Roger Wright – Chicago

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aYAUE6is7I]

The tent had collapsed in the blistering rain of the Outer Banks. Miles from any kind of light but our own and we just couldn’t stop laughing. Neither of us having any business setting up a tent.

 

Piling all our soaking stuff into the back seat. Didn’t take very long. We didn’t have very much. And then still laughing, driving through the night green soaked North Carolina forests. Back to your parents house in Chapel Hill. And if the ride were to take forever, that would be OK. The rain, the windshield wipers the tires gliding down dark deserted pavement through the trees.

 

And because we both knew every word to every song, we thought the ride might last forever.

 

Mary Travers sang: “Follow me, where I go. Who I am and what I know. Make it part of you, to be a part of me.”

 

Then when she sang “Though the cities start to crumble, and the towers fall around us, the sun is slowly sinking, and it’s colder than the sea” —-we thought we knew big thoughts and would do big things. There was no horizon to possibility. The night time North Carolina road went on forever.

 

Mary Travers, not just singing with Peter and Paul, but giving voice to us in that car, in that rainstorm, when she sang, “Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.”  We thought we knew what that song meant too. And maybe somewhere deep we both did. Maybe that’s why we both laughed in the rain when the tent came down.

 

Mary Travers gone. So is all our laughing innocence.

 

But Mary leaves us her song. And we remember the words.

 

Was that us?

 Running through cool sand under 2:00 a.m. starry skies, clothes tossed along the way splashing into the sea then diving under the waves and coming up laughing shivering joy.

 

Was that us?

 

Not this time.

 

Aunts and Uncles, Moms and Dads, families you were born to, families you choose, all tucked away in the borrowed beach house rooms along the Jersey shore while the kids raced the sands and rode the waves.

 

Once it was us. Crashing the waves, or traipsing big city neon streets or even standing in your very own kitchen polishing off a bottle of really good tequila.

 

And now as it becomes the kids, the no-longer are they kids, kids—time stops. And it’s all just this one golden moment on the beach.

Aunts and Uncles, the chosen or the related kind, know the moment well. Because it’s those moments that are the crystal polished beaming diamond of what you get if you are one of those aunts or uncles. Aunts and Uncles are in it for the sprint. The moment

Looking around at the parents, those, unlike me, blessed with kids, they are in it for the marathon. The long haul.

 

Then what happens at the wedding is that both the sprint and the marathon come racing towards a finish line together.

 

And that’s when the time stops.

 

Seems like just a moment ago it started.

Now I stand on my sister’s porch, listening through the window, and hear that long gone little boy in the picture say to my father, “Bud, would you like me to help you carry that luggage?” And of course my father answers, “No, no, thanks Ben. I’ve got it.”

 

And Ben answers, “Well, I’m going to help you anyway.”

 

And just like that: the little boy is gone. Somehow in his place, a wandering, born to heal soul of that no one would ever mistake for anything other than a man.

 

Sokyo and Ben came together traveling India. In tiny villages, along quiet roads where there are no tourists. In teeming, ancient cities he once heard her laughter inside a building 1,000 miles and months since the last time they met. Circling Asia, he told me, they later found other times and places where their paths had almost crossed again. Places they stayed where they would both look out separate windows and see the exact same view.

 

Brides are the stars of any wedding. But this one kicked it up a notch.

The invitation was her freehand drawing of every single wedding guest. Drawing she did from photographs. The night it arrived at our house, I opened it up, thought “That’s nice.” But then my wife said, “Wait a minute. Look at this. There’s US! Sitting at that table!” And then proceeded to study this tiny masterpiece for about ½ an hour. Ben had hand scripted names to fold over each face or figure, so there was even a program to identify all the players.

 

Uncles keep a respectful distance. Both in watching the preparation for the ceremony in the church across the street. And at the wedding itself. 

 

Watching this bride glide from Korean flower arranging that rang of timelessness; to the preparation of the Indian food. And then suddenly Ben would walk by and she’d jump on his back and off they’d go laughing like two smiling young trees in the wind.

 

A snapshot at the wedding dinner. The 90 year old matriarch, Ben’s English Grandmother, goes to sit with Sokyo’s mother Mrs. Kim. Neither speaks the others language. But they talk and smile, pat each others arm, they laugh and nod their heads. And then, and only then, the bride sees them talking from across the room, walks through the crowd to just them, kneels down between the two women from different ends of the earth, holds both their hands and translates.

 

At the cake cutting, the bride doesn’t just make sure her husband’s face is covered with cake; she cuts pieces and goes and plasters them all over the faces of each of her bridesmaids in once again another explosion of laughter.

 

Then another gift to every single person in the room. All of the bridesmaids and the bride’s mother, Mrs. Kim, get up and sing a traditional Korean folk song. And there is no need at all for a translation. The sweet lilting harmony cascading like a waterfall joining the world. No translation necessary. Just a sweet song of joy.

 

When it’s time for the first dance, the bride and groom, both dressed in traditional Korean garb, he with billowing pants and a puffy pirate shirt, she in a lovely multi-colored Korean robe and red dots on her face, take to the dance floor—and perform the Rickey Gervais dance from the TV show “The Office”

Imagine this dance done step by step by two poker faced newlyweds in traditional Korean dress. Neither breaking a smile until it was done.

 

 

And then again comes the laughter.

 

 

 

 

The aunts, uncles, mothers and fathers now in the darkness around the dance floor; time stopping again for that entire room as all the flames of thanksgiving love and joy and heartbreak and separation and all that time and all that distance all converge in pools of what might have been, could have been and then somehow push back to what is. Back to right now.

 

The next day brings Ben riding a bicycle in the late summer sun, waving, saying, “Guess I best get to the bank or pack or something. We’re going to Peru tomorrow.”

 

That night there is pizza and Mrs. Kim cooking up something that simply tastes like it could sustain a person’s very soul. I dish myself some from the bowl on the table and she shakes her head a vigorous “No!” pulls me over, digs in to the bowl with her chop sticks and gives me 3 times as much —then she smiles and nods her head quickly, as do I.

 

The bridesmaids, Mrs. Kim and Sokyo present Ben’s grandmother with some small decorative Korean art. “Grandmum.” Says Ben, this is paper made the way it was made a thousand years ago.”

 

Then they sing the acapella song again. This time the words are passed around and I remember the first line was:

 

“It is no accident that we meet.”

 

That night the airport runs to Newark and JFK begin. Giant white whale international airliners arcing up into higher skies bound for Heathrow and Manchester and Seoul.  Snappy little domestic flights board for Chicago and North Carolina. Mini-vans wind there way up the coast to Boston and down to DC.

 

And I remember one more snapshot. Right after the Ricky Gervais dance, just for one golden instant, that kind of moment that an Uncle or Aunt can treasure most, the song below came on, a part of their music mix. It was quickly turned off. Not loud enough. Or new enough. Or something.

 

But as this song plays in my head and our little flight glides up and points back to Chicago, I think:

Will you look at that?  Maybe it was just for a moment. But was on their mix. They put it there. One of our songs. Written and sung by a blind man who I bet more than once has felt the warmth of an Asian sun on his face. A song that said: I’ll be loving you always.

 

What a gift they gave us with their wedding. Letting us stop time for just a moment and ask ourselves.

 

Hey. Was that us?

 

 

Let’s invite them all to the apartment for Thanksgiving. The first one they missed. That Thanksgiving we had when we were all so very young.

 

All of them who flew from the crumbling towers and the dust and the smell of chalky death. All of them who slammed into the Pennsylvania field. All of them who burned to fiery fear in the five sided building.

 

Let’s invite them all to share that turkey dinner, in the bright yellow kitchen. Sitting at that tiny round table while it snows and the Chicago wind howls. Pour a little wine. Pass the turkey and the stuffing.

 

There will be enough.

 

I know it might get crowded. Spill out into the living room. Cheap pine stand for the record player. Bookshelves and rocking chair. Bathroom where your Wella Balsam shampoo beaded wet in the shower next to my cheap young boy shampoo. And then the bedroom. Then the bedroom.

 

I know it might get crowded. But in the golden sparkling sight of you across the room, that power you have to help me keep my feet on the ground, in your laughter like a song of a healing balm in Gilead: I’m sure we’ll find the room.

 

Then when all the years pass. When we remember how we helped dish out the meal that Thanksgiving, without a clue as to where it came from, how it was cooked or why that turkey ended up tasting just so good; we will both remember —wasn’t that a time?

 

Our guests all fed. A poet from that crowd we helped feed will whisper “Lost, by the wind grieved ghost, come back!”

 

But the courses have been set. Decisions made. And our guests have all moved on.

 

Happy with the turkey. Laughing with the wine.

 

By then we’ll both know, what we didn’t know then. We’re a part of a story that started long before us and will go on when we’re gone.

 

Come the end of the meal—on any given day—will come new songs. The mischief and the grin in a wondrous little girl’s eyes. Then stories like rewards at the end of hard long days.

 

We will remember all of them, remember all of them we tried to feed that first Thanksgiving.

 

We will set some more places at a table of tomorrow.

 

And try once more to feed the world’s lost souls taken way too fast.

 

A smile turning sad for just a moment. But it passes. Just like a boat. That can carry two.

 

There is lots more work to do.