Grae

Gary and I waited up until 11pm on Wednesday night. Grae was home visiting and he called and told us he was in the area. It was no imposition, it was a joy to wait around on the couch for him. I have often thought about writing a little story about Grae, such an interesting path he follows and it is worth telling about the days he comes home and tells us of his adventures. For some reason during his first few visits he reminded me of Dill from To Kill A Mockingbird. Scout would go about her life all through the year and almost forget about Dill and then the summer days would shine upon her and Dill would be at her door, ready to play again. That is how it is for us and Grae.
Grae used to be Greg and Gary has known him for many more years than I. From the stories I have listened in on throughout the years Grae somehow met Gary out in Western Mass or maybe at a show somewhere and they immediately made a connection. They have been friends ever since. The first time that I met Grae was driving to a Max Creek show in the middle of nowhere with Gary on New Years Eve, I think 1996, yeah that is it. I was going to give up smoking and he was trying to talk me out of it. I was not drinking and he was lecturing me on the necessities of living an independent free life away from the constraints of not drinking. To be honest, he was not my favorite friend of Gary's but we sat up until the wee hours in our shared hotel room talking and laughing, the three of us. And then he was gone.
For all of the time that I have known him he has lived in Northern California and he has come to visit his home of Massachusetts once every couple of years so this has amounted to about 8 or 9 visits in our life together from Grae.
It marks time for me.
All the visits occurring in our 20s were marked with drinking and partying and philosophizing and laughing.
When Gary and I started to have children our relationship with him took on a whole other flavor.
There is this thing that happens when friends have children and other friends don't but Grae was around so infrequently that really it was not a big deal. We always cleared time for him. Gary loved him and before I knew it so did I.
In our most recent visits all of the confusion and angst that I had in my eyes throughout my 2os and early 30s are in his eyes in his 40s and now this visit was all about changes and moving on. He has moved all of his belongings in to a storage facility and is going on a great adventure to live in South America on the Amazon River indefinitely. Cool.
We stayed up and waited for him. He looked older, much thinner and much kinder than he ever had. We picked up right where we had left it two or three years ago and then the next day he was gone.
Gary and I are two creatures of habit and constancy. We stay in our flow and we have become foundations for some of our most wandering friends. I love to hear their stories. I love it when they sleep on my couch. I hope that my children travel to wonderful places and have great adventures and find our home waiting for them just where they had left it, a light on and the two of us standing in the doorway....... waiting.

Happy Learn Nothing Day!

Crap! I forgot today was Learn Nothing Day! The kids have already gone off to Nature Camp, listened to the radio, opened books and talked with us about all sorts of various things. Learning Nothing is a very hard thing to do...........

In younger days I danced like this. This is how Gary met me. Looking and feeling like this. This was a festival before we got married. Gary had just come home from 6 weeks out on the road and we had driven the old tour bus two hours to this festival. I think Gary may have been playing while I was dancing here but maybe not.
We camped with our good friend LJ. Several years later LJ drove across the United States and left us a message staring at the clouds in Montana chanting about the surreal beauty in the skies. He overdosed two weeks after that call.
We were dancing during this photo. He and I loved to dance together.
I miss being that carefree. I know what they all say, all the old cliches about age and youth and all that but I know that when I go out now even if I may be swaying I will never dance like that again.
I danced in those days with the lightness of a floating petal, carefree and full of the promise of another day and one after that. I danced without the burden of bills and taxes and checklists. I danced in the eternal glow of youth.
I love this picture. I am glad it is here to remind me.

"He took her soul—though, being a secular-minded person, he didn’t think of it that way. He didn’t take the whole thing; that would not have been possible. But he got such a significant piece that it felt as if her entire soul were gone. As soon as he had it, he not only forgot that he’d taken it; he forgot he’d ever known about it. This was not the first time, either.

He was a musician, well regarded in his hometown and little known anywhere else. This fact sometimes gnawed at him and yet was sometimes a secret relief; he had seen musicians get sucked up by fame and it was like watching a frog get stuffed into a bottle, staring out with its face, its splayed legs, its private beating throat distorted and revealed against the glass. Fame, of course, was bigger and more fun than a bottle, but still, once you were behind the glass and blown up huge for all to see, there you were. It would suddenly be harder to sit and drink in the anonymous little haunts where songs were still alive and moving in the murky darkness, where a girl might still look at him and wonder who he was. And he might wonder about her."
Mary Gaitskill Mirrorball, at Pantheon Books