On my somewhat difficult Mother's birthday, I went to her grave for the first time since the funeral. John David Souther was playing Nighttown in Cleveland Heights, Ohio -- and I wanted to take Alex Bevan, my childhood idol who'd graciously given up his honeymoon camping weekend to sing at the funeral, to see the man who wrote "Last In Love," "New Kid In Town," "Prisoner In Disguise," "Best of My Love," "Faithless Love," and...
The idea that dreamers of dreams and singers of songs don't always intersect makes me sad, just like the notion that these wondrous songwriters -- like JD, Jackson Browne, John Prine, Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash -- aren't heard by the audience they deserve. But all that pales compared to the revelations at an unmarked grave at the storied Lakeview Cemetary...
In the rush get-through-it, a lot goes unrealized. This is where the past catches up with the future...
Roses In The Snow
John David Souther, Graves without Markers + My Return to the Scene of the Crime
Direction is not my strong suit. Anyone who’s ever had to talk me in from God knows where knows that. Just like I’m not nearly as brave as people might think… That playground sense of justice works great when I’m sticking up for someone else; not so much when it’s my own fears that must be stood down.
And so, I came to Cleveland. In the cold. Lake effect blown out again, but the chill the kind that works from the inside out, turns your bones to brittle twigs and shakes you to the core. But when you’re on a mission – especially one driven by ghosts and demons – you don’t stop for an icy wind. You can’t stop… or you lose your nerve.
Lakeview Cemetary is one of the pretty ones. Well-kept, even in late November, with crews of gravediggers and groundskeepers removing the leaves and what snow has accumulated on the paths of passage. But the home of President Garfield’s Tomb is also a maddening tangle of roads, plots, sections, a veritable warren of lives spent and sculpture angels and madonnas weeping, praying and protecting the earthly remains and heavenward (we hope) souls.
Armed with a Xerox veined in fluorescent yellow, squinching my eyes as if they’re some kind of diving mechanism, I am lost. I get the notion of numbers and curves that will lead you to the ones you seek, yet somehow I am making a knot out of my way.
A barrel-chested man in several layers, no doubt insulated with flannel, furrows his brows.
“Where are you trying to get to?”
“My mother’s grave…” My voice falters like the lead in the window of an old Tudor house, barely holding the panes of glass in, rickety in its resolve and yet, frozen in place by the time.
“Honey, let me see your map,” he says kindly. Maybe ten years younger than I am. Certainly no stranger to the pilgrims arriving with their fistful of roses to scatter on some dear departed’s grave. He probably can guess the story without asking, and I don’t offer.
It’s all I can do to look up and follow his gloved finger pointing down a road.
“She’s on Daffodil Hill,” he says. “Straight down this road, and curve over there…”
I’m not sure I understand, but I know I will find it. I can’t smile, so I nod.
I actually think about Ronnie Dunn’s throat torn open full Pentecostal wail, “I can’t quote the book, the chapter or the verse, but you can’t tell me that this all ends with a slow ride in hearse… I be-lieve…”
How to explain how it’s come this? A long ride out of Nashville, through Kentucky, over that steel bridge into Cincinnati, through the farm country of lower Ohio and through Columbus, Akron, Cleveland… to go to a place I’ve not been since the day she was laid to rest there.
The reasons I’ve not been back… the reasons I must go… The things I couldn’t know… tell… let go… Because in the end, so much goes unsaid – even when it’s easy. This wasn’t easy. Not the living, nor the dying, nor the thinking about what was.
A few hundred feet away, I pulled the car over. Sat for a minute, listening to a meditative, if haunted song nobody knows about the way the other side of midnight can make you crazy… broken hearts, one night stands, they line the shelves… and I remember all those nights you saved me… in the darkness from the madness, from myself…
The irony, though, lies in the juxtaposition of song and mission.
I wasn’t going to see my savior, but to talk to a broken woman who couldn’t quite be as much as she wanted, as desperately as she tried. My mother scared me… judged me… loved me in a way that makes kudzu and lime seem anything but corrosive and strangling. It was a fraught relationship, and the people who know the stories try not to think too much about it.
I exhaled. Slowly. Closed my eyes. Knew there was something there beyond ghosts and echoes, not sure what or why, just that I needed to walk however many steps in a pair of rubber barn boots and a mushroom-colored velvet car coat to find out. All the graves, the markers and headstones – somebody’s mother or father, son or daughter, husband or wife or never quite married -- all the lives lived and then extinguished.
You walk softer when you realize you’re treading on histories you don’t know, but still a link in someone else’s bracelet. When there’s no one around, the snow crunches like your footsteps in a marble church. Respectful, you take in the names and the 1st Corinthians passages, while seeking your own destination… Not quite sure where you’re going, not even certain there’s any kind of marker to be found, picking along the expanse, scanning the snow-blanketed ground, wondering if you’ve gone too far.
“Honey…” It is the grave-digger again.
I wrinkle my nose and look towards the voice. Nod again, throat too tight to squeak out much of anything.
“You need to go over that little ridge… It’s on the other side.”
I gulp. Nod a little more. Lift a gloved hand in “thank you.” He looks out from his pick-up truck and nods back, the solemn offer of support from someone who understands.
The top of the hill falls away, dropping to a much lower road. It is marked by old trees and a couple graves with tall headstones – and there, halfway down, I see them: a dozen red roses in a cardboard floral delivery box.
It is my mother’s birthday. My stepfather couldn’t let it go. Here in the snow with no one to see them, he still made sure there were roses in the snow… and a card that said simply “Love, Brian.”
My mother loved flowers. “When I go,” she used to say, jabbing the air with her Marlboro 100 for punctuation, “I want every white flower in Cleveland…”
My Mother founded the Flower Cart at University Hospital, a volunteer group who eventually bought a professional cooler and sold flowers to people coming to see patients. It was her way of giving back, of being alive, of making a difference – and when the phone rang, as it did so many nights during dinner with some volunteer calling unable to make their shift, she would complain; but often she’d cover it, because it let her be near the hydrangeas and roses, bakers fern and babys breath, six kinds of chrysanthemums – all waiting to be whirled into some glorious arrangement.
My Mother was a regular at the wholesaler, Berthold Grigsby. where its back wall was emblazoned with an old Chinese proverb: “How can a culture called itself civilized when flowers are priced to make them a luxury?” Curttng with floor manager Mark, who when asked how he was, offered “Sick in bed with a friend” and laughed even louder.
My Mother could walk into any florist anywhere in the world – Paris, West Hollywood, Belle Meade – and immediately lay-out the designers and take hostage of the most expensive flowers for only a carnations’ ransom. They saw her passion for the stens, they were emblazoned by what she could do with the colors and shapes and blooms.
Sitting there, in the desolation where there was no marker to bear witness to who she was or how she lived, twelve long stem red roses. Even more crimson against the slate brown bark, the grey-green pine needle clumps and drifts of white that had fallen from a too chilled sky.
The sobbing started right there. It rolled back off the other hill and returned, sweeping over me. It echoed back and forth, joined by the fresh cries that poured from somewhere deep down.
A long time ago, I learned to check expectations, to not even consider what could be. It’s not as disorienting in the moment, lessens the disappointment of what should or ought to – and allows the gifts of grace to bubble up like champagne bubbles, tickling your spirit and going straight to your head.
There was much that needed to be settled with this woman, the one who couldn’t help but consume or destroy whatever was in her path. She left me quaking and uncertain about so much of everything that I learned to live with my hand against a wall, hyper-vigilant about everything, demi-frozen and certainly tough enough on the outside, you’d never know the way I shook within.
My mother created a place where what was often wasn’t… and you bought in, or you paid the price. After a while, you stop wondering, just surrender and move ahead never knowing what is real, sure it’s all your fault, certain that what is just can’t be.
Yes, there was much to reckon, and yet, there was nothing…
But the tears and cries fell for anything but what I might’ve guessed. It wasn’t for what wasn’t – or the things that should’ve been. No, the tears that were streaming down my face were for a life lived yet never truly realized, for someone so locked up in their anger and their hunger, they were never quite okay where they were…
My mother had lived and died with a level of taste most people can’t imagine, with a knowledge of how to do more things than anyone I’ve ever seen and an appreciation of art and beauty that exceeds anyone I’ve ever met. Yet, she died lost and lonely – and that, standing with my feet numb from the cold hard ground, broke my heart in ways it has never been broken.
We all maks deals, trade away things in the name of “getting by.” Who knows what kind of deal this woman made? But the trade probably wasn’t worth what there was in the end… and I am the only witness of a dozen roses to say this life had been lived.
There were a dozen bright pink roses in my hand, long stems and thorns clenched between the celery-colored fingers inside my gloves. I gently laid them down, stepped away and kept on crying – not sure what to do, what to say beyond a few stumbling Hail Marys, a prayer to the Guardian Angels, a Glory Be.
I stood looking, just quiet, feeling a swollen winter river rolling not just through my veins, but my body. It was surging, hurling with a power that only the coldest water seems to have when it breaks up.
Laying on the ground, those pink roses were in their own kind of state, but that didn’t seem the way it should end. Tragic beauty, fatally left when there was water so close, seemed so wrong. Pulling off a glove, I took a single stem and hoped there was room amongst the deeper red ones.
Pressing down, the stems in the plastic cup gave way – and the pink rose sank into the ones that were already arranged. So it went… trying to make room for another dozen in the frozen afternoon, not wanting to hurt what was already there, just to leave a mark that someone else was here, someone else had seen.
The work calmed my crying. It focused me and gave me a purpose. It reminded me of another one of her sweeping pronouncements: She’d pause for effect, brandishing her giant diamond and bright pink nails as she emphatically declared, “You can’t smell’em when you’re dead.”
I wiped away the tears that were welling again.
“I’m not so sure, Mom,” I said. “I’m not sure I believe that any more.”
There are times you just want to be alone. No one is solace, no reasons can be found. Back in the car, I turned over the ignition, put on the radio to the classic rock station and wondered if the man was gonna play the hit that I wanted to hear. Not quite sure what it would be, but certain I would know it if he did.
Inching out of Lakeview, I found myself on familiar roads, driving on automatic pilot, looking for answers beyond the oceans of compassion that engulfed me. Whatever it was that had been there – those things I came seeking to know, to understand – it was gone.
Now there was only black top roads tattooed with tar in the cracks and patched where the tar wouldn’t do. Out Fairmount Boulevard and across Chagrin River Road, with its aging trees, the river that has run through my life, the curves and the barns and the fields that beg to ridden across on a horse.
Tumbling and rolling, tires turning but never quite taking me away.
In a few hours, I would be taking Alex Bevan -- the songwriter who I once followed around and who graciously sang about a “Gunfighters Smile” and “Silver Wings” at my mother’s funeral -- to see John David Souther at Night Town, the very restaurant I went once the funeral was over and the wake complete.
“Gone but not forgotten, through the eyes of autumn,” he sang softly at the church where I’d made my First Communion and Confirmation, where we were laying my mother to rest. “I can still see your gunfighter’s smile…”
The things that last beyond the mortal. The mortal that transcends what you’d expect.
John David Souther almost a quarter of a century from his last record, offering up the most intimate exploration of his own soul in a small room to a rapt audience who hung on every note. Never mind the Eagles hits – “Best of My Love,” “New Kid In Town,” even their most recent single “How Long” – nor the songs that gave Linda Ronstadt much of her depth – “Simple Man, Simple Dream,” “Silver Blue,” “Prisoner in Disguise” that opens with the painful truth “You thought the love you never had might save you…” – this was something far more elegant, far more gracious, far more grown-up than mere pop music could ever hope to be.
Elegance is one of John David’s defining realities. If The World Was You, the first record he’s seen fit to release in almost a quarter of a century, is an album that’s timelessly beyond time… Sax lines float weightlessly over very simple declarations of desire cloaked in equally basic indifference… Souther strings his truths like white Christmas lights, dangling like stars that’re closer to our touch, the little stings of defeats that remind us we’re human, the tiny surges from the taste of something that we yearn for reinforcing that we’re alive.
In a black topcoat, leather gloves and scarf, he’s a Sinatra-esque figure, making his way to the stage where three guitars and a mostly tuned piano wait. He has a book in his hands, and the look of the true romantic at the moment of disembarkment in his eye. Not quite soft, deeply tender, but with the fire of arriving at his reason for... being?
Without a word, he turns to the audience and confesses, “I like the way you bring the water, with your fingers on the lime… When you walk that way it kills me, I’ll be here at closing time…”
There is something courtly to this. In a world of overt eroticism, the subtlety is its own tsunami. Souther understands calibration is everything, nuance is its own reward. Even if he’s just picking up a waitress – and one gets the impression this might be something more – he does it with such style, you get lost in his honor and intentions.
Like the great writers of once upon a time, the measure of a man is the dignity with which he walks through the world. It may not be the mark of now, but it is the underpinning of what makes the one-time Shaker Heights resident and Southern California songwriting legend matter. It’s not faster, deeper or harder, but slow and languid and melting from the inside.
Continuing without any meaningful discourse, he plays “White Rhythm & Blues,” a song about resolve and disappointment, knowing what you need to get by and understanding the tides that pull you out will also bring you in. The imagery is enchanted, the notion balming.
“Just give me… black roses… white rhythm… and blues,” he moans softly, “and somebody who cares when you lose…”
Souther recognized that it’s the cut that makes the suit, the moments that define the life, the most basic things that have all the merit. He is not about the fancy, but the earthy – and in that quest for things that matter deeply, he will not surrender to what is brokered by the current trend.
It is almost old-fashioned – or so progressively modern we’ve not caught up yet. His friend Jackson Browne wrote: “Is this the past or the future that is calling?” It is a tightrope Souther negotiates without looking down.
Still for as heartening as the hits and songs from his past are, it is the newer songs that truly draw you in. The idea that jazz can be rendered in the most diffused light with the sparest arrangements, a few sprinkled piano notes, an odd tuning that clings to the sentiments, the melody like mist around a street light. He evokes with details, pulls back veils and curtains to reveal what’s behind… and that whisper beckons to places one never thought they’d find.
That innocence within the knowing is everything. “In My Arms Tonight” paints the picture of a kid who isn’t ready, but wants to leap; a man who recognizes his restless, reckless ways and the magnetic tie that makes the wanting in some ways even more than the having. Desire has its own curious gravity – and this seemingly easy little melody captures the deceptive ways we have with our ownselves, the lies we tell, the deals we make, the lines we walk and the walls we run into until they cave.
John David Souther on my mother’s birthday with my first idol and his lovely bride at a place I’ve been going since I was “just a kid in dangerous disguise.” There are times when the strands all twist together into a thread you can stitch your life up with.
I don’t go looking for these things, but they have a way of happening. Not just to me, but to everybody. It’s only the matter of how one chooses to see the world unfolding around them.
There is a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape on the table that’s on its way being empty. There are songs hanging in the air, faces turned towards the stage. No one speaks a word, not because they wouldn’t dare, but because they’ve been rendered speechless by the possibilities.
Two hours he plays. Tells a few stories, offers some impromptu notions, including a very sultry “I Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” that flowed out of an observation he was making. It was that kind of evening, a man who came to sing and share his world… and a roomful of people who more than understood, they came away enthralled by the level of commitment to the exhaled songs and shared truths. This could be their life, the ache, their notion of love in the wind…
“I ain’t going to heaven now,” he sings halfway through the first song of the encore. “I know too many tricks…”
It is a grifter’s confession, but also the lament of one reckoning with the opportunities lost or squandered. For someone seeking refuge, it is the illumination of the shackles that are self-imposed, the intention thwarted by one’s need to protect oneself from harm.
“I just wanna get over this wall, how come I sit here making bricks… and mortar…guarding the border…”
The chorus, a counting up of the reality of this awareness, is kind in its assessment of the damage. “Love has a border, I can’t cross over… Love has a border, and a right and a wrong… Love has a border, some kind of an order… beyond that border, I don’t belong.”
And so it is, an elegy for the refugees in their own lives, exiles in SUVs who drive back and forth to their jobs to come home to someone they can’t remember why they ever loved… or the ones who flinched before the trigger was pulled and now mark the time alone, realizing too late the sadness of the emptiness that grows longer than their shadow.
What is done is done. What might be takes courage. “The Border Guard” is about the choices we must cognitively make, the moments where we step up, we reach out, we shrug off our fears and walk into the blinding light and potential peril of what might not be. To trust what has shattered and mocked us is to set ourselves up to be the fool… and yet…
At lunch before going to the grave, an old friend talked about bands with musicians don’t quite cut it and marriages that have become petrified wood. “You know,” he said quietly, “it’s the fear of the great unknown. You don’t know what’s out there – and if it’s someone who was your friend before it all happened… it’s sometimes easier to suffer through than to cut them loose, because you just don’t know…”
You just don’t know, except you do. Marking time and slowly dying, burning out like the last ember in the fire. I’ve always said it takes courage to be happy… but you have to be far braver to reckon with what you live with – even if what you’re living with is the ghost of someone two years dead.
It’s a funny thing about caution, you come to realize: the very thing that keeps you safe suffocates you in the end. It is only in pushing back the blanket, the memories or the fear that holds you down that you can fly.
Seems so simple seeing the words upon the page. Even watching Souther’s songs glow golden in the room with the vintage French posters. But standing in the snow, with the tears running down your face, clutching a fistful of roses, it is as urgent a truth as any that’s ever come across the plate.
To live fully is not to be cautious, it is to immerse and embrace, to see – really see what is – and accept it for its flawed manifestation. Not always what you want, but usually just what there is. Certainly it’s the only way to break the water for the sunlight and the air that’s gonna fill your lungs, giving you the sweet oxygen necessary to love and dream and become what you were sent here to fully be.
For John David Souther, somewhere in the Midwest with a tour manager, a sleeveful of songs meant to last a lifetime and the need to see them ripple through hearts like his own, that is all there is. Does he know grand and luxe and beyond? Of course. But somewhere along the line, that wasn’t what was important… and that is all there is.
Sitting on the 5th floor of a Moroccan once-upon-a-time chic hotel, watching the flurries fall through the sunlight, the peach walls and white trim, window seats and gilded chandeliers, I, too, have stepped out of time. As the years dissolve around me, there is only the truth that beyond the best she could, there was the pain my mother lived with – and for that, there were tears to be shed.
Freedom comes from strange places. Compassion is an ocean that dissolves the pain you hold. It makes no sense, but as I type this I smile a smile I’ve never known. Is it grace? Or peace? Or love without buttresses to hold it in place in the face of pressures only an engineer could understand?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Just the tranquility of letting go, the quiet of the storm dying down and the notion that this is a ghost that can now stop howling. In the silence, I can hear my heartbeat, and it is truly a rhythm that is all my own.