Tarmac Meditations

Tarmac Meditations #121: Yesterday Is Where You find It

April 28, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Sure doesn’t look like what it used to be, now does it? Barbed wire and uncut grass under a lowering sky doesn’t a field of dreams make. Maybe it does. I suppose if you listen close enough you can still hear the ball leaving the bat, the ‘gone’ in the swing, the passing whisper of a dream.

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Tarmac Meditations #120: In the Moment

April 21, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

Said a friend when they saw this picture: “Well, Michael, she is indeed one of the prettiest women I know and she is an absolutely wonderful person and yes, she is a heck of a runner…”

I don’t know her. I took the picture because she was smiling at me from behind the espresso coffee machine and I had a camera in my hand. We were both working, so to speak. Who knew she could run like the wind?

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Tarmac Meditations #119: Never Fades Away

April 14, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz 2 Comments

I wrote this awhile ago. It was a much longer piece then but over the years I have kept cutting it back. I think I wanted to make it more universal in the sense that while it is just one encounter between two people in a specific context, the image I wanted/want to explore is the complexity of war for all involved, at whatever distance, for whatever their reasons. Maybe it does this. Maybe not. I thought about it while running this morning because a flight of F-16s flew over head, their approach heard before they were seen. Even in the peaceful morning rain, the terror that is implied in war planes overhead was palpable. I came back and looked at this and said what the hell, maybe time to put it out there.

A War Story

When I saw her this morning I asked her how she was. She is a graphic artist from Yugoslavia and she works in the office downstairs.

“How was your weekend?”

She said she watched CNN just like she does every night since the Peacekeepers started bombing Belgrade.

In that moment she looked like someone Picasso might have met on the outskirts of Guernica.

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Tarmac Meditations #118: Heavy Gates

March 31, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

I threw her out again last night. I am sitting here this morning thinking that since she isn’t here I don’t have to get high right now. And if I don’t have to get high right now maybe I won’t get high all day.

Fat chance.

For an instant it felt like the heavy gates opened, like the light is shining through the crack. Like it is time to wake up. It’s better to wake up they say, better that than to come to.

According to local rules, you can’t get to heaven without going to hell. It seems that I made an easy deal with the Devil, a “handful a gimme/ a mouth fulla much obliged” kind of deal. It was a very long time ago. Here I sit with an empty pipe and no more stories left to tell.

It has been a hard row to hoe and my friends are hard to find. I have discovered that looking for salvation can be damn near lethal.

Come some distant sunrise, maybe I will give up all hope of changing the past.

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Tarmac Meditations #117: Work in Progress

March 24, 2013 By Michael Lebowitz Leave a Comment

The minister’s granddaughter had a laugh out of a Toulouse Lautrec poster. You make me laugh she said that first night. I better, I said, otherwise it’ll just get weird. Frank Zappa said that.

“I’m glad to hear that you are writing” she said. After a considerable silence, she added, “What a horrible price I’ve paid for your writing.”

I put the phone down and wondered, not for the first time, who was this person I had married one day last June. “Are you kidding me?” I thought later, slouching like DeNiro but just feelin’ tired. There is plenty more to say but before all that there is a price to be paid. Did she know that words are priced in blood and virtue, in boredom and in sin, that words cost the earth and more until they want to be found and then, harder still, until you are ready to hear them.

From the start there was red and orange glowing. At the end there was fire. Leaving before the embers had died required making a shady deal with an enlightened Beelzebub. Jane Gowan said that a long time ago, when I was foolish enough to think that I was ahead of the game. I still like it even if I don’t know what it means.

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