So I wrote this a few years ago and then let it be. I haven’t been able to get back into the longer work I began in the fall, so I have been doing a lot of whining, housecleaning, erranding, complaining out loud to strangers, cleaning the window grouting with a used toothbrush, creating new recipes for old vegetables and anything else that was not writing.

The other day I mistakenly wondered about a document in my writing folder whose title caught my eye. Mistakenly because I opened it, read it and started into rewriting it. And then I did it again with another piece; so much time went by that I decided to pick yet another piece and do the same thing. I spent the entire working day just like that – rewriting old stuff. OMG it was kind of thrilling. Sadly, the piece that needs finishing and several others that need starting are in no immediate danger of meeting their appointed fates.

But if “hope is a thing with feathers” as the poet said (although I am sure she was not referring to the new duster I bought the other day and placed prominently on a corner of my desk), I am closing in on the work that needs doing. Trust me.

Honolulu Café

I was going to meet a poet for drinks at 5:00, so i ran some errands on the other side of town. I was early, she was late. I wrote this while I was waiting. Later we drank cheap red and made out, leaning backwards across the hood of a ’55 Chevy.

It’s been raining hard all day.

I’m driving south on Main Street towards Marine Drive. I’ve got some bills I have to pay. Roy Rogers and Norton Buffalo are playing on the radio. It sounds like the lost nights and the window skies from so long ago; sweet, endless like youth itself and now, it seems, over. Rest in peace, Norton.

I stop for a red light. I catch sight of the Honolulu Café on the eastern side of the street right there between the New Antique Market with a “new” container from Belgium and the Come-In Enterprises Emporium, featuring stamp collections and “super healthy” food from Hong Kong.

Honolulu: hotels, beaches, Pearl Harbor, beautiful Hawaiian girls, the Pipeline. The palm tree sign out front has fallen over. The place looks wet from the inside out, shrouded in the rain like Noah’s final port of call, a last chance hole in the wall, a wait-it-out-‘til-paradise kinda joint.

I get to thinkin’ how maybe Miles or ‘Trane played here some long-ago lost night on the road but that’s romantic tripe. My guess is that nobody ever played anything at all at the Honolulu Café.

I don’t know anyone in there and they don’t know me. At the Honolulu Café you got to figure that since they don’t say anything, they got to know something.

On a rainy day here, north of the original Skid Row, we are all innocent bystanders. According to a local ordinance, every act of kindness will be revenged.

Behind the fallen palm tree sign and the worn out yellow light the shadows drift behind the fading yellow window.

Outside the Honolulu Café an old man staggers against the blowing rain. I imagine for a moment that he is remembering how the decks were awash in the South Pacific swell.
The darkness inside the midnight watch was blacker than the night sky in Hell. The Southern Cross was all but gone. As he ran for the wheelhouse he prayed that it wasn’t another one of those rogue waves rolling up from the South China Sea.

From behind my wheel it looks to me like that storm is right here, right now. Watch caps and John Deere hats don’t keep you dry up here. The streets are wet; his pockets are empty. I’m thinkin’ that he knows that there ain’t nobody home waiting up. The old guy turns into the oncoming rain. It slashes across his battered face. From here I can see a hint of a smile; could be he is remembering his last good day, somewhere east of the Solomons, running for home in front of the storms coming up out of the Sou’west.

I’m waiting for the light to change. I keep drifting back to the back of the place I grew up in. I hear the sounds of chairs scraping on the wet floor and dishes hitting the bus box. Comes a voice in a long-ago hotel kitchen singing, “You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’…,”  a dishwashing angel, backlit in clouds of steam and endless stacks of dirty dishes. He wasn’t young like me or old like hard times; he was just worn out with the distance between here and used to be. I went back to look for him one night, maybe ask him where he’d been, ask him what he knew. He wasn’t there.

I can hear the wipers on the windshield, the rain on the roof, the road wet tires, the sounds of passing by. I’m heading south, paying some bills. I’m waiting for the fog to lift, waiting for sunrise over the islands. I’m waiting for the phone to ring. I’m waiting for the waiting to be over.

and the other piece,

Hard Candy

She turned her back to me
I threw my arm around her,
thinking that she might feel safer
later she took my hand and squeezed
it on her childlike breast,
my shakes rolled in and
tore up the night
Hours went by
before she said softly,
Charlie, It’s make peace not war.

I’ve been raped every night
for the last four years
she said
go to sleep I said,
drifting smoke images of  the Pieta
slow danced across the spackled ceiling

I saw the Pieta at the ’64 New York World’s Fair
She seemed aware,
in her patient
stone cloak, pried loose as it had been
from our rough beginnings,
of having been touched by God’s hand,
And yet she remained silent and cold, very cold

She is barely alive,
we  are barely afloat
in our indifferent ocean.
I held her so tight,
she held me up,
held,
we made our way to morning

Let’s call Eaton she said
He’s got the best shit in town
After  awhile, “we’ll call him,“
a few minutes later we did.

Image Credits

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I finished up doing intervals (2) on the trail, walked through the parking lot, stretched my achin’ calf and achilles, turned to go and got blasted by the warmth of the sun. I stopped and took a breath and then another one. Felt the warmth spread through my body and bring me pause and silence. The years slipped away. And I found myself smiling foolishly at nothing in particular. “I know you, Rider” ( “…I have missed you while you were gone”- Grateful Dead) ran through my head. Not inexplicably, I felt great in that moment, for the first time in a long while – and I still do. 

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I fell asleep last night while listening to West Coast jazz from the 50’s on Pandora, and then Van Morrison. I woke up hours later to Ben E King singing Stand by Me. I was a kid, a teenager, the last time that happened. Fall nights can be that way: sometimes magic, sometimes just a little bit sad, but not in a bad way.

I had a friend who had a great voice, and his particular sound had a Ben E King-like quality. He used to try it out in stairwells across campus and, later, in the New York subway system. Another friend once asked him to sing backup and harmony for him at a recording session for a demo single that eventually got picked up by a music publisher. My Ben E King singer friend never went to the session. For all kinds of reasons, none of which could ever hide his disappointment with himself. It became one of those “I was almost” a something or other. Maybe a “contender.” But in fact he had real talent, real in equal measure to his terror of failure or maybe, equally, of success, and so he never tried.

Over the years I have found that this story, or reference to it, just tires me out. We all have those stories, don’t we? There is a multi-billion-dollar industry built on self-help to “unlock what you might have had” or might “still discover.” I know I still have the sense that possibility in my life is not dead even though, lately, Death/Time, in its “winged chariot,” seems to be hovering near.

In retrospect I see that the things left undone, for whatever reasons, became fuel for my running. Showing up is a victory in itself; finishing is a bonus but not the only result. Finishing, for me, implies that there is yet again another hill to climb and “miles to go before I sleep.”

I wish that I had woken up, laced up, disregarded my back, and hit the street for a little run. But instead I wrote this and worked on the photograph that accompanies it. It was always clear that the song Stand By Me was a prayer of a kind, possibly to God and/or a woman or friend. But early this morning I heard it differently; I heard the singer asking that he might stand tall once more and do what needed doing. For a drifting moment in the darkened house, my home for many years, the singer’s voice felt like my own. 

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Shot the Waldo 100k at Willamette Pass here in Oregon yesterday. I missed it last year due to bad health and atrial fibrillation procedures, but Matt Hagen, a good friend and a good photographer, stepped in and covered my butt. I am grateful to Craig Thornley and Meghan Canfield Arbogast, the fabulous RD’s who invited me back, and to Gary Breedlove, who helped me shoot the finish.

The shoot emptied my tank, if you will, but the day was beautiful, the runners inspirational as they embraced their personal pursuit of their hard earned dreams. I am grateful to all of them as they make these days what they are; their efforts encourage me every day to dream my own dreams and to “lace up and light out” in search of them.

With all of this “positivity” going on, though, why am a bit depressed, as if feeling the passing time in my newly awakened muscles and dreams brings on the inevitable wondering about the implied shelf-life in aging?

Oh well, tomorrow is another day and I will have things to do and promises to keep.

Image Credits

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I have been going out on the local trails for my walking “training” – good for the heart, mind and spirit. Left Fox Hollow and headed over to Dillard trail head. Got distracted by a sharp left going downhill. Went downhill, but it was steeper than I am used to. Found a sharp right at the bottom of the trail and continued to go downhill. Eventually ran out of downhill and turned around; lesson #1: if it’s downhill all the way there, it is likely to be uphill all the way back.

Met Bruce and Janice, who between them are 170 years old and happy to be here. We walked uphill for a while and then Bruce, being 88, thought that he had had enough uphill for awhile. His week-old pacemaker told him that caution was the better part of valor. As they turned and came past me they asked after my parking situation and suggested that I follow them down to the Martin Street trail head and catch a ride up to my car.

Bruce turned to me and said as we drove off, “Young man, 68 is young, believe you me. It just keeps on getting better and better from here on out.”

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.