| for Dale Robert Anderson
(1920-1997)
Hey Dale, howya doin? You won’t believe what just happened! We’d gotten together to prepare a remembrance of you at Encanto and I’m driving home, you know, after, and there’s this poet being interviewed on NPR and she’s talking about how her dad was a musician before World War II and he comes back and he & her mom get married and he gets a regular job and a year later she’s born. And her dad never played in a band again. She’s talking about how she stuck with poetry, didn’t do a regular job gig, didn’t do what her dad had done, and she says something about her wild and crazy life, she says that as I’m driving home wondering why I don’t write about you, haven’t written anything direct about you, and somehow, that phrase fits, I don’t know how, but it fits, it fits you and me and why I haven’t written: me and my crazy life. And I pull my notebook out, I’m driving down the street, I was on 40th by then, I was trying to write it down and drive and not run into the cars stopped at the light up ahead, so I slow down & I write & I glance up & I see the light has changed & I slow more so I can finish before I get to the cars and the intersection there at McDowell and I look up again & the cars haven’t moved, the light had changed before and the cars haven’t moved and just then this large two-tone car comes thru the other way, against the light, long after the light has changed & everyone has waited and now they begin to go & I catch up with them wondering how come no one in this lead foot town had zipped out in front of that iron boat; how, clean as can be, and smooth as a crazy life can be, that car sailed that way thru and it was just like when you came in my life and then went right on thru with everyone waiting, safe, and watching, you, grand as can be, driving thru against the light, it had to be you, going against the light and nobody minded, everyone waited. |
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RD Savage
04/26/97 © 1997 |