Over heard at an AA meeting; Look for something that you don’t like and then don’t do it.

“…Still I search for something I can’t see
They don’t have what I need at the A&P…”
James McMurtry

Some days I stumble over how I used to be flashy and useless. And then there are days when there are rainbows in the spray of surf that rolls in from the South China Sea. It feels exciting and scary as if starting out for the first time; maybe love is waiting in the wind. Maybe not. “Dawn’s early light” sculpts the rainbows into carriages overflowing with childhood’s dreams, drifting away to forever, perhaps to be found again.

Over heard at another AA meeting; I had an abortion in Juarez – I don’t want to die.

The short answer to your question about what happened in those last years on the drug run is a Dylan quote: “I bargained for salvation and she gave a lethal dose.” I thought if I got married and lived on an island in the Gulf she could save my life. It might have worked but for the cocaine in the city during the week. She was “steamy” and not okay with her own place in the world. I didn’t see that, on account of I wasn’t lookin’. When we burned it to the ground I was devastated and relieved at the same time, the release from fantasy set me free to continue down the lost highway in “full tilt dirty boogie” mode. Three years later I finally ran out of room and began the journey home.

More recently, I remembered this one from many years ago.

“Well, I rapped upon a house
With the U.S. flag upon display
I said, “Could you help me out
I got some friends down the way”
The man says, “Get out of here
I’ll tear you limb from limb”
I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”
He said, “You’re not Him.”

Photo Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz – All rights reserved.

“But everything keeps on a-moving
Yeah, everybody’s on the go
You don’t find things that last anymore
Like an old woven Navajo rug.”
Navajo Rug, Ian Tyson

I have always loved this song, mostly on account of Katy, a waitress with an eye for woven products; she knew how to make good use of that old  Navajo rug. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.  

I often write about serious stuff, you know long distance running, bad health, bad attitudes, mine in particular, and, around last year’s election about the state of the nation as I saw it.  Today with this song as a reminder, I am thinking about something from way back, so long ago, that Dwight David Eisenhower was president. Who?? In my household that was a disaster. If my parents had not already passed on, they would be in that process now with Donald Trump in the White House. Be grateful for small mercies is what I say.

The other day in the seemingly  endless cycle of chronic back pain, I was trying to make my bed. These days that takes way more energy than it used to, so I found myself doing a blanket angel on the bed. I noticed not for the first time that the blanket in question was a classic Hudson’s Bay blanket, you know, the white ones with the green, red yellow and black  stripes. I bounced up and began staring at the blanket. As with Proust and his famous Madeleine, I was transported back to the long ago days before yesterday, when all the talk was about nuclear holocaust, the Red Menace, and either the Brooklyn Dodgers (yes, they usta be in Bwooklyn) or the New York Yankees. I am of the generation that learned to “duck and cover” in school under those God-awful school desks that were so popular in the 50s.  I left PS 164 and escaped to high school, just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Living, as I did, under the flight paths of both LaGuardia and what was too soon to become JFK,  it was not only a large scale universal nightmare but  also a deeply personal one from the standpoint of a selfish, awkward 15 year old, in that I was terrified every time a plane went over head. In this I was not unusual. Unbeknownst to the millions of Americans whose nightmares were similar to my own, I was sure I had an answer, if not to the missile crisis, then to my own survival. I knew from my earlier experience in the 50s that if I was under my Hudson’s Bay blanket I would live forever, safe from whatever idiocies  the adult world  beyond my control could think up.

Despite the fact that I am no longer 15, (what a relief), I still confront the idiocies of a world that I no longer understand very well nor which I can control in any way.  The one that has Donald Trump as president. When Senator Bob Corker brought up the phrase World War 3, I found myself doing blanket angels on my now straightened up Hudson’s Bay blanket. These were not superstitious, or a return to my misguided, sometimes terrified, youth. I was simply exhausted with the anger that I have lived with since Trump was elected. I sat up on the bed and looked around, listened for air raid sirens, heard none and decided quite happily that today was not going to be a day when I would die in a nuclear holocaust. When I looked down at the blanket, a sense of great relief flooded over me, and just a little embarrassment for my instantaneous return to childhood demons, and to my simple, happy, impossible, solutions.  

Peace of mind is where you find it, so too relief… and a veteran blanket.

Photo Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz – All rights reserved.