Cheers everyone and welcome to Friday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
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Notes from Below Sea Level
“A Poem in the Middle of This Long Day”
I sometimes use touchstones to remind me of mistakes I’ve made—perhaps the journal’s equivalent of a literary Madeleine. They reach out, take hold of an elbow, and drag me to a place and time that is both familiar and new—places of love and ecstasy, pain and regret. The smell of a diesel generator muffled by a bracing wind. The sound of waves lapping at the rotting pilings of an unused dock. The feel of a freshly honed blade on my palm or a kiss placed lightly on the back of my neck. The first few notes of a song from my youth, the ferric flood of fresh blood from a recent kill, the bite of a misplaced hook in the crook of my thumb. Cold morning rain on weathered stone.
The silence of this late winter morning, with this cold rain falling steadily on my patio is as good a time as any for reflection. Here, a comfortable loneliness rules and the remnants of reason and long-lost words swirl like a fresh snow seeking purchase on the cold, bare bones of memory. This morning’s rain is chilled and oddly insistent, but my mood springs from a conversation I had with my love not so long ago. She mentioned a woman she knew back in the day from The Mudd Club in New York City. Her recollection and story folded quickly into a reminder—because it brings her no end of pleasure to tease me—of the times I was in NYC back then and failed to call.
I never called.
Sins of omission: her favorite of my many types of transgressions. All true, I’m afraid, but by now most duly confessed and begrudgingly forgiven. This was in the late 70s and through most of the 80s and I never called, though I snuck off to NYC a few times a year as an escape from Louisiana and later during breaks from school—it was my Mecca of culture and learning and access to knowledge and resources, many of them free or close to it.
I could have called, I guess, though tracking her down back then would have taken skills and a self-confidence I wouldn’t possess for another two decades. I could have called her mother, of course, but that would have chanced her mother in New York mentioning it to her brother in Louisiana who then may have mentioned it to someone who might have (at some point) mentioned it to my parents. And I couldn’t have them knowing where I was. But that wasn’t the heart of the reason—at least not the most honest, or even most logical, reason I didn’t call.
The reason was simply the maddening and confusing flux that is the medium necessary to grow a boy into a man. How do I now convince someone they would not have liked who I was at a particular time in my life? I was a pretentious prick back then. Not on purpose, though; I just didn’t know any better. But explaining that now (some 40 years later) does little good to absolve those early sins. She knew me then, at least small parts of me—the poor, reckless, unpolished parts of me: the parts that perched her on that proverbial pedestal and found her well beyond my station. She didn’t know the part of me that preferred books and cats to people, the part of me that sought out the cold bite of a park bench in Washington Square rather than the warmth of a cafe, the part of me that found long periods of solitude preferable to company. She didn’t know that part of my me that searched for glimpses of God in the brush strokes of a Renaissance master bringing “The Book of Revelations” to life, or the illuminated notes of an anonymous monk scratched into ancient parchment, or the weathered faces of beggars on the streets of TriBeCa.
But that picture of me is Romantic only in its contemporary viewing. It over-paints the long, frustrating nights studying Sanskrit (which I never truly learned), convinced that what I so desperately needed to know was hidden in random passages of The Upanishads. It ignores the torn, discarded sketches of a skinny kid foregoing food for that battered parallel bible unearthed in a used bookstore on 4th Avenue. Despite what you read in the tales of knights errant, there is nothing less appealing than the ignorant on a quest for truth. Hell, the unwashed clothes and unkempt look alone (not to mention body odor, I’m sure) would have justified you crossing the narrow confines of 9th Street where I found affordable lodgings.
So, I never called.
Then we grow older and there are mornings like this one. A morning when I sit on my patio shivering in the grip of winter’s darkness and imagine the feel of a kiss—placed lightly on the back of my neck—that takes hold of my elbow and pulls me back to a time warped and confused by the competing gravitational pulls of love and regret. A morning when an old man can peck away at a keyboard and admit, with the confidence of one who has failed so many times before, that it was the fear of knowing her that stayed his hand those many years ago.
(March, 2017-2024)
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My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?