Old Songs in a New Cafe (3 page)

Early on, with me dancing along early morning beaches and feeding my demons, it was clear that you would need a life of your
own if this marriage were to flourish. That was your hardest struggle. It almost broke us apart. But you found something in
the clay, something that quietly said, “This is me.”

And I knew we had won when the woman at the cocktail party gushed: “Oh, you must be the potters husband!” Inside of me, at
that moment, I shouted in celebration. Not for myself, or even for us, but for you. Chrysalis had died, you had become. Now
the potter’s work and the potter’s trade keep you centered like the clay.

Love? I cannot analyze that. It is of a piece. Taken apart, it becomes something else, and the gull-like melody that is ours
disappears. But even in our difficult times, times when we took suitcases down from closet shelves and stared at each other
in anger, love was there.

Liking is another matter. I can get a hold on that. Most of all, I think, I like you for the good-natured understanding you
worked so hard to acquire, even if that understanding sometimes borders on wavering tolerance.

You understand the need to live with old furniture and rusted cars and only two kitchen cabinets and rough wooden floors and
vacuum cleaners that don’t vacuum and clothes washers that operate correctly only when the tab from a beer can is stuck just
so behind the dial, so that a little money will be there when I yell over the side of the loft, “Let’s go to Paris!”

Remember the time I was in graduate school and we had less than $100 in the bank, when I considered trading our doddering
Volkswagen for a guitar? You crinkled your face, looked serious, and said, with no hint of the scold, “How will we get to
the grocery store?” You said only that. And I was grateful.

You tolerate one side of the living room stacked with music equipment, while my canoe full of camping gear and two cats tenants
the other side, stretching from one corner over to where it inelegantly mingles with an amplifier, several microphone stands,
and old suitcases full of cords and other necessary truck. I am working on the gunnels and mumbling about river maps I can’t
find and rotten weather and wizards I am going out to search for. Over dinner, you smile softly and ask, “How long do you
think the canoe will be in the living room?” The point is made. I will move it out tomorrow. Or maybe the day after.

You are older now. I can see that if I look hard. But I don’t. I have always seen you in soft focus. I see you standing in
the winter on a great stretch of deserted beach in the Netherlands Antilles brushing your long and freshly washed hair in
the sea wind from Venezuela. I see you in khaki and sandals at the waterfront cafÉ in French Marigot listening to an island
band play a decent imitation of vintage American rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and ol’ Jerry Lee were part of our courting years,
and we grin at the aging lyrics—“Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee….”

I glance over and see you beside me at blackjack tables around the world. Was it in Vegas where you wore a long gold dress
and the fur coat you bought for $50 at a second-hand clothing shop? I think so. We played all night, I remember that, Guilty
though you felt about buying anything made of fur, you were the perfect 1930s vamp as I counted cards in my blue suspenders.

Or I look up ever so slightly from the fingerboard of my jazz guitar and watch as you play the second chorus of “Gone with
the Wind,” the one where you do the little two-fingered runs I like so well You are hunched over the keyboard, lightly swaying
in pink and white and wearing dark glasses. The sun hammers down, while people dance, by a pool, on the Fourth of July, in
Chicago.

And you are sleepy in bed and lit so gently by early light when I bring you coffee on high, hard winter mornings, while the
wood stove putters around trying to douse the cold of the night. I have been up for hours reading and writing. You are no
morning person, so talk must come later. Still, I hover around, clumsily, just to look at you and smell the warm, perfumed
scent of your body.

It seems I have spent a lifetime running toward you. I have tossed in my bed in Arabian desert towns and wanted you. I have
stared off midnight balconies in deep Asia, watching dhows older than me tug at their moorings and long for the thrash of
coastal waters, missing you and wondering about you.

I am uneasy at being nearly thirty-hours’
flying time from you. That’s too far. Then, over the miles and across the oceans, through a thousand airports, I am home,
wrinkled and worn, and you are there with a single rose and a small sign that says, “Welcome Home, Captain Cook, Welcome Home.”
Late into the night we laugh as I take the gold and silver presents from my battered suitcase.

I have trusted the years, and I was right to do so. They brought me you. We have watched others’ lives intertwine and then
unravel. But we have held together. At least for this life, in this time.

Yet I am haunted by the feeling that we might not meet again, that this might be just our one moment in the great sweep of
things. Once, as I lay on the floor, breathing through oxygen tubes, looking past the somber faces of paramedics, I saw your
tears, and I felt a great sadness, worrying not about myself, but rather that I might not find you again in the swirling crowds
out there in the centuries to come. It was the loss of you, not life, that I feared.

For we have come by different ways to this place. I have no feeling that we met before. No dÉjà vu. I don’t think it was you
in lavender by the sea as I rode by in
A.D
. 1206 or beside me in the border wars. Or there in the Gallatins, a hundred years ago, lying with me in the silver-green
grass above some mountain town. I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves
when you speak to waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.

If you were there in the Gallatins, you were married to a wealthy rancher and lived in a grand house. I was a gambler at the
table or the mountain man at the bar or the fiddler in the corner, playing a slow waltz to his memories. The dust from your
carriage was of more value than my life in those clays, and it drowned me in longing and sullied my dreams as you passed by
in the street. Somehow, though, for this life and this time, we came together. You taught me about caring and softness and
intimacy. The task before me was to teach you about music. And dreams. And how to savor the smell of ancient cities and the
sound of cards whispering across green felt. This I have done.

So I rest secure knowing that you have learned and that, in another time, you might recognize me coming across the street
of some gamblers town, in high brown boots with an old fiddle case over my shoulder, as your carriage moves by in the dust.
And perhaps you will smile and nod and, for a strange and flickering moment, you will remember how the waves of January wash
the sea wall at Marigot

______________________________________

I
can get excited about river otters. They not only look neat, they also are among those of God’s creatures who take play seriously.
If they were human, they’d probably live in California, drive Porsches, and have something to do with the entertainment business.

So it was that my heart fairly leapt when I read the announcement in
The Des Moines Sunday Register.
It said that twenty river otters would be released the following Wednesday at Sweet’s Marsh, near Tripoli. I organized my
week around that event, packed a sandwich and my cameras, and left for Tripoli early on a bright March morning.

I figured the crowd at the release would be small—a few people from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources with the animals
and maybe a half-dozen other grizzled outdoor types. After all, I spend days along the rivers of Iowa without seeing anyone
other than profiles in cars going over bridges.

When I pulled into the access to Sweet’s Marsh, a man wearing a camouflage shirt said I should continue straight ahead for
parking instructions. I always listen to men wearing camouflage shirts, no matter what they are telling me, so I continued
on and parked behind eight other cars on the shoulder of the road. No one was there to provide parking instructions, so, as
typical lowans, we just worked it out for ourselves.

It was at this point I began to experience a slight twitching in my stomach, and it had nothing to do with the coffee in my
thermos. You see, I never go to any place where parking instructions are required. That stems from multiple traumatic experiences
I had as a child when Jaycees wearing pith helmets and waving canes used to direct traffic at the county fair. I began to
associate parking instructions with crowds and noise and other assaults on my tender sensibilities.

By 9
A.M
., approximately sixty people had gathered and were surrounding two small cages containing a few otters for public display.
People stood around commenting about the animals’ inherent cuteness and firing away with point-and-shoot cameras.

“Well, this isn’t too bad,” I thought. Then I saw the state trooper. I also never go to events where state troopers are required.
Not because I don’t like state troopers, understand. My experiences with them have been distant, but pleasant. It’s just that
the presence of a trooper meant that crowd control of a somewhat higher order might be required.

I moved off to one side, poured a little coffee into my cup, and considered it all Meanwhile, the DNR folks were busy stringing
rope barricades along the south side of the inlet where the otters would be released. I started adding it up: parking instructions
plus state trooper plus rope barricades equals
uh oh.

But I love otters and wanted to see the little folks out of their wire mesh cages and in the water. So I decided to grit it
out. That was when the yellow school buses began to arrive, and I knew it was all over.

I absolutely never go anywhere that involves yellow school buses. Never. Unless I am paid, and paid handsomely, for it. But
the buses came and purged themselves of their cargos. The running, jumping, shrieking future business leaders of America poured
from the open doors, glands pounding. But, what the hell. It’s better than another hour of Cooperative Living (For Seniors
Only, Elective) taught from some smarmy textbook designed to kill creative passion once and for all.

The students ran to be in the front row behind the rope barricades. I ran to the north side of the inlet where I figured the
swampy ground would discourage those in new Reeboks. No luck. I had merely broken the ice by being the first into that area.
Another veteran of the rivers soon joined me, grumbling about what a mess this was turning out to be.

Then came a heavy-set guy pawing through the branches with a 35-mm camera equipped with at least a 14,000-mm lens. That not
being enough, he had affixed a teleconverter between the lens and the camera, which increases the effective length of the
lens. He was hand-holding the camera and lens and attachments. I lost track of him, but if he was able to avoid sinking in
the lowland low and to lift the apparatus to eye level and fire, I can tell you what his pictures look like without seeing
them. It’s the way the world looks to someone who has just been hit sharply behind the ear with a tire iron.

More yellow school buses. Driven by the same drivers, of course. I finally sorted it all out a few years ago. There are only
twelve school bus drivers in the whole world. That’s why they all seem to look the same.

I staked out a couple of feet of ground, set up my tripod, and asked the ninth-grade boys behind me to please stop pushing
each other into the tree branch that whacked me each time one of them fell against it. Why do ninth-grade boys always push
each other? Why haven’t we shipped them all to North Dakota until they calm down?

By this time, I knew exactly why the state trooper was there. He had a drawn and jaundiced look to him, a legacy of too many
county fairs and otter releases. I estimated the crowd at four hundred, with more cars and buses still arriving. At 9:30,
the promised time for the freeing of the otters, a Department of Natural Resources man with a new-age bullhorn got on top
of a pickup truck and asked the crowd for its attention. Attention? He had to be kidding.

Then he started a spiel about otters and their habitat and how lucky we are to have seed stock that may result in a viable
otter population in Iowa. He tried to point out that we used to have lots of otters, but that they were driven to extinction
by pollution, loss of habitat, and yellow school buses.

His speech did not go well. It suffered the same problems as 98.73 percent of all other speeches—an inadequate sound system
and length. It went something like this: “Baarraak… otters… (muffled words)… rrarkk… thanks to… kkkzzrraL.”

He did manage somehow to get across that it would take decades before the otter population was large enough to “harvest.”
There’s that word again! We persist in using the euphemism wherever the slaughtering of attractive animals is being talked
about. Dammit, we kill them. We slaughter them, just like we slaughter cattle. We catch them in steel traps or blow them down
with shotguns. We rip off their hides and wear their furs or hang their heads on den walls. We
kill them,
we don’t
harvest them
!
Someday we’ll all grow up and face that reality.

The speech droned on and on, the crowd became restive. You could almost hear it under people’s breath—a chant still in the
mind but ready to spring forth if the speech continued. “We want the otters, we want the otters, we want….” The state trooper
stiffened, sensing the otter-release equivalent of a feeding frenzy.

But I don’t blame the DNR people. Cripes, they spend most of their time in obscurity, working hard with seines and handling
squishy, crawly things under an August sun. By jove, for once they had a crowd, and this was a chance for their message to
get across, whatever it was.