Roger Wright – Chicago

He’s been a neighbor for most of the summer. Bald, egg shaped head poking out of the blankets, he sleeps under the bridge on Grace Street.

Rumbling Metra Trains zoom cut through the night overhead. Cars stop and start. He’s tucked in a corner, steps from pedestrians stumbling back from the bars of Wrigley Field.

Early in the mornings, unsuspecting drivers slow at the Stop sign, glance over wide-eyed and see him stretched out on the sidewalk. Walking up to get a newspaper, I see only his bald head and wonder, chemo?

Two, three, minutes later, newspaper folded under my arm, I walk back home and he’s gone. I guess he’s tall, about ½ my age, but I really don’t know because I’ve only really seen him lying down.

Across Grace, up the embankment, a sliver of the green grass wild that runs along the railroad tracks, three bulky brown garbage bags. It’s where he stores his stuff.

And in this summer of apocalyptic rains, he is out there underneath the bridge. As the winds tear down bending, snapping trees to send with a ruthless indifference into arbitrary bedrooms so seemingly safe; he is out there underneath the bridge. As the water rises. The late night SUV rolls by. The train runs on time. He’s out there.

What lets him sleep?

A song rises up. Becker and Fagen—Steely Dan– sing,

“I was on the other side of no tomorrow.”

Perhaps he sleeps by dreams of being saved.

“You walked in.
And my life began again”

Maybe there was a day when he scraped the bottom. He knew Katy would be leaving. The job ended. The doctor brought news or the bank just won. Like the song says, he “spent the last piaster he could borrow”— he used up his last dime. Lights out. Game over.

Then every point of view broke loose and went spiraling.

“Katy tried,” said the song
I was halfway crucified “

Just who was the drug? The one come to save him?
And where was the doctor?

Becker and Fagen. All those masterful studio cats who played along on the song;

“Are you with me Doctor Wu?
Are you really just a shadow
Of the man that I once knew?
Are you crazy are you high?
Or just an ordinary guy?
Have you done all you can do?
Are you with me Doctor?”

That last question hurled up into the rain
Just before his new bridge home.
And somewhere after that long, cool saxophone solo
Katy left him under the bridge
The bridge on Grace.

Where sometimes
In the morning
Just before the early commuter train rumbles up above his head
On that concrete pillow
He remembers,

Just like the songwriters said

“All night long
We would sing that stupid song
And every word we sang
I knew was true.”

He remembers every word was true.
Just before he stuffs his blankets in the garbage bags and meets the day.
He remembers every word we sang
Was true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHpoSL-SEhA

A tired grey morning rain, boarding the elevated train in Chicago, reaching up to grab the strap, standing shoulder to shoulder. She shoots a fast glance as the train lurches forward and our shoulders touch. Decides I’m safe. Leans down to keep scrolling her phone, shakes the red hair from her face. The train slows, a seat opens, I invite her to sit down with my eyes and a nod. She does. And from the packed aisle of the train, no one moves to sit next to her. She looks up at me and with a tiny smile of amusement and with a shake of the head asks the world, “Was it something I said?”

 

So I sit down next to her. Shoulder to shoulder. Lightly grazing thighs with the rumble and clank of the train on down to the center of the city. She looks up from the phone, the hint, then my memory of a smile. Perhaps, she sees me and wonders about a grandfather she never knew as we touch shoulders.

 

But as the train doors swish open and I hear the rain, I’m back in Paris with the water washing down the gutters of the ancient stone streets that flow, like time, down the hill from the gleaming white Basilica Sacre Coeur. I smell coffee that lights up the morning and like Holly Near once sang, “frees my soul and I ain’t ready to grow that old.”

 

Once again, I am six hours or so from sitting down next to you on the steps of the Basilica, gazing out together over Paris in the mid day sunlight and saying the absolute most profound thing I could come up with at the time, which was, “Wow.”

 

At which point, you looked over with only enough interest to smirk, “That was deep.”

 

A few seconds passed, you got up, paused for one more look at the rippling city in the sunlight below, stretched, and I almost believed, like McMurtry once said, that it really was possible to fall in love with someone while they were stretching.

 

Being pretty good with the more primal of life’s needs, I remember saying something about being hungry. Probably something dumb like, “Know where you can get any good French food around here?” Then, and this is a mystery I still never have and never will, till my very last breath, figure out, we were in a café, there was wine that amazed, and cheese and fruit and sausage and the shadows were falling in a way that marked time moving at the speed of light.

 

We never stopped talking.

 

My new book had just come out. I remember reading you stories out loud. I remember telling you instantly about how the blonde had come back with coffee and croissants one spring morning and announced, “Roger? I’m a Princess. I just thought you should know.”

 

The Princess was soon gone. Vanished except for the way she hovered over so many stories. And now you’re gone too.

 

Which is why it’s so strange that you keep coming back and filling in what’s between the lines of all these new stories. What’s between the lines, where the important parts of the story go un-said. Except for the ways they reverberate. Like the way that folk singer’s voice reverberated. We saw her in that smoky bar on the tiniest of alleys winding downhill from the Basilica. Remember the way her voice was somehow shaky and strong at the very same time?

 

You’re not a dream . . .

You’re not an angel . . .

 

Course you liked your music to howl and cry, and sing to distant stars. No wimpy ass folk music. You didn’t even like Dylan. But we were saved when we both settled in on John Hiatt and stayed firm. So I guessed that Buffy Ste Marie did nothing for you when she sang the song we heard that night. I guessed quietly cause I didn’t really want to know the answer. I just wanted you and Paris. Like you were both some giant bowl of buttered, salted popcorn, and if I just kept eating, kept stuffing that salty, buttered taste of fluffy popcorn in my mouth, then you would someday roll down the drawbridges into the solid, whip smart grounded laughing haven of your generous soul, clear eyed loving me at least as much as I loved you. Because we had plans and golden promises.

 

That night we heard Buffy Ste Marie sang the song, I told you about the next book. We went back to sit on the steps of the Basilica, look out over the Paris. Bathed in the timeless night magic of the city of lights.

 

I told you the title would be “Street Corner Spirits.” That the stories would be mysteries, all of which started inside the doors of that Basilica. Inside those doors you saw rules. And I saw mysteries. Still, you could see our next book better than anyone.

 

But back then? Back when our eyes were reflected in the stars that somehow sang together with the lights of the city, back then I thought that loving someone enough meant that eventually they’d change.

 

And of course that doesn’t happen.

 

So the city lights dimmed. And you stayed, until it was time, for both of us to go.

 

And as much as I sang and wrote and wrote about all those mysteries you never believed in, what I never imagined, even in the parts between the lines, was that a return was possible. I never imagined you’d come back. But you did. You do.

 

You came back. Right this very moment. The Chicago train swishes into the Grand Station, the woman gets up and wonder of wonders, leaves a smile for her imagined Grandfather, me. She smiles at me and there you are.

 

I conjure up from the smoky mists, John McDonald’s timeless hero Travis McGhee in Pale Gray For Guilt, a letter McGhee gets at the end of the story.

 

“ . . . and now and again, when she is asleep and you are awake, and your arms are around her and you are sleeping like spoons, with her head tucked under your ugly chin, pretend it is ‘me’, who loved you.

 

Even right here in this story, the young girl leaves the train. And you came back.

 

Like hope on an Easter morning, you came back.

**************************************

Buffy Ste Marie “Until It’s Time for You To Go”

Photo Credit: Gavin Heillier

 

 

Paul Gaugin is the white haired gentleman hit by the light on the left. His shoulder to the camera.  Arthur Wesley Dow is in the white hat, sitting behind the table on the right. The rest? Who knows. And why so serious? Looking off in different directions. Many questions here.

Posed in front of the Pension Gloanec. Pont Aven. Brittany. Picture is from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Dow’s legacy now preserved forever in the Smithsonian, the Addison Gallery and collections world wide due in large part to the work of his Grandniece—Dr. Barbara Wright. (aka . . .my Mom)

If you haven’t read the book, communitizing means the work of community building. ANY kind of community. For example, I live in a wonderful neighborhood, filled with people like Debbie, one of my faithful supporters during my divorce.  Her father was a pastor at a small Lutheran Church, another community. She helped me get an audition for the Music Director/Organist position.  I got that job. None of us “networked” or had meetings. We shared a community.

 

Steam #3: Solving Mysteries

The Lutheran church supported a school for children on the Autism Spectrum.  So much progress has been made in treating autism, but there is still much that is a mystery. The school administrator asked me to teach piano to a boy that suffered from dyslexia.  As soon as Jonathan began studying piano – he began to have success with reading.

 

There is always an element of mystery in knowing yourself. As my 50th birthday rolled around, I knew it was time to re-invent myself. I began coach training at through iPEC, completed Corporate Training Certification (ASTD) and attended a weekend workshop with well-known author and public speaker, Marianne Williamson.

 

Jonathan’s parents were owners of a public relations company.  I invited Jonathan’s mother to the very first Coach Training session in Chicago.  We began talking about coaching and their business. She attended one of my first Strengths Development Workshops.

 

Just before completing the coach training, I started having surgeries and treatment for an abdominal issue caused by a C-section repair involving mesh that was put in in 1997.

 

Another student from the Lutheran school, Ivan, was referred to me for piano instruction.  His mother’s brother was a specialist in gastrointestinal pathology at the University of Chicago Medical Center.  He referred me to the surgical teams that were already doing the type of surgery that I wanted. 

 

I used my coaching skills and strengths awareness to manage my health and create a strategic plan to put the best surgical team and procedure in place. I was told that there could be up to 3 surgeries over a one year period. I set my intentions; remove the mesh, repair my intestines and abdominal wall and restore my health. The surgical team was superb and after 9 hours they had successfully completed the entire procedure with success.

 

Finally, “Practicing Stewardship.”

The “Practicing Stewardship” principle simply means taking care of something even larger than myself. Making sure that my own river flows into the river of a greater good. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. My life experiences, music performance and practice, strengths awareness and belief in the coaching process have helped me manage my life and thrive on my own. But even more important, they have helped serve a greater good.

 

My River Keeps Flowing

Jonathan’s parents were working with a mid-sized company going through reorganization.  The owners wanted to provide outplacement coaching for a large number of released employees.  I submitted a proposal and was hired on short notice to help others find work and re-invent themselves.

I look back on my story now, my river, and I see there is much more here than simply finding a job, finding work when there are no jobs or labeling me an entrepreneur.

 

It’s hard to describe, all those streams flowing into a river and then my river flowing into an even larger river or a sea.

 

It’s kind of like where I started my story. It’s like music.