Tarmac Meditations

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.

Once I Was

May 30, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I remembered this morning that there had been a life between us, holding us tightly as if a private gravity, personal and rollin’ steady, like ” a circle ’round the sun.”

Today breaks over the ridge, shadowing the valley road. Each morning is a gift these dwindling days, a 4/4 rhythm in the dancehall of runaway time. “Dance me outside.” a favorite local writer once said. Waltz me one more time under night bright western skies is what I say.

Listen close, hear the far off sounds of saxophones playin’ soft, of dinner dishes settlin’ in the sink, of sweet music in the kitchen. There are shadows dancin’, lighting up the wall.

Tarmac Meditations-It Ain’t Heaven…It’s Illinois.

May 29, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I was riding in an ATV on my way to Memorial Stadium in Champaign-Urbana to get to the finish line of a 10K race event. In order to get there before the first finishers we scooted down a back road. I shot this from the back of the ATV, high shutter speed and ISO and a great deal of good luck. The sky wasn’t that precise blue and the shadows weren’t quite that long, but it felt like the end of day. The sunlight on the silo spoke of night coming and something special in the air. So that is how I processed it.

Writer’s Whine

May 28, 2012 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I don’t want to write about brave Ulysses or Persephone unveiled or running through the town or any other such heroic fuckin’ thing.

I am sittin’ in my room, waitin’ for my ship to come in; I’m thinkin’ that I just want to get where I am going.

It’s not a lot to ask. Or is it?