“Walk out of any doorway
feel your way, feel your way
like the day before.
Maybe you'll find direction
around some corner
where it's been waiting to meet you.”
~ Grateful Dead, “Box of Rain”
I would classify myself as a low-functioning Dead Head. To put it simply; I don’t have all the albums, but I do listen to “American Beauty” enough to be whisked away into the plain of peaceful, easy feeling. The kind of feeling where there are no worries and their is no pain; only joy of a pleasant existence.
The first time I ever heard the Dead was a few years back when I watched the show “Freaks and Geeks” and the song “Ripple” played out the show’s finale. I dug the groove but didn’t give the song a second thought until the night I returned to Charlotte, North Carolina unannounced.
I had disappeared from Charlotte back in the spring of 2012 a week or so after having been kicked out of ministry school and had returned to correct some wrongdoings I had committed during my tenure there. When I arrived I contacted my buddy Clyde who I had, unknown to him, wronged once upon a time.
The only way to explain Clyde is to tell you a story for he is a character.
Clyde is a musical genius, a musical prophet and super gay for John Mayer. In early July of 2013 Clyde had began to cover, with his band Laylo, the classic Skynyrd song “Call Me the Breeze” written by the late J.J. Cale. Clyde had been consistently ranting, as he often does, about everything, that John Mayer was stealing his ideas for songs via their shared brain frequency and that soon Mayer would begin to play Grateful Dead tunes. He was certainly predicting a lot.
On the 23rd of July, just a few weeks later of my arrival in Charlotte, J.J. Cale passes away. The gang and I were at an open mike when we heard the news. Laylo had already played their set which had included the song “Call Me the Breeze”. Then on August 20th John Mayer released his album “Paradise Valley” which contains a cover of “Call Me the Breeze”. Clyde is playfully pissed and I still don’t fully believe in his foolish “premonitions”.
September rolls around and our buddy Chris the German returns to America. The German takes his girlfriend to see John Mayer in concert at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Charlotte. This is the first tour John Mayer had done in three years and Clyde, for some reason, couldn’t make it. Thoroughly bummed he became sullen with inner turmoil when the German sends him a video of John Mayer performing a cover of Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” completely fulfilling Clyde’s prophecy.
I have since recanted the error of my ways and have become a believer in the “Clyde is always right eventually” theory. Its a controversial organization with very few members, but I have high hopes in its future growth in the greater Charlotte area.
That’s but a brief beginner’s guide to all that is Clyde and when he becomes famous and dies I will be glad to write to his biography because he will surely, if not already, live a life deserving of one.
Now, as I’ve said, I disappeared from Charlotte a year and a half prior and had returned unannounced, with ten dollars in my pocket and no place to stay, when Clyde picks me up around nine o’clock at night. I hop into his car and he says we’re going to go for a drive. I tell him all about my time I spent away and the deep depression I had fallen into and how I had recovered. In the meantime though I was unsure of what Clyde was thinking because he hadn’t said hardly a word for him being the conversationalist he is.
Clyde, acting very distant the whole drive, then told me he’s taking me to go see a friend of his. I was unsure of who this person could be and was wondering if he was going to take me to someone’s house or to a homeless shelter when we pulled up to a little brick house. ‘Well who could live here,’ I wondered.
We walked to the door and Clyde knocked. I’m very nervous when suddenly the porch light turns on and the door unlocks opening up to the face of another dear old friend…
Lo and behold! it was that ole scoundrel Dirty Dave. I hadn’t seen Dave since my second year of ministry school back in 2011 and was shocked and awed to see him make yet another appearance in my life. Dave is one of only three kindred spirits I possess and the only man I know to live up to the hippie ways of old. A truly gifted and talented guy.
We shuffled our way to his garage where Grateful Dead were playing from the sound system and we all sit down exchanging what had been going on in our lives over the last couple of years. Then Dave pulls out a tiny, cylindrical, glass thingy. This thingy turned out to be a bowl. I became ecstatic and for some reason it had never occurred to me that Dave smoked pot too. I accepted his offer taking a few hits and we then commenced to pass around the guitar taking turns playing our songs when suddenly the pot began to take effect.
In the back ground “American Beauty” was playing and it completely filled my mind. I sat there for maybe thirty minutes swaying unspeaking, letting the word’s wash over me like the refreshing streams of biblical waters. My head eventually began to swim and I turned nauseous. Not wanting to embarrass myself I stand up and excuse myself walking out of the garage door to find some fresh air. I made two steps around the corner when I completely lost my composure falling into myself like a sack of bricks.
I decided to just lay low hoping Clyde and Dave hadn’t noticed. Eyes closed the darkness spins and spins swirling and turning into a vortex of euphoric ecstasy.
As I listen to “Box of Rain” pour softly through the midnight air I follow a single drop of rain that falls from the sky and as it drops through my skull and into my mind I follow close behind, winding the trail of my unconsciousness.
- - -
The drop of rain continued its venture, eventually reaching the valley of my past, coursing the rough and mountainous terrain of of my dreams and memories. Everything collides as if all were one.
The first “dreamory" I came across was of me lying in the smooth, tall, swaying grass of a country meadow. The sun shines down upon me and a girl with satiny raven hair I did not know but who seems completely familiar and ever present. She’s laughing when she turns over to wrap her arms around me and kisses me gazing deep into my eyes and I into hers. We continue to watch the passing white clouds holding onto each other for what seems an eternity.
I return, somehow and reluctantly, to the valley where the drop of rain waits for me to continue our journey.
Not knowing how I got there I’m suddenly ten years old and riding a bike with other children through the streets of an old town in the vicinity of the 50’s; where everyone know everyone and the red scare never happened and the commies of old were dead.
All is black and white and we’re on our way to the local ice-cream parlor. We walk in I receive a mighty fine welcome from Mr. Watson, the proprietor, who calls me by name asking how my father’s doing. I tell him father had been promoted at the factory and was taking the family that weekend to the county fair and how swell it would be. He gave me a free ice-cream cone and best wishes to my father.
And as I turn to step out of the parlor I’m confronted by a little girl barely five holding a pinecone. All reverts back to color. The girl begins to tug at the seam of my jeans and I reach down to pick her up when I see that my hands are wrinkled and old with wispy grey hairs. “Grampa,” the girl asks with a furrowed brow and showing me the pinecone, “What’s this?” I tell her its a seed that will one day become a tree and the expression of confusion remains plastered within her beautiful wide eyes.
I blink for just a moment when suddenly I’m back again with the raindrop who’d been waiting patiently for me to return. Then the valley begins to widen and the mountains slowly begin to turn into hills and the hills into a wide horizon and beyond the horizon was a vast and endless blue. The path we’d been following had become a river gently guiding us to the sea.
I looked at the drop of rain and it gave off a glimmer from the sun as if winking, trying to tell me something, when it slowly begins to slip into the river and then washes away.
- - -
Back in reality I opened my eyes to Dave’s back yard. The dark and empty sky loomed over me. Groggy, sad, and a little lonely, I tested myself to see if I could stand on my feet. I could and walked back into Dave’s garage. Clyde asked me if I was okay telling me that I had been out for about an hour. I told him I was just really high. Then I told them, in not quite the detail I’ve told you, about my experience; how I walked through memories I’d never had and how painful yet joyful it was to walk through a life I’d never lived or, to be hopeful, yet to have.
And what I have since come to understand was that this experience was but a gallery of the desires of my heart and, I assure you, there are many, many more. Some, as sad as it is, will never come to pass. I will never get to live in Mayberry, I’ll never go to the fair with my dad, I’ll never be able to do things I wish I could have done differently. But I will, I’m sure of it, be in love someday wrapped in the warm arms of a woman in a meadow, and hold a beautiful little girl and explain to her the wonders of the world, or write the great novel of my time and be forever and eternally remembered.
We shall all one day face the sea. Washing away into the horizon with the twinkle of sunlight in our eyes whispering goodbye. Let the rain fall, easing your pain and troubled mind, and may love see us through.
KJ out.
No comments:
Post a Comment