First, a few brief points of consideration, some of which are vivid memory and others possibly re-imagined but no less authentic; none in any particular order:
–Dad sings along in natural French to Michel Polnareff. One voice blends in harmony with the scratchy vinyl recording of the other. The creamy sound of the language is beautiful and dreamlike. It soars in articulate and elongated flourishes; each indecipherable phrase arrives in the nick of time like making turns on a slippery road. I feel secure; warm with happiness, aware of the joy in the lilt and prayer of my father’s cantor.
–I am curious. With each turn of a page, I scan the structure of writing for dirty sentences in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. I have no idea what I will find; I’ve only just heard about the book and remember being sent off early to bed so that my parents can be alone to watch it on the VCR. I do manage to find a few choice sentences that give me the satisfaction of something I’m too young to understand, but more than this is an awareness of the shape and flow of language on the page. I’m drawn to the idea of a man sitting in a room behind a typewriter putting these sentences down. I close the book and take a long slow look at the broad shelves full of books in front of me. Bright yellow sunlight leans through the window to my right like a slanted pillar, enlivening the deep emerald hue of this mysterious hallway. For the first time in my young life I know exactly who I am; I know precisely what I am going to do.
–I lie on a cot in a big canvas tent in Island Park, Idaho reading verse by Rudyard Kipling. Lifting my voice just above the hissing Coleman lantern which pours cold light onto the page in front of me, I hear these words: …if you can think and not make thoughts your aim…and lose and start again at the beginning and never breathe a word about your loss…you’ll be a man, my son. Many years later I read these same words again and remember telling myself not ever to forget them.
–I swim into shadow just beyond the harsh stadium light of the fifty meter pool and tread water twelve feet from the floor. For a moment I look up at the milky white crescent moon which hangs like a glow-sticker on the ceiling of a pale pre-dawn sky. I am entirely alone; the first into the pristine glass. Reaching down with both hands I pull the red speedo from my hips and buttocks, sinking beneath the surface to slither completely out of the suit. I hear myself laughing under the water and return to the surface with the lycra fabric wadded into the fist of my left hand. The two staff lifeguards on duty chortle at the far end of the pool unaware of my nakedness as they half-glance in my direction. It feels good to be so wide awake! I swim naked in the dark, undisturbed, for several minutes. I am perfectly slippery in the water.
–I drive onto the shoulder of northbound US 101 and stop near an auto repair shop outside of Port Angeles, Washington. I am in a terrible state of panic. This might be the end–but the end of what? Am I experiencing a heart attack?–I can’t be sure. I look in the rearview mirror and see no hurt there. Looking away I open the car door and slide from the seat onto the ground where I thrust the tips of my fingers into the loose tar-scented gravel. I’m not sure why, but I feel like I need to hold onto something or I might fall forward into the grey sky above. Several cars pass by. I don’t care.
–I hear a faint, distinctive engine outside and get up from the couch where I am watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse with my little son. “I’ll be right back,” I say, surprised by a sudden and decisive verdict. I go into the room where I write and pull a book from its shelf. Quickly, I flip through it one last time, scanning highlighted passages and commentary I wrote in the margins some thirteen years earlier. The book has merit, but the writer didn’t tell the truth which has always bothered me. I wonder why I have kept it this long? I take the book outside, holding it by the binding; my right index and middle finger extending up its spine in a four-seam fastball grip. I raise my hand and pitch the book forcibly into the trash can I’d set out the night before. The sound it makes under the power of my throw is a slap, paper-thick. Its resonance gives me great satisfaction and immediate closure. I return to the house where I wait by the window and watch as the big green truck with its mechanical arm grabs hold of the can and raises it high up and over its steel container. The contents of the can pour forth like a chunky stew into a pot–I want to see the book drop into it, but can’t. “Daddy what is it?” asks my little son, now right beside me. I take him up into my arms, kiss him on the cheek and let him see for himself. “TRASH TRUCK!!!” he exclaims. We look at each other with reciprocal O-faces full of exhilaration and then look back out the window and wave at the driver, but he doesn’t see us. The truck hisses and whistles as it rolls forward. We watch it go and then I lower my son to the carpet where he runs down the hall holding a red Lego-man high above his head. He issues a sharp jetlike shoooooosh sound from puckered lips as he turns the corner in a flight of imagination and is gone.
****
My life, no different than any other, is really just a sequence of little moments. Most aren’t worth telling. When I sat down to write this morning I had a different idea in mind about what I thought I was going to say. Writing is the great leveller because when I get into it I realize I’m just an apprentice to the language and what it has to say–my opinion doesn’t really matter. What does matter is how I use the tools in the box to get to the truth. This is always the hard part. In the end, I think I understand what Jack Kerouac meant in the second sentence of his beautiful novel On The Road. He’s right; I won’t bother to talk about it. Life is usually a lot of memory about something and most often it leaves a feeling that everything that happened is now dead. The choice is to find a way to get out of the way of what was, become less aware of myself now and more aware of the person right in front of me, even when I don’t want to.
I recently rediscovered the music of Michel Polnareff. It is interesting to listen to songs you haven’t heard since childhood. There is a shock of memory which is more felt than understood and suddenly you realize how quickly you’ve grown up. The safety net that was once a certainty is gone and so are your heroes. In my case, Dad has been gone now four years. The two songs I remembered best and am now listening to again are as beautiful and pure as ever, but I’m also twenty-five years older than Dad was when I was watching him sing along to them. Time is a terribly funny and sad thing. It distorts all the lies and truths. Sometimes I forget that I’m singing along to my own songs in French. When I look behind me, I see my kids looking up in my direction, watching me, the way I watched Dad.
In 1966, Michel Polnareff released his debut album entitled Love Me Please Love Me. My Dad discovered it whilst living in Marseille, France in 1969. He bought the record there and then brought it home in 1970. It is fitting Dad was elegantly fluent in French. His adopted language was always the soft touch to a good and hard life. My earliest memory of listening to the record with Dad is around 1978–I was four. The title track Sous quelle etoile suis-je ne?, never really left me, though I had not heard it in over three decades. It took me a while to locate the song and its artist, but when I did, the emotional reward was profound. The clue that led me to the artist was an orchestrated version of another one of Polnareff’s songs, Dad adored, but for which I did not know the title. That song is called Ame Caline, entitled Soul Coaxing in English. As it happens, I am an avid listener of channel 69 on SiriusXM Radio called Escape and not in the least skittish in admitting this–in fact, it is my favorite channel! Escape is a consortium of orchestrated contemporary easy listening, usually dubbed ‘grocery story music’ and always perfectly effervescent and delightful to listen to. I rely on it daily. Every so often I would hear an arrangement of a particular song that was somewhat obvious to me, but for some reason I’d never made the direct connection to its source. One morning about a year after Dad died I was driving my Impala and listening to channel 69 when Soul Coaxing came on. The song’s rendition was by the French composer Raymond Lefevre. The melody struck like a force of electricity and suddenly it all came back–this was one of Dad’s songs! When I got to where I was going I parked the car and then clicked YouTube on my iPhone to perform a search and in a matter of seconds there was Michel Polnareff in a black and white video from 1967 singing Ame Caline! From there I found the cover of the album I’d long forgotten but subconsciously remembered so well. The song Soul Coaxing was released the following year in 1967. Dad had a copy of that single on a “78” vinyl and I always remembered him switching out the spacer and stylus from a “33” to a “78” on the record player before spinning it. I wish I had his old copies of those vinyl records but they are now long gone. I still remember the way they smelled in their sleeves.
****
Recently I sold suits at Dillard’s. One night I was feeling particularly low. I had a miserable headache and my feet were in terrible pain. The men’s department was a ghost town, but I kept busy anyway and found small comfort in the tinny music streaming from speakers no one would ever want in their home. I rearranged and tagged two entire sections of shirts and then organized all the underwear in the Big & Tall section. I felt bad thinking about some of the men who needed the sizes I was sorting. After that I vacuumed the dressing rooms which were a god-awful mess of hangers and dress pins and piles of discarded dress shirts which I then took to the counter and neatly refolded and re-pinned. All of these tasks required no thought, no intellect, no curiosity. Though I tried to consider a bigger picture I couldn’t help but feel sad inside for doing work that ultimately felt like such a waste of time and of my best energy.
I looked up. Over in the corner was a gentleman of simple means with his wife sorting through a round discount rack of suits. I approached and offered to measure him. As it turned out he wasn’t much older than I was and we spent the better part of an hour together picking out a nice suit and shirt and tie for a job interview at a car dealership. He had been laid off and out of work for some time. We both laughed about the turns life takes and the nobility of just doing what you can, when you can. I wished him well and told him maybe one day I’ll come and buy a car from him. He said, “I’d like that.”
And then it was quiet again but I didn’t feel so bad anymore. I had managed to get out of my own way. As I thought about it, no time is ever wasted. The time we have is really all we’ve got.
I am a work in progress but I am always on my way.
RCS
19 October, 2020