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Tarmac Meditations #157: Revisiting Old Blue Eyes

May 6, 2015 By Michael Lebowitz 2 Comments

The other day I found that I was not able to write anything at all; the blank screen was piling up points and the morning writing time was dwindling. I fell back upon an old writer’s trick and started rereading some of my older published pieces for the confidence they might inspire. I came upon “Ol’ Blue Eyes: Music of Broken Dreams” and found myself starting to rewrite from top to bottom. I realized that the words were coming, and as any writer does when “it’s working,” I kept on going. Later that day, I sat down to write some more and I was delighted to find that the old trick had worked. Whatever it takes to get the work done is what is necessary that day. The piece that follows is what came out of that day.

A friend and I were having dinner in the kitchen when we heard the news on public radio that Frank Sinatra had died earlier that day.

She said something about how she never got it, the Sinatra thing. That her mother always went on about him, sang his songs on car trips and like that. We ate and drank a little, talked about the day. I told her that I used to listen to Make Believe Ballroom every Saturday morning, a radio show from Philadelphia. “Learnin’ The Blues” was a big hit that year. And even now when I hear his voice, I imagine that I can smell dinner on the stove and I know that my father is on the way home. My mother is singing softly, “It’s a quarter to three, there’s no one in the place… .” It was like that every day for years. “It was a safe place and it was mine,” I said.

I told her that I had seen Frank Sinatra in black and white movies on the Dumont TV in the dining room. From Here to Eternity, The Man with The Golden Arm, High Society. He was…cool. And, it turns out, everything I thought I wanted to be. I knew that there was sadness inside his voice, even in his more popular AM radio hits that played all day long. I couldn’t have said that at the time. What I did know was that his voice told me a lot about who I thought I was.

I went into the other room to put a disc on the player. Without much thinking about it I pulled “In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning,” a complete rendering of the end of things, the end of his love affair, likely with Ava Gardner, heart breaking. It seemed like the right way to remember. The CD, with its Hopper-like illustration on the case, pictured Sinatra leaning sad against a lamp post a block away from the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It looked like it always had to me, evocative, always a mirror image of how I wanted to see myself and often did. I put it on and went back to the kitchen and an unusually quiet dinner.

A bit later she asked where I was, meaning, I guess, that I had drifted away from the conversation. I told her that the music had reminded me of a movie I once saw when I was maybe eight or nine years old. I told her about watching A Walk in the Sun, starring Dana Andrews, directed by Lewis Millstone. I told her I had seen it many times since then and that while it had aged, as had I, it still had the power to remind me of the young boy I had been and what I had thought I would become. When I grew up. I mostly remembered that the narrator referred to a letter he was trying to compose in his head. He returned to it at several different points during the film, which was really a very simple story about an American army platoon hiking up a road in Sicily with orders to take a farmhouse which was a German gun emplacement.

“Dear Frances…,” he says several times, his voice trailing off. The platoon arrives at the farmhouse; the men are hidden behind a centuries-old stone wall. The sun gets higher and higher. They go over the wall. The farmhouse is taken and it is not yet noon.

“Dear Frances….” Andrew’s voice comes over the scene of the bodies lying in the sun, characters we have come to know during their long walk in this foreign place. The survivors gather up and get ready to move on. That’s what men did. They went to war, they didn’t say much about what they had just seen and done, they took care of business and they got on with things.

“Dear Frances,” he says, with weariness, as the camera pulls up and back, looking over the bodies in the sun. “We took a farmhouse today. It was easy.” Only “it” hadn’t been easy, and it’s never what it seems to be. Even I could see that.

I told her about my 14-year-old pill-popping amphetamine-addict life, about how I was filled with images of lost highways and dead-end midnight dreams, of frantic phone calls from mysterious, faraway places, all black and white, with fog on the tarmac. I always imagined I saw a single horn player with a battered leather case, shuffling slowly to the plane through the fog swirling on the runway, pulling me along to somewhere unknown, a place just beyond my reach. Elvis and Benny King were in my head. It seemed that everything was far off, waiting for me, magical, a “rose in Spanish Harlem,” glimpsed but never taken, that life was elsewhere. I couldn’t wait. The music spoke of broken dreams and lost love and sex, and every word seemed meant only for me. Get on with it, Michael, it seemed to say; time’s winged chariot ain’t waitin’ at no station.

Nearly every night for most of my late teens and early 20s, Vietnam was a central fact of life for me as it was for all of us. I had dreams of a battlefield grave, a rifle bayonet in the ground with dog tags and an empty helmet hanging down from the rifle stock. There was a single horn playing Taps. I always woke up in a cold sweat, cotton-mouthed and resigned. I woke up before I was close enough to read the name on the tags.

When my mother died I was in another country, on another coast. When I went home for the funeral with my own 10-year-old son, the classical music station of my mother’s kitchen was off and the door to the study where my dad spent most evenings working on his lectures, papers, on the life of a university professor, was still closed.

I no longer wonder what happened to my childhood’s lonesome highway, to the bloodied heroes and the feverishly imagined manhood where the bars are still open at a quarter to three and morning is a distant fire streaked across the sky. Where the neon in the darkness offers drifting promise that shit will turn to gold and the door will open and my Dad and I will talk together.

Cocaine and whiskey have taught me what I needed to know. Taught me that it isn’t easy and that it never happens that way.

Sinatra’s voice cuts across our wee hours from the other room. He is still walking the floor, she is still gone, whoever she was.

Two nows, 40 years apart. My friend and I (we are new) dance slow and close, keeping time together. Under a cold spring moon our shadows play across the kitchen wall.

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Tarmac Meditations #156: Where the White Wind Blows

April 25, 2015 By Michael Lebowitz 2 Comments

I came across this piece of writing on Facebook. I copied it because it resonated with me. Foolishly, I clicked away after that and could not find it again to give proper credit to the writer. My apologies. It struck me as a familiar and well written thought about living with age and infirmity. My own journey has become a crooked highway littered with seemingly small diagnoses that over time began to coalesce into some pretty big deals for me to confront. Strokes, three in number in six months, atrial fibrillation and its consequent care, during which I sustained a serious upper respiratory infection, all led to an episode of congestive heart failure from which I am now recovering.

Sounds bad, does it not? In reality it’s only “what it is” and there is stuff I can do to “keep on keepin’ on.” Better diet, good exercise, lots of walking, proper care and feeding of my recently more present soul. Which leads me back to running, the cathedral of my own making where much of who I have become was formed and sustained.

“It’s a combination of deep acceptance and a recognition that things are not, physically, going to improve. And the discouragement that goes hand in hand with that, that is often difficult for me to admit… And I couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go backward. I couldn’t do anything. And it felt like: ‘Well, I guess this is it then. It’s all done….’

“So there was a fine bench facing the ocean and I decided to do what I could, to just sit. Sit completely still until forever came.”

I know this bench whereof he speaks; I have used it on a different day to the same end. Simply put, whether metaphorical or literal, when it feels like like end of things. Maybe the best thing to be done is to sit down and wait for what comes next; in every battle it is necessary to find your way from where you are to where you want and need to be. Sometimes that works out. Sometimes not. So I took this photograph.

“Where the white wind blows
I have been.”

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Tarmac Meditations #155: In Search of Lost Time (Apologies to Marcel Proust)

April 22, 2015 By Michael Lebowitz 2 Comments

Proust had his madeleine cookie and, 1500 pages later, he had his book (In Search of Lost Time).

I found a shot of me, taken by a good friend as I was crossing the finish line at the Napa marathon in 2009. I played with the image, made it black and white. As I did that some memories surfaced and I thought a Tarmac Meditation might be in the offing. And so it was. More personal than some of its predecessors but the words showed up and a writer has to go with what there is.

The day, race day, began two days before and included two anger-filled, sleepless nights and a relentless migraine (mine), random angry sex and Banshee-like yelling. I had made a terrible mistake in my reactions to my partner’s most recent choice to join me on race day as a fellow runner. I had, as the Brits would say, behaved very badly.

Napa 2009 Memory: “A steady rain falls over the hills east of the Silverado Trail, an augury of the internal storms to come for those here to run the 31st Napa Valley Marathon. Cold, wet, tired, migrained, 62, I am at a start line after an absence of three long years. The rain seems a messenger from on high, cleansing the earth, the road ahead, readying the bodies and minds of the faithful for the task at hand” (“Tarmac Meditations – Lessons I Learned at Marathon Camp.” Life As A Human, 2010).

So why am I remembering this now? I came across this picture taken of me as I was crossing the finish line at Napa. The embarrassment came back in waves of regret, in this present-day context of having been able to do something then that I can no longer do. It has been, and is likely to be, my last marathon. Had I been paying attention to more than the run itself I might never have finished it. It was, strangely, my best run in four years, and at the age of 62 I had every right to be proud of it and to immediately begin to plan the next one. I don’t see any pride in my expression. I see only distance, rain and exhaustion. I see the beginning of the “thousand-yard stare,” having just endured what marathoners refer to with overblown melodrama, as a “Death march,” one foot in front of the other, just dragging the all and everything of “what hasn’t been right today” to the conclusion to a tough run. It might also be referred to as a long day at the office.

From my present perspective, whatever else that day was, it was the last good one I have had since then in so far as my running and my health are concerned. My responses to the image are laced with poignancy and a drifting regret like the beginning of the first snowstorm of the winter.

By the time race day came around, said partner had decided not to run and to instead be my support crew as we had intended right from the beginning. In other words, she had changed her mind. Much ado about not very much at all. As a note to anyone who has not run a long-distance race, the days leading up to the event are often filled with tension and terror. It is, after all, a long way to go and a lot of stress to put on your body, so a little fear is probably a good thing. In my case, my preparation in the days before took the form of going inside myself, wrapped in endless repetitions of Dylan’s “Knocking’ on Heaven’s Door,” sung by Bob Marley and/or Eric Clapton, in order to deal with this sense that I had that I was about to leave what I knew – my comfort zone, if you will – and go out into the “uncomfortable.”

I heard and saw the interaction between us as a great violation of our social contract – no, make that of everything that is holy. To hear me in those moments a person might have thought I was auditioning for the position of Director of Communications-Infidel Recruitment Branch during the Spanish Inquisition, which, to be fair, nobody really expected. I could’ve simply shrugged and asked her if she had brought her good running shoes. After all, what did it matter? The timing of the change was capricious and without malice and if a bit self-serving, so what? I still had miles in front of me and “promises to keep”; leaving her to her own dreams might have been a kindness as well as the best way out of my own self-destructive tantrums. I remembered all of this embarrassment when I first came across the portrait the other day.

I also saw in my face the beginning of the end for us. There was no kindness to be shared in victory is what I see. She was who she was and I, in my own way, was repeating some very flawed behaviors from my addict past. Selfishness on my part, invincibility and the over-whelming drive to be right. It is hard on a person to be like that and equally to have to put up with that, regardless of the intimacies which are shared. Twenty-six-point-two miles is a long time to think about all of that stuff. I see all of that in my face with a hint of regret when I look at my expression. Years later we came apart, mostly because of what we had both revealed in those days. We hadn’t changed very much and so it goes.

Napa 2009 Memory No. 2: “By late afternoon there was no evidence of the 2,500 runners and volunteers. No paper cups, no Gu packages. The sun came out and by nightfall the Silverado Trail was dry. The next morning all that remained was local traffic and the faint sense of something that had happened here. It, too, would be washed away by the morning rains, falling light upon the vineyards whose bounty was still months away” (“Tarmac Meditations – Lessons Learned at Marathon Camp,” Life As A Human, 2010)

I have begun to think about those days more recently as my own return to long-distance running has become some far-off distant glimmer that may or may not ever happen. The miles have been a part of my recovery from drugs and alcohol, as well as my best tool for staying steady in the face of aging and its attendant physical humiliations. The discipline of making a plan, sticking with it and executing on the day has been rewarding in countless ways. I have found a solace and a whisper of Grace in the solitude of the running. It had been my hope that after a year – make that two years – of scary physical, medical issues, I might finally be able to “get back at it.” Not so fast, Michael. It is going to take a long while to work through what is in front of me. It is possible and indeed likely that I will one day in the distant future go out for a double-digit run and not wind up in an ER somewhere. I am looking forward to that.

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