Old Songs in a New Cafe (11 page)

Still, my dad drives down from Rockford on below-zero nights to watch what is left of it. He sits along the west sideline
in the old teachers college gym, and, moving downcourt, I can pick his voice out of 4,000 others, “Go get ‘em, Bobby.” He
was there with the same words, years ago, on winter nights in all the Corn Bowl Conference towns.

He calls on a March morning to say that I have made the All-North Central Conference first team. He heard it on the radio,
he is pleased, and I am pleased for him. I ignore my remaining eligibility, take some extra courses, and graduate.

There is one final moment, though. The University of Iowa seniors barnstorm after their season is over. Another player and
I team up with a group of high school coaches and play them at the Manchester, Iowa, gym for a benefit. It’s a good game.
We are in it until the last few minutes when our big center fouls out, and I am forced to guard Don Nelson, later of the Boston
Celtics. And, for one more night, the jump shot is there, just as it once was. Twelve of them go down from deep on the outside.

The jump shot, with some 2,500 points scribbled on it, has lain unused for over twenty years. It rests in a closet somewhere,
with my old schoolbooks and Flexible Flyer sled. I got it out once to show my daughter, who asked about it. It took a few
minutes to shine it up, and she watched it flash for a little while in the late-afternoon light of a neighbor’s back yard.
I put it away again. It was a boy’s tool for a boy’s game, for growing up and showing your stuff. Merlin knew that.

More than anything, though, and I understand it clearly now, the jump shot was a matter of aesthetics, an art form for a small-town
kid—the ballet-like movement, the easy release, the gentle arc over a telephone wire through the summer nights of Iowa, while
my mother and father peered out the back-porch screen door and looked at each other softly.

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I
n my late forties, I came quartering down the years and forgot how old I was. When asked to give my age, I would run a quick
cipher: “Let’s see (mumble, move lips slightly) … born in … present year… subtract …” Was this a simple inatten-tiveness caused
by the distractions of a busy life, I wondered? Or maybe, I wondered again, if some winsome sleight-of-hand by the mind itself
was at work, the balming of harsh reality by a man growing older.

In any case, others noticed it first. My turning fifty, that is. A few months before my birthday, people started speaking
to me in peculiar tongues, saying things such as “Hey, hey, Bob-O, the BIG ONE’s coming! How are you going to celebrate it?”
“I’m too busy to have a birthday,” I countered, shuffling away from the subject.

That was not good enough. Indeed, I was told, this is a seminal occasion and deep, indelible markings should be tooled upon
the hours of August 1. So, when pressed, I would claim the day to be mine alone and declared I would spend it sloshing around
in some quiet swamp with my cameras.

But I dawdled, made no plans, and others kindly took over. My friend Scott organized a small birthday party held two days
before the actual date. Old friends were generous enough to attend, I sat in a lawn chair with red balloons tied to the back
of it, and Scott took a class picture. That was as wild as it got. We had a genuinely good time, in a quiet way, and the affair
fit my approach to things. Well, the balloons seemed a little out of character for me, but I thought afterward that everyone
ought to spend at least one day a year sitting in a chair with balloons tied to the back of it.

I drove the sixty miles up to Rockford the evening before my birthday and took my mother out for dinner. Lifting my glass
as she lifted hers, I grinned, “Thanks for getting me here.” She smiled back, said she was proud of me, and told me again
how the delivery took place in the middle of an Iowa thunderstorm and how the hospital lights failed just before I was born.
I leave the significance of those latter two events open to various interpretations.

On the day itself, I put aside my low-fat, semiveg-etarian tendencies and ate two Maid-Rites. That was rather like an act
of homage to my youth. For it was in Roger Dixon’s Charles City Maid-Rite where I first lunched as a young boy, and I have
retained a nearly religious zeal for the loose-meat sandwiches since then. As part of this, trips to Des Moines often are
scheduled in such a way that a stop at Taylor’s Maid-Rite in Mar-shalltown is not only possible, but inevitable.

There are, you see, few rituals more sublime than slowly spinning back and forth on a counter stool and watching sandwich
makings being scooped from the steam table of a true Maid-Rite cafÉ. Truth in this case flows from a purity of undiluted purpose,
a place where nothing other than Maid-Rites are served, except for the essential milk shake and graham cracker pie.

After the Maid-Rites, I took a nap, did my three miles on the road, read for several hours, and watched a movie. No “Over-the-Hill-Gang”
T-shirts were purchased, no champagne was chilled, and bad jokes about getting older were avoided entirely. My wife wrote
me a lovely note that said, “Pm short on words, but long on love,” which I thought, apart from the sentiment, was a model
of good writing and deserved a steel guitar lick underneath it. She also gave me a small crystal embedded in silver made by
a local craftsman, and upon the silver were etched a fish and a falcon to represent my love of things wild and free. That
was it, and it was just fine.

Still, the gentle lash of my friends and relations about the day’s significance had its effect. In the midst of my reading
that afternoon, I began to drift, thinking about time and the curious spiral dance of which I am a part. If I am just one
of a long file of travelers, how about the rest? What were they doing on some other August 1 ?

Galileo, for example, in 1633. In April of that year, the Church had forced him, under threat of torture, to recant the conclusions
reached in his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
that Ptolemy had been wrong and Copernicus had been right: earth was not the center of all things heavenly. So I imagined
Galileo Galilei in Florence, afraid, angry, and alone on a warm August day.

How did a shepherd ranging over the hills of Sumer, 2,000 years before Galileo, feel on this day? Did the flutter of light
and shadow cause him to stop and think of a woman in a nearby town or how life is passing strange? Was the Rev. Thomas Bayes
working on his famous probability theorem on the first of August in 1760? The beauty of his proof, which is taken by some
as the beginning of modern statistics, consistently has escaped my students.

And Socrates. Where was he on a fine August evening? Making his way home with other guests from a night at Xenophon’s, I suppose.
The music was fading, but there was yet enough wine in the blood to stir their tongues as they moved through the quiet streets
of Athens, the conversation still lively, still centered around matters at the heart of things.

Was Alexander out on the desert with his armies? Where was Geronimo a hundred years ago? And how did the infantryman walking
along the French hedgerows in 1944 feel? On some August 1st was Charlie Parker practicing scales in E-flat major and Gertrude
Stein holding court in Paris and Dali twirling his moustache? Was Swinburne writing “The world is not sweet in the end” on
my birthday somewhere in the cool of England, while a black woman stared through a haze of Alabama heat at distant rain clouds?

Swinging around in my chair, I looked at what surrounded me and imagined a future archaeologist, perhaps some alien blob of
magenta protoplasm, carefully brushing away the crust of five thousand years and making notes on what it found. “Computer
keyboard—primitive method of data entry.” “Guitar—well-preserved example of mid-twentieth-century instrument building.” “Stapler—used
for fastening papers together prior to the invention of laser bonding.” “Camera—one of the last models predating portable,
digital imaging.”

Next, I reviewed my list of ways I do not want to die. For example, I have noted “In a hospital.” And, “Tail-ended by a 74
Cadillac in front of K Mart while a blue-light special on men’s underwear is commencing.” Then I turned to the acceptable
list. “Falling off a cliff in northern Iowa on a foggy morning while adjusting my tripod.” Or, “A spear in the chest on the
African veldt” (first preference).

I also remembered that, following his orders, the bones of Genghis Khan were carried about by his armies in the field after
his death, as a kind of memorial. That’s what morticians like to call “pre-need planning.” Personally, I’ve always thought
that Khan pushed things a bit, overstayed his welcome, as it were.

That was all good fun, but it took me no closer to anything fundamental than where I had been at the beginning. So I dug in
a bit, started things running back and forth across the corpus callosum, and got down to basics, while the overhead fan turned
slowly. “All right,” I said to myself, “Im gibbous, more than half-rounded, a long run from the chrisom and the breast. So
what can be made of that? What do I know and feel here on a summer afternoon with a half-century stretching out in back of
me?”

Ontologists searching for the meaning of existence generally leave me behind in their quest, at least in their writings. I
suppose, as with other such matters, it would have helped to have been there, at the Cafe Flore with Sartre, de Beauvoir,
and the rest when they gathered to deal with the foundations of being.

For me, Fm content with Waller’s Second Conjecture: Existence takes on meaning only when you give it meaning by making it
meaningful. And how do you make it meaningful? By listening to those almost-secret voices within you that, at certain critical
times, whisper, “This is me.”

In those moments, it’s important to consciously note what you’re doing and to do more of it, a lifetime of it, in fact. I
think this is what Joseph Campbell means when he speaks of “following your bliss.” In case this seems a little too narcissistic,
a little too thin and self-focused, I also believe that the meaningful life must include a concern for things beyond yourself,
including our animal friends, rivers, trees, and other humans.

For twenty years I have had the following verse by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore hanging above my desk:

The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day

I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument.

The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set;

Only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.

Those words have haunted me for two decades. And, as I move around, I think they apply to a fair number of people I meet.
I now keep Tagore pasted above me more out of tradition than necessity. Somewhere, around forty, I began, though somewhat
imperfectly, to get the instrument tuned, the words in order, and the melodies flowing. Ice skaters are required to learn
school figures, basic stuff. Living is a little like that. You have to get the school figures down, get ‘em cold, so you can
execute them subconsciously.

When that happens, when the words began to flow and the melodies take shape, the search for meaning does not end, but life
starts to become meaningful even as you seek to make it more that way. Others apparently get there earlier than I did. Many
never do, and that is the great tragedy of our times and the failure of our civilization, for neither our religions nor our
schools nor our informal social structures provide us with the tools to search, diligently, for meaning in this present life.

How do you know when you’re getting there? Well, things feel right; there is a sense of unification, as if you are becoming
a tapestry rather than a conglomeration of tangled threads, and you are doing the weaving yourself, almost effortlessly. Personally,
I think the pursuit of trivia and rapacious, material acquisition so honored by this society thwart the search and inhibit
the weaving, and that the arts are the prime vehicle for clarifying and accelerating the search. But that’s another story
for another time.

At some point, you have to deal with a hard and essential fact: you discover that the things you’re good at and the things
you love are not necessarily the same. Whatever wisdom I have, I tend to get much of it from strange places. One of them was
an obscure film,
The Gig,
about musicians. A first-class professional is talking to a man who wants nothing more than to be a professional, but obviously
cannot cut it. The pro is tired of the amateur’s whining and obsequious pleas to join a band and says: “Music is not like
religion; devotion is not enough.” There it is. It’s a good thing to know.

There’s also the problem of doing away with the clutter. Like good composition of any kind, coming to grips with life requires
a certain elegance of lifestyle, not in the sense of being fancy, but rather a consideration of what can be discarded in favor
of simplicity. I propose there is an insidious plot to steal our time in the world we have created, and it’s important to
get rid of as many encumbrances as possible, including lawn care and excessive housekeeping. The sign my wife posted a long
time ago says it rather nicely: “Today I Cherish, Tomorrow I Dust.”

Even being a little antisocial helps. A friend of mine is fond of quoting something I said a few years back about my reluctance
to attend events of borderline value: “You have fewer people at your funeral, but you get more reading time.” There are krakens
out there gobbling your life, and it’s crucial that they be spotted and nullified.

Then there are the quantity people who want you to try and live forever. You’ve got to watch them, too. I’m not talking here
about commonsense matters of diet and personal habits. I’m talking about those who resent flyers and do all they can to ground
them. They’re everywhere with cautious, chirping advice: “Keep your hands in the boat,” “Hang on to the latchkey,” “Stay away
from the road.” Some people see dragons all about them. Avoid those people and fight the dragons when they come along.