24 little hours

"What a difference a day makes..".

It's easy to fall back on feelings when you're out standing in the rain. Feeling sorry for yourself is not such a bad option when you find yourself standing under a foreshortened umbrella, rainwater dripping down your neck, a stiff breeze blowing tiny shards of cold, wet drizzle up against the back of your pant legs and your not so waterproof jacket. It's easy to feel low when folks you know see you standing before your cart, well, actually, your friends dog cart, pushed up mean against the side of the road,, and wonder "how the hell did he end up there?" Looking around all I could see was grey, fat clouds and the expanding rings of raindrops hitting oily water in chuck holes the size of large bread boxes. I stood there and all I could think was "fall from grace". I kept flashing on Charleton Heston's turn as a galley slave in Ben Hur. It was all I could do to keep from knocking out a beat on the stamped steel beast I stood before, thrumming out "ramming speed" as cars kept passing me by.

Fast forward twenty four hours and the sun is shining bright. It's still cold out but I'm inside with the heater on. The cat is out, hot coffee is circulating through my veins, the bed is freshly unmade and I still have last night's dinner dishes in the sink. I am starting to sleep better now that I have let go my wonderfully bad habit of eating late and drinking late. I stood on the porch a moment ago and looked out over the water towards the Olympics and know that at some point today you will be looking out that way, too. Bound to be, have to be, as they are about as beautiful today as you are.

I think of days like today and wish to forego that lengthy drive I have ahead of me, stay here, wait for something to break, then just when I think I'll blow off my opportunity I think of days like yesterday when I felt like a misplaced bracero selling oranges off of a freeway offramp and know I have no choice but to go. I know that I have to set my finances back a bit in order to see if I can make a hiring list or two. I know that I have to keep up my housework so that that imaginary dream buyer will fall in love with my house. I know I must keep my spirits up because not every day is a rainy day, because there are plenty of sunny days up ahead.

Outside my door it's still winter, will be for another three weeks or so. We managed to get through the season here in PO with little to no snow. I managed to make it through this financial debacle so far with luck and pluck and bit of hard work. With the sun shining, the wrens singing, the dafodils rising up through the muck, job interview in the wings and the fridge full I feel that life might just be okay. Find me again out on a walk, my dear, and up the antey. I have a long road ahead of me and every little bit helps.

Ramming speed, indeed! Onward and upward, my dear!

Your WHMB

Second chance on Hawkstone, 2/21/2010

"No regrets".

Before I went to sleep last night I lay in my bed thinking of you and our chance meeting yesterday. I "talked" to you up there in my bed in a way that I wish I could have when we ran into each other on the street. Upstairs I didn't feel the tug of unseen hands on our coats. In my bed I could dismiss the sands of time that ran much too quickly through that egg timer we shared. In the quiet confines of my room I didn't feel the pressure of a million eyes that folks laid on us as they drove by. In my bed, my head on my pillow, I didn't feel like I was running after a train, didn't have that "say it to me now or forever miss the chance" angst I felt right before we parted.

Yesterday, as we stood there on the trail by the side of the road I felt the weight of all too many months worth of baggage on my shoulders, felt an unnatural constriction of time, the necessity for brevity, the confines of propriety. It felt odd, forced, almost manic to talk to you that clipped, chirpy sort of way. It was all I could do to avoid missing beats. I couldn't help but to stumble on my words. In that Last Supper moment I let all negative things fly away and packed as much soulful inane chatter into five hard and fleeting minutes as I could.

Up in my room, before I fell asleep, it was another matter altogether. The words I had for you there were slow, easy, filled with all the sweet nuances and sloy observations of life that come when you're feeling safe with someone. I've had an awful lot of practice "talking" to you up there, for you have been the one that I look for in heart first and last before going off to sleep or when I wake. I discovered this little truth there in my room that I didn't see or understand when we were there on foot and that is when I saw you I knew that I didn't want to burden you with my feelings. Instead, when I saw you I knew it would be enough just to share grocery aisle stuff, "wow, where did you come from? Out of the blue?" kinda of chatter.

In my bed, in my head, all feelings for you flowed, all bets were off, all normally choked off, restricted or forbidden words, were allowed. I think of all my words to you here, kind or longing or bitter or angry, and know that when I write them they're just to let you know where I stand, to let you know what I'm feeling at the moment. Here it's easy to share with you the general frustration I have knowing that you're out there, that I am over here, and that our coffee pot has been growing cold waiting for us to have our time in the sun once again.

When I saw you coming down the path yesterday I knew we would have just a moment to catch up, the way two people share pregnant pauses in an elevator in between floors, like the minutes you have with a friend, sharing movie star observations, while being stuck behind a harried hausfrau with a cart full of groceries at a checkout. I wanted time to move slowly but knew what we had was being pulled apart by our various realities. Those minutes we shared had to be enough.

But here my words for you can go on forever. My last words to you tonight before I fell asleep? Just this: no regrets. Jane, I have no regrets. I saw that those words registered when I said then to you right before we parted that second time. I saw it in your eyes. I haven't seen emotion like that from you for me in a long time. Like an arrow my words hit their mark. Bullseye.

Yeah, Jane, I have no regrets.

Your WHMB

Gosh

It was one of those things that I've always hoped for but has never happened, that is, until today.

It was short, sweet. I saw you coming about the same time you saw me, a few hundred yards out, on the other side of the intersection. Would you cross? Turn around? Make yourself scarce? The closer we got the more apprehensive I became. Would you wave? Disappear? Just smile and walk away?

Let me tell you I was surprised, somewhat shocked, when we actually stopped and talked. I felt almost at a loss as to what to say considering the boxcar loads of words and emotions and stories I've been storing up and setting aside to share with you . Let me say that stopping and chatting on the same patch of asphalt, hearing your voice, seeing your face, looking into your eyes and touching your hand, gloved or not, was more than enough for me. It truly made my year, short year that it's been. I have been glowing ever since.

We haven't talked, really talked, in over a year a half. And while I still have much to say, just know that those things I said to you on that second pass, when I caught you on the street on my way out of the Woods, will always stand:

That I have no regrets.

That you will always be my friend.

Know that no matter where we go that you can call on me and I'll come running.

That there isn't a day that goes by where I don't think of you.

And Jane, while I didn't say this, know that I will always love you. And, if I had a choice, I would never leave the region, for to go away means losing contact with you entirely, and that, for me, seems like a sad bit of business, indeed.

Seeing you today was a finest gift that I have received in a long, long time. Thank you, god of afternoon walkers, for making it happen.

Yeah, love, your WHMB

Get behind me Satan! 08/05, 02/10

Sometimes we just know when we fall upon aural bookends to our lives. Turn up the jams!

It's bright and sunny outside today, not too much unlike that fabled August day that we shared oh so long ago. I ended that night in a sort of fevered sonic embrace with David Bowie's album Hunky Dory, believing that everything would turn out just that way. Hunky dory. Why would I think otherwise after such a stellar, rule bending day? Didn't we have momentum behind us, a sort of confused but weighty purity of heart propelling us forward?

Fast forward four and a half years and we both know that the world is a different place. Instead of waking up to your face on a pillow next to mine on a sunny Sunday morning what I see before me is a smattering of quiet, cool architectural reminders of you, cryptic and inscrutible. On my way down to breakfast and redemption I found an album that appealed to me in the same way that that early Bowie album did on that long ago night. The White Stripes, Get Behind Me, Satan! Might it be the way the singer, high pitched and emotional, bangs out his tales of woe? Could it be the heart wrenching guitar solos that dart in and out of the sonic dialogue? Surely, it must be the tinkering keys of the piano echoing about the sunshine filled corners of my house that makes it so fulfulling?

It is full out daylight now, sort of like the day after our arm and arm walk down the concrete park path in Tacoma. Like that long ago day I see sunlight outside my door, a day colored by cool green lawns, deep blue skies and a sort of balmy grey calmness that typically washes over combatants still on their feet after having survived a fierce firefight in the dead of night.

So now I can say that I have yet another soundtrack to my life, bookend albums that will always spark memories of the joys and travails I shared with you, my True Love, records that will always say to me that I am a warrior, that I am a lover who took the hardest blows that life could deliver and still managed to wake up and face the dawn, happy, scared, deep in thought and filled with a sort of twisted joy in having loved the most difficult to love woman on the face of this planet. I am not the damaged man that you feared leaving behind, the shapeshifter that you chose to live with, instead I am the emotionally upright, morally skewed, financially wrecked and completely ready kick ass on the world man you wish you had, who wears the battle scars you left behind like colorful tattoos on his face.

Jane, here in this space I will always be happy to show the world the high price I was willing to pay for the joy and priviledge of loving you. Now, instead of shining me on why don't you grab a cup of joe, a plate of French toast and turn up the tunes. It's a beautiful day out there, a bit too grand and glorious for the blues, for the plinking of melancholy piano keys! Slap on something that's hard, sweet and righteous, will ya? Life is right outside the door and we need to find the next set of bookends for the next tale in our life that has yet to be lived!

Hard love, baby, no better kind. Your WHMB

The photo on the table

Open house, open hearts.

I have to make ready for a day's worth of viewing, and I'm not sure how to feel about it yet. I've cleaned off surfaces, put up books and movies and such, took down masks, swapped out paintings, all to please those folks out there who have the imaginative powers of a bucket of sand.

When it comes to this place I can look around and still see all my belongings, my times, dinners, holidays and the kids, all that. Whenever I wake up in my bed I look across the hall and see stuff that tells me that I've lived waay too much life here, that I need to take my goods and go somewhere else, start anew, get a fresh take on life and love, all that.

The bedroom across the hall was a battleground, a nest, a place of solitude and rest, a haven of a sort of strange purity that I can't even begin to imagine ever being able to capture it again. I watch romantic films and read exquisite love stories and know what we shared here in this house was a strange and wonderful kind of love, and know that what we struggled to accomplish up in that room was hamstrung by the simple fact that you weren't truly mine and I wasn't even close to being yours. Didn't help that we shared a mutual pact that revolved around having no more children. And really, how did we ever expect to truly get comfortable knowing that we shared that downy surface with all my household gods and your Big G God and the shadows of a Detective and an Estranged One? It was some sort of perverse cosmic joke they shared, all of them sitting around the edges of the bed looking down on us or nestling inbetween us whenever we could sneak in a moment to relax. We had more than ample opportunity to wrestle hard, get down to spit and sweat and all manner of viscous bodily fluids, but instead we chose to lay down like newborns, sometimes down to socks and sheets and sleet outside the window.

When it came to Valentine's Day we shared something different than what we might have shared had we been allowed to really "go all the way". Instead of taking our love to the streets and finding a pricey restaurant to show off our affections, you ate supper at home that night before pushing your tribe out the door for religious studies and coming here. Instead of a Hallmark moment we wrote notes and poems and exchanged simple gifts like tart tins and cheesecakes. It was all about the heart, all about simplicity, about all the possibilities of what we might share if the world would just lay off for a moment, stand back and see what we had going on.

I think of what we passed back and forth on the couch that night as a sort of simple benediction, a laying of the hands on our love, reaffirming a sort of simple faith that our love would endure, would carry us home, would somehow impress the world enough to open doors for us, to have the entire freaking planet see what we shared was good and somewhat holy and aching, aching, for resolution and communion and consumation. We wanted to open up the House of Love to the world, invite everyone to our party, but then, once the witching hour came down at 8:35 we had to close up shop and get you the hell out of my house, into your car and down the alley and off to the Woods before your sanctified troops lead by The Detective came back home again.

We had one more thing inbetween us in that bed, too, my dear, one thing that we could never shake, and that was our obligation to those pesky, beautiful and needy children of ours. I suppose that's why today on this holiest of days dedicated to love I could walk across the hall into my old bedroom and sit down on the edge of the bed and look over at a photo or three of you and know that I was looking down at a photo and not holding you only because of our high ground and the role that our kids play in our lives. I won't take those photos of you down, staging or folks in the community who might know us be damned. On Valentines day that old bedroom of mine is a shrine to Love, is a sacred place dedicated to two hearts who wanted to take that love to the limits but knew and understood that the restrictions of life and our children had more power and purpose than our love ever could.

We loved, that much I know. My surroundings tell me so. Look at that fireplace mantle, glance over into the kitchen, look at that back door, peek up the stairs and know that we loved here. No matter how much I box up and square away this place I can never remove that. Never a stigma, always a blessing.

Love to you, Jane. Happy St Valentine's Day.

Your WHMB