loss

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.

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.

Loan Me a Dime

October 27, 2010 By longrun Leave a Comment

It began with a phone call. It usually does.

My name is Billy Prophet and these days my job is to find what’s been lost. People come to me when they tried everything else, including prayer.

I don’t do salvage work like some of my fellow sleuths say they do on account of I don’t believe in it. Once something’s been lost or broken it can’t be salvaged, not really. Hemingway once wrote that people heal stronger in the broken places. I ‘m not so sure about that. You can’t step in the same river twice or so I’ve heard. I figure the only way to find what’s been lost is to use what you know and then imagine the rest. Maybe that will allow you to start over with a clean slate. Sometimes it works for me and my clients. Sometimes not.

I should have died the way things were going. I came to that last time, on my knees, looking for any kind of cocaine on the rancid floor of my bedroom. I remember asking a god I didn’t believe in and had been angry at for as long as I remember to please just let me go to sleep. After what seemed to me to be a long while I asked him/her/it if it would be okay if I woke up.

The past simply stopped. What I know is that it was over. There was nothing left, nowhere to go. Death or starting over. There are still days when it is not an obvious choice.

I have tried to stop wondering how it is that I am still here. It doesn’t really matter, the why of it. I pretty much leave that to talk show hosts, Republicans, and TV evangelists. When I look back I see that I have left every place I’ve ever been with nearly everything left undone, smoke rising in the rearview mirror. What I do know is that I have left before I have had to pay the true price of things.

I’ve lost damn near everything I’ve ever had and more to the point, pretty much everything I ever thought I was. I guess that’s why I look for lost things.

I’ve been doing it for a long time.

One of the things I learned right off is that you can lose something when it is right in front of you. I was thinking about that when the phone rang. She said her name was Linda Granger and she wanted to come see me. She had gotten my name from a friend of hers who knew me but she didn’t tell me who. I wasn’t surprised. People are embarrassed to come to me, to have other people know that they have come. In a society where ownership is status losing something or someone is a stigma, a sign of failure. I figure if you come to me you have nowhere else to go; that you think your laundry is so dirty that you just want it to go away before any more damage can be done.

I find lost things sometimes but more often than not I am simply trying to put things right, to help my clients start over. Guessing from the sound of her voice Linda Granger woke up everyday with something else that went wrong. She had nowhere else to go.

I had a bad feeling about this one.

to be continued…