Journal – Page 3

Early Morning False Alarm

July 9, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

In the distance, while lacing up before 5:00 “Come out with your hands up, you are surrounded!” this down the street on a what was otherwise a very quiet summer morning. I remember those mornings from another time-more like the end of another long bad night. I ran by, recognized a couple of the uniforms from some local races, nodded and got my miles. It was a very hard way to live. When I looked back the lights were still flashing and several lives were heading south. After my run my neighbor asked me what all the fuss had been about; I pointed down the road and said “It took us years to learn that the “shit” could kill you, I guess it’s their turn now.” He nodded, sipped his coffee, hit his smoke and went back inside. I don’t know where he had been when I had been where those kids are now, but he had been somewhere and the memory wasn’t easy. I was glad in that moment that I didn’t have his day.

Moondance by Van Morrison had been playing on the ‘Pod while I was running. When this song/album came out I was working a cement crew in a sewer treatment plant being built in Toronto. My girlfriend and later, wife and mother to my kids, used to get up and make lunch for me. In the early summer morning we would eat breakfast, usually maple syrup bacon and eggs and toast and coffee on the french paned glassed in back porch of our beautiful, soon to be replaced by a huge apartment complex, brick house with a view of downtown. What ever could go wrong with that? It was simpler then and maybe it was easier but inevitably it changed. Now the apartments remain, the wife is ex, the children are grown and lovely…the music and the memories are still plenty good. I can almost taste that bacon and really, there is no need to explain why I was smiling when I finished my run.

Almost Independence Day 2012

July 4, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Sometimes I rewrite the past, make it up, turn things around, maybe what happened to me really happened to somebody else or the other way around. I used to think of it as lying, then later as imagination leading to writing. These days I sometimes think I do it to make things easier, at least easier until I have the courage and the willingness to turn into the wind and square up. It’s almost the Fourth of July 2012, Independence Day. Me and Van Morrison have been at this thing a long time. Together, after a fashion. Missing absent friends tonight, so I’m just listenin’ to the music, watchin’ the sun slip away over ridgeline, thinkin’ about how tired I get when I’m wonderin’ about how things are, about how they got this way, when I’m doin’ nothin’ more than waitin’ on the comin’ day.

Driftin’

June 19, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The court stenographer reminds me of Sandy-what’s-her-name, quiet and proud, interior, aloof. I always wanted Sandy-what’s-her-name. She stood tall and straight. An athlete, a dancer. She walked softly, steady on her feet, blonde pony tail metronome. I thought she was, well, I thought she was beautiful. We talked all the time but I never knew her at all. I asked her to the Jr. High prom or maybe the high school prom.She said no. And then she smiled her lovely, sweet, sad smile.

It seems bizarre to me that I keep thinking of Sandy as I sit here in the courtroom during a criminal trial of a friend. He is facing five years for a felony count of possession of pornography. The expert witnesses are explaining how his bipolar disease had caused his drug abuse, which led to his hanging out with the hooker who led him to the porno sites which became the possession in question. It is very sad . He is my friend. I have been told that I have the same disease. Bi polar maybe, more likely addiction. Mine came on at about age nineteen. I abused drugs for forty years but have never been charged with possession of pornography. Or done hard time. Or died.

I keep trying to listen to the witnesses but mostly I watch the court stenographer. The judge gives my friend five years and then suspends the sentence. He puts him on probation in the care of the facility where he is still in treatment.

Something good has happened here or at least it seems to be good at this moment. I remember, as we walk down the hallway in the company of my friend and his Vietnam veteran Marine Corps lawyer who uses a couple of “oorahs” to describe his feelings, that Sandy had a brother who beat me up once after school. He was always in trouble with the law. Given the choice of going to jail after some serious incident or enlisting in the Marines he chose the Marines. Years later I heard that he died at Khe Sahn.

I wonder if she still walks quietly. I wonder if we met accidentally would we say hello and talk awhile. Maybe we would nod, not really knowing how we knew each other. Maybe we would smile but just keep on with the hurry of the day, waiting for later, waiting for the drift into how it was way back when, when we were all bored silly, scared half to death, filled with promises and dreams, waiting forever for our lives to happen.

Santa Fe Dreams

June 19, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The E Train went by underground, shaking the floor, the glasses on the bar. The kid standing next to me looked startled.

“When I was a kid the Santa Fe freights used to wake me up,” the kid said. He seemed lost and kind of lowdown when he said it.

We were strangers, standing at the rail of an uptown joint in the snow bound northern city where I grew up. I had come home to visit my father. He was in the stroke ward at the nearby hospital. It wasn’t going well between us, Dad and me. It never did.

“I can still hear them ol’ freights, like rolling thunder,” he said.

After awhile he said he used to wait for the circus to come to town. “Yeah I get that.” I said. “We would go to the Garden, just down the street, and watch the clowns”. I told him how the clowns scared the hell out me, how I thought that my dad thought it was funny that clowns scared me. Later, much later, it turned out it wasn’t true he thought that.

The kid looked at me like I was a crazy old man or maybe just drunk. “I used to hear the circus coming from miles away” he said, “I could hear the calliope from way far off. Folks in town would stop what they were doing and listen.Get ready to party.” Then he stopped, as if caught up in a dust devil memory he shook his head and said very quietly, “they would get a funny look in their eyes, maybe thinkin’ it was something more than the end of summer, more than another year gone to harvest.” He was quiet after that.

Before I left I asked him where he was from. He told me he was from a little town just outside of Denton, Texas. I told him I knew where it was, that I had heard the Santa Fe freights rolling by, that I had stayed awhile and moved on. I wished him well and went out the door. I walked down the once familiar streets to the uncertainty that was waiting at the hospital.

I didn’t tell him that I had been in Denton because I was running for cover, drying out, getting clean. That the trains in the night sounded like all things lost, that lonesome was a way station on the road back from where I had been.

Loose Ends

May 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I am now, as always, lost in the grainy black and white myth of Bogart and Bacall; a kiss is still a kiss, a twin engine DC 3 waits on the rain slick tarmac in the night fog, it leaves in a hour for Lisbon, and we all walk off stage right into the swirling fog at the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Ain’t like that here. Just pay the bills, carry the weight. I’ll turn off the lights one more time and “close the door lightly” when I go.

Cut it loose an old friend told me years ago. If it don’t bring you joy, she said, cut it loose. Acceptable losses is what she meant.

Tying up the loose ends is what I said to her yesterday. At the end of love nothin’ is easy. What the hell, over is over.