric's Throne

Back in the daze, Eric had the best overstuffed chair on the planet. A massive cupped hand of cushions and frame that sucked you in and handed you an invitation to stay a week or two. It magnified gravity and pulled your ass back down if you even thought about getting up. It sang a sirens song enticing anyone close to give in, give up, and just relax for a very... long... time. That Goodwill gem, the envy of his peeps, made the other dorm rooms seem cold and uninviting by comparison. Of course it also fueled a search for copycat luxury. With an imposing footprint and demanding nothing less than center stage, other furniture in Eric's room blended into an innocuous background. As for Eric, Eric looked like a king on his throne... or, in his throne actually. His king's gold, mostly Acapulco, was hidden deep around the cushions. Eric could reach down and pull out smoke, papers, matches, maybe an ashtray or two, all the necessities to entertain himself and others. I imagined that he had an unlimited cache of survival supplies stuffed down within arm's reach...food, drink, money, books... Very likely there was a bit of magic at play that allowed him to actually pull out anything he wished for. He sat in a magician’s top hat in the form of a huge overstuffed chair.

We came to him, gathering in his room for music, talk and play. A motley crew of Northern interlopers in a little Southern town. A group of misfits trapped aboard a ship sitting stagnant in hostile waters. But Eric's room was a place of comfort, a refuge for friends, ideas, and music. At those times, all was good with the world as Eric held court from his magic chair, his home away from home.

Smoke

He came to us as “Rufus”, a little black rescue dog with a dopey name that really doesn’t conjure any positive images. It's like calling him “Gomer”. He's a total mutt but why hobble him at such a young age? 

Rufus stops and crouches, staring at me with skeptical wolf eyes fired by the very few genes that he has left from those ancient ancestors. I want to rename him something more noble: “Smoke”... that has a certain dark mystery about it. It also honors my friend of the same name, who has a big head. Rufus has a big head too. Well I guess it's really not so big in relation to his body but more...muscular looking. Now my friend Glenn really does have a big head, any way you look at it. Maybe he could say that it houses more brain material than the average cranium and suggest some kind of an intellectual edge. But size doesn't automatically dictate any special qualities one way or the other. I mean, in spandex shorts, I look like I may be smuggling a weasel. Something large, tubular, and very much alive. But I'm old, and it's just a hernia and a piece of prolapsed bowel so don't go getting all excited.

Maybe Glenn has a big head full of encephalitic fluid and simply needs a stent to reduce the swelling. I'm just guessing here.

But the sweetest sound to man or beast is the sound of their own name, so I'll give Rufus a more mysterious name, more worthy of respect... Smoke. I mean, Johnny sang of a “Boy named Sue”, a moniker that always plagued the guy he wrote about. We can do better than that, Rufus. 

You're welcome Smoke, you'll thank me one day, but I doubt my friend will.

Gator Country...

When we take the dogs out for a run around the lake behind our house, Sasha, the standard poodle with a brain the size of a walnut, always looks for this guy (the gator, not Dale). She loves to make him jump into the water. If it’s a hot day, she also expects to take a dip. There’s a place with no obstructions, very beach like with a clear view, where I let all four dogs swim. Several years ago when Sasha went in, I saw three gators leave the opposite bank and make a beeline for the poodle buffet.  All were less than four feet, but to prevent a coordinated attack, I made her get out of the pool. Two gators sulked at quite a distance, but one got close. Thinking that the gator was her beloved throwing stick, Sasha splashed back in to retrieve it. Closing the distance and trying to bite the now magically animated stick, I heard the young gator clearly yell to his buds: “Oh shit, this bitch is crazy!” and immediately take a dive. Sasha swam in circles looking for her stick and lunged when it surfaced a few feet away. I was growing hoarse, yelling for that dog to come to shore, when she dutifully came back in, not realizing that she was lucky to still have all four legs. But Sasha already had a history with that particular gator, loving to run at him when he would sun himself on the bank. He would always take a dive. I had been afraid that one day though, he may refuse to jump and think Sasha suddenly looked like a Big Mac. So I finally called Dale, the state gator guy, to do his manly trapping act. Dale sells the meat, and someone gets a belt and a great pair of shoes.

For Sasha, Dale and for me, it’s a win, win, win.

One down, two to go. 

The Name of God...

This is a good one. It makes sense. When Bill Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell on “The Power of Myth”, Campbell compared religion to being in a club (Campbell himself was a Catholic). He pointed out that there was great value for many in joining the club and believing in the club experience, and possibly having an epiphany by doing so. You need to try to believe in your club, be it Catholic or Baptist, Moose or Mason. Campbell pointed out that there are many roads to the same place. We get into trouble when people leave no room for differences of opinion and insist that their club is the only way, not just for themselves, but for everyone else as well. Humans fight endless wars over the name of God or for the individual right to not give god any name at all...

Memory Snapshots

Memories flow from these images, as rich and full of life as the waters rushing under that bridge. They fill me up as they do that chest, more real than the physical things that spawn them.

An image of the iconic Bridge of Lions hangs over the chest that my Grandfather made for Grandma Maverick to mark their wedding anniversary. I spent the summer of 1972 in the woods at their place in Charlottesville when he was working in his shop on this surprise for his love of more than 50 years. Watching him use his router to rough out the patterns on the mahogany panels, the smell of charring wood reminded me of a wood-burning set I had gotten for Christmas back when I was in Boy Scouts and had my own projects to fret over. Often I would ask: “What are you carving? What is that going to be?” With mock disgust he would fire back: “It's my casket, dammit! I'm going to be buried in it!”

Then one hot August day when Grandma drove her yellow Nash Rambler station wagon into town to buy groceries at the Safeway store, Grandpa said: “Take a picture of me in my casket.” Morbid, I know, but he insisted that we get the shot before Grandma could pull back up the long driveway and nix the whole idea. Dutifully I helped Grandpa carry the chest out of the shop and onto the sunny path leading up to the main house. When he climbed into “his casket” and sat up all erect and picture perfect under his straw fedora, I snapped away. One of those prints is barely visible here attached to the top right hand side of the lid. I love that box, so full of memories, even when it appears to be empty.

Now the Bridge of Lions connects me to another flood of mental snapshots, happy times from when we lived on Anastasia Island and walked or rode our bikes up and over that bridge and back down again into the center of the old city. Carla, Ruth, Hannah and me peddling single file up the narrow sidewalk, often stopping at the top where the drawbridge teeth clenched tightly like a giant steel mouth, grinning and ready to open wide again very soon..

 We paused at that half-way point to fill our lungs with fresh salt air, spitting over the side rail to watch a little piece of ourselves hit and swirl in that unstoppable tidal flood only forty feet below. Conspiratorial smiles among us at the certainty of rapid acceleration and downhill breezes, we launched into winds that would blow us straight into the heart of downtown for a a family play-date. Memories branded onto our own hearts, now unleashed by these fertile images, each one spawning innumerable invitations to once again revel and play.