Letter / Class of '76: there are tears tucked inside those years.

There are few sensations more sublime, at least to me, than reflecting over losses incurred-but- not reported, loves lost or, more frequently, loved ones lost.  These interludes happen infrequently and they are not to be indulged lest one be trapped in the past, locked away from the future.  But they do stand the test of time; indeed, they are the test of time.

For me, it requires a moment when I am tired and not really thinking.  Surprising as it may seem to you all, my mind, if anything, is too active, buzzing from one thought to next, like a puppy chasing four bouncing balls at once.  No, this is not creativity but its mere precursor.  Creativity takes discipline, the willingness to cut away that which does not belong; not an easy thing to do.

That explains the small number of truly creative people I know or have ever known; less than ten out of thousands.  Yes, I really should be better at harnessing these careening and chaotic thoughts; but I dare you to try to discipline a tadpole.  Once in a while, when that momentary repose does settle in, the right confluence of other sensations occurs.  Almost always involves music.

The music involved can be the Grateful Dead, Gustav Mahler, Glenn Miller or the top-forty.  It has to have its own trace of melancholia; the lyrics often do not really matter, but they often do.  Yet the voice is everything.  That subtle under-tow of sadness, as part of the daily fabric usually expressed as small-talk or other kinship in code, is the bait; the moment of repose is the hook.

This sublime set-aside in time, about three minutes long, occurred today, not more than ten minutes ago (that is to say: before the rough-and-jumble draft of this letter).   The song was some Mexican popular love ballad.  Sad-sack songs are a national obsession down here, often by men who lost the loves of their lives (after likely cheating repeatedly on them).

All irony aside, the rhythm of regret and a sonorous but somber voice transported me into one of those breaks from reality into the deeper meaning of time; one of those breaks from the dreadfully limited and normal person that I have become or turned out to be.  That statement is not meant to sound quite as depressing as it does.  But life-long unmarried or long-time divorced people often go through this stuff.

There is just too much time on our hands not to. Like it or not, travelled or provincial, well read or pushing our way up the next mountain, we are simply not completely engaged in the world.  That is not a terrible thing but it has its moments of repose.  Caught in the moment of one of these songs or in the midst of an emotionally evocative film (e.g., Letters from Iwo Jima), the melancholy is released.

Its dominion is short in time, deep in remembrance.  As I listened to that top-40 ballad this afternoon, I gave in and closed my eyes.  I thought of my only ‘blood-brother’ in grade school, struck by a car and killed just after I went away to school, unleashing a melancholia that took two decades to overcome.  I thought of a cherished schoolmate and another childhood bud -- good friends and (young) men, both – who took their own lives leaving us to wrestle with the living koäns of deaths without context.

Then came my college sweetheart; the one whom I “knew” did not love me in return; and she almost certainly did not.  When a drunken teen hit her car head-on and ripped her beautiful form -- her visage chiselled by God himself -- to shreds in less than a second, just a week out of college for me, I felt much like Saint Peter (Matthew 26:75, “And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.”). 

I never had the courage to tell her I loved her.  Love unexpressed (not unrequited) is the heart's worst treason.  Then came in the images of my beloved parents, each in their prime, happy with themselves and with their life’s creation: a son and a daughter….and a grand-daughter or two.  In each case, I felt as if, just for a moment – the song lasts only three minutes – that each was not only present before me but present in my flesh. 

Just for a moment, now; I had felt this sensation before; mournful of the loss, mindful of their needed presence, even today, years later.  The last one was a surprise.  But there he was; I felt a little shakey with this one.  This reference had no direct root in memory and little, even, in fantasy.  Yet my high cheekbones felt a little itchy, as did the jaw-bone; just slightly, hardly noticeable anymore.

The rocking chair felt comforting to my lanky frame; these old bones are weary.  Wait, I am only in my mid-fifties.  She was still there, in my mind’s eye, Ann was.  How I still remembered her on those cloudy  and solitary days, walking alone through garden or near the calm, wise, forever river.  Somehow that artery of the Republic was my connection, 

Yes, the last connection to the ever-beautiful, forever young Ann, as she ran, constantly stumbling forward in the encircling, white dress, laughing to see me, her bonnet half undone, her cinnamon hair showing, flowing.  Her modesty untouched as she laughed without thought and looked up at me, a kiss in her smile -- felicity across her eyes.

¡Guess I am glad she can’t see me now!

This quiet song from a land from which slave-owners and others prone to empire had defrauded a half of its territory and this rocking chair – they felt right, just right.  The strain and the eternal sadness of my soul ripped asunder more-so than even my prostrate country with the blood, our blood, six inches deep – North and South, East and West, man and woman, parent and child, negro and white…

Ah, to have this blessed rest for a moment, for this ballad, on this rocking chair.  Only now do I realize how stooped I have become, what with the yoke of leadership – ten pounds too heavy – always, always on my shoulders, without reprieve, with abating resilience.  I looked over the big yard in front of me, onto the river.  This river is a little river; perhaps fitting as I can only think about the little one lost to typhoid running down the hall upstairs, his light footfalls almost tapping out "Daddy!" in Morse code.  I smile with warmth.

The song ended. I opened my eyes and jotted down these thoughts.  Time to go back to work.