Being There
When a moment comes, much like Al Pacino's character Ricky Roma says in Glengarry Glen Ross, "We are either looking forward - or looking back. There is no in between."
Sometimes, when the music plays, it is too beautiful for the ears. There is something going on that stays upon an ethereal plane and never touches our mortal mud.
We see fields and grasses of our youth, whizzing by in a whiff of pollen, hayseed and longing.
The far-awayness of a lap steel, twanging somewhere among the meadowlarks and lost loves irks something within me that is so poetic that it's ultrasonic.
The piano strokes of Joni Mitchell in 'River' make me think of an old art house, in the Ottawa countyside, that my mom took me too and taught myself and other friends about making wax prints. We did stencils of leaves. It was near harvest. The floors were white linoleum and the chairs were those wood composite/veneer jobs that had a thin strip of ply across the two, erect gray steel pipes that wrapped around the back and were snipped on an angle, near the top of the back support.
I don't know what happened to my childhood. It was here and it is gone.
How are we supposed to know the answers? Why is there no crystal ball that lays everything out, in a metaphysical script, and lets us see our lives in a scroll of blips, buzzes and whirling colour. Why?
'I made my baby cry'.
To see someone you love in pain is never an easy process. It is twisting and burning, like a cylindrical fire poker that has been sitting in flame and ash for eons. It cuts through skin and bone and sears our conscious spirit.
We take unbelievable risks and let others hang out to dry in the rain of our selfishness.
But on twangs the lost-summer-love steel - and we heed its distant cry.
We cry adventure but whisper comfort.
We long for home - the home that is gone.
When the backward path is all that we see behind us, I find it hard to know which way to go.
