August 11, 2020
Tonight was the first night of the Perseid Meteor showers. Just before midnight I walked up along Shoreline Park to a relatively dark spot. I let my eyes adjust and listen to the waves. It’s chilly, the chillest August I can remember. (I think) Looking up I see the silhouette of a great blue heron. Birds screech far out over the water. They sound like Terns to my untrained ears. I’ve seen huge flocks of Terns in the past week. So it makes sense. I wonder, do they feed at night?
Two faint meteors flash dimly and fade quickly. Then two more. I stare straight up for another ten minutes. Nothing. I’m a little early, the real show isn’t supposed to start for a few more hours. Patience is my least favorite virtue. Ten more minutes. As my night vision grows stronger the Milky Way, The River of Heaven, becomes more pronounced. It is a wonder to look into the center of our galaxy and ponder its vastness and meditate on what could be looking back at me. As alluring as that sounds I’m not being arrogant. I suspect there is no one out there interested in my speck of a life. I bask in the universe’s profound indifference. It’s comforting in a way and I shiver.
A bright meteor lights up the sky from the mountains to the ocean. It’s a brilliant burning rock that leaves a long white trail. The sky goes dark again but the image is burnt into my retinas. I close my eyes and can still see the glow. A short, five second, spark of beauty that will only happen once and I was in the right place to experience it before the moment was gone for eternity. A thrilling display of the workings of the solar system.
I see another ghost of a meteor, dim and brief, before going back home to wait a while for the moonrise and the predicted 50 to 60 an hour. I stand in my yard but there’s too much ambient light. The local owl hoots in the distance and then all is silent before I finally go inside.
At two o’clock I look out the window and the fog has crept into the neighborhood. There will be no more sky watching tonight.
The crow is a symbol of, among many things, the afterlife. Most mornings I wake to their loud and, to me, joyful conversations. It’s not generally respectful to anthropomorphize but I can’t help it sometimes. These playful black birds always seem to be enjoying themselves as they indulge their curiosities. They act like grateful opportunists eating whatever they stumble upon. So, oddly, I often look to these birds as something more than just neighbors. Symbols, as I’ve said, can be tricky. Joseph Campbell writes,
“Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead not only to the spilling of valueless ink, but of valuable blood.” And also, “And the problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.”
Emerson, who Campbell says “Got it!” writes in his journal in 1855, “But, (it is known to us all that) every man may be, (& some men are,) raised to a platform whence he sees beyond sense to moral and spiritual truth; when he no longer sees snow as snow, or horses as horses, but only sees or names them representatively for those interior facts which they signify. This is the way the prophets, this is the way the poets use them. And in that exulted state, the mind deals very easily with great and small material things, and strings worlds like beads upon its thought. The success with which this is done can alone determine how genuine the inspiration.”
So, maybe, a crow is more than a crow. Time will tell.
I’m trying to figure out if this past half of a year is really a dream or not. It seems like it is and there are clues. When I’m in the middle of a dream I will say to myself things like, “This can’t be right, I don’t know how to play the clarinet!” as Bob Weir motions from across the stage for me to take a solo. Or, “Shit Mide, that’s good advice and I wish I had it months ago. And aren’t you supposed to be dead?” My remarkable brother laughs and walks out of my bar leaving me wondering what to do next.
When I jump off a mountain and start flying towards another peak I try to wake myself up before I crash into the Tuolumne River. Sometimes I’m successful and usually wake laughing at my gullibility. After all, even if I could play the clarinet Weir probably wouldn’t have a spot for me in the band. Perhaps he’d let me sit in for Bird Song or Dark Star, but I guess we’ll never know for sure.
I do wonder if it’s a dream that Donald Trump is really as fucking ignorant as he appears in interviews. Nobody can be that stupid and be president of the United States.
Other things that make me question whether I’m awake or not: I haven’t been in a restaurant in almost six months. Haven’t had a drink either. Can this be possible? The world is all wearing masks. Well, most of the world anyway. There are those idiots who think it’s some sort of a plot or conspiracy against their beloved leader. Which makes the greatest country on earth seem like it’s not so great anymore. A laughing stock. Dad and Uncle Harry wouldn’t recognize where we are today. They’d be as baffled as I am.
I haven’t seen so many friends in way too long. It’s inconceivable. But, I can’t seem to shake myself awake like I do just before I steer a great ship into an iceberg or realize that I’m once again talking to a dead friend. Or, as happened the other night, watching Fran cut up lines of glittering cocaine. And I told myself in a dream a few weeks ago, “Ferdyn! You don’t know how to fly a helicopter!” However, I had no choice, Amanda was scared. I mercifully woke up before I could do any real damage. And then later my dreams made a segue way to a silly scene where I was sitting at my desk writing these notes. Hmmmnnn.
I woke up this morning humming Stella Blue, not unusual. Later I saw that Dead and Company were streaming the Hollywood Bowl shows from last year and I remember Weir singing it. So I listened to the concert. A fine version and Mayer’s solo at the end is beautiful. He catches the feeling perfectly. Then I get in the Jeep and the first song that pops up on the iPod is Stella Blue live from the Knickerbocker, late 80s. A lovely rendition. Jung would call it synchronicity but he and I would differ on the meaningfulness of it all. I’m happy just to call it a coincidence and leave it at that.
Deadheads are funny and not, as my father would say, funny ha ha, but funny peculiar. Sometimes when a bunch of us get together we start talking about our favorite versions of particular songs that we saw performed live. For years I’ve been claiming that a night in Vegas, at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl, they played a very, for me, poignant rendition of Stella Blue. Something about that night; the hot desert air, my life’s crooked path, the deep love for my traveling companions, an uncertain future, as well as too much other stuff, gave me pause. We did have a penchant in those days (1994) to overindulge in the finer offerings available to the initiated. We were young and strong back then, made of tougher stuff.
A mellow song to begin with, Jerry often sang it with more than a tinge of melancholy. I dug through the old bootlegs, now available on the app ReListen, and played Stella Blue from that long ago concert. It was as I remembered. Deep, soulful, with a haunting touch of pathos. That night Hunter’s words shook me and I had tears in my eyes as Jerry played a long touching solo to bring the song to an end. As only the Grateful Dead could do, they took a song I’d heard many many times before and altered it ever so slightly to give it a meaning that affected me on another level. I looked at things a bit differently later that night while walking around the surreal casino at The Excalibur Hotel. Would, as I often wondered, life ever be the same?
Well, I figured, there was only one thing left to do. I pulled the book The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics down off the shelf. I was wondering what I needed to know about Stella Blue and why it was hammering my mind so hard today for, seemingly, reasons obscure.
Stella was a guitar brand popular in the 1920s. Hunter wrote the song at The Chelsea Hotel in 1970. It was first played at The Hollywood Bowl on June 17, 1972, coincidently, Pig Pen’s final show.
I stood in my yard and read the words out loud like I was reading a poem to the crows and the Anna’s hummingbird, which I guess I was. And this about says it all.
It all rolls into one
and nothing comes for free
There’s nothing you can hold
for very long
And when you hear that song
come crying like the wind
it seems like all this life
was just a dream
Under the Jacaranda tree this morning was a dead Mourning Dove. Its chest was plucked out and it was eyeless. I looked up in the branches expecting to see the Cooper’s Hawk who haunts, and hunts, the neighborhood. There was plenty of the bird still left to eat. There was no sign of the hawk. Perhaps I spooked him. Across the street on the wire was a lone and silent dove watching me. Mourning. This, I remember, is how they got their name. Who told me that? Joanna? Brenda?
That was four days ago. The lone Mourning Dove is still sitting vigil. It flies back and forth from the wire to the Jacaranda tree. It is still silent. The dead bird is gone. Today the Cooper’s Hawk flew by, later it was chased by the crows, and the lone Mourning Dove on the wire didn’t even flinch. Too sad to move? No longer fearful of its own extinguishment? Hard for my simple mind to grasp.
Day five and the lonely, solitary, stoic Mourning Dove gave a tentative coo. An hour later it gave another soft, weary and melancholy call. Another bird answered back and soon landed on the wire. They were about a dozen yards apart before the original bird flew off. Then the new bird flew off as well. Later in the afternoon a single bird was back again shyly cooing. The second bird returned and they sat side by side silently for the rest of the day. The sun is setting and they are gone now. Love and death playing out on a small scale in my front yard. What happened and what it means is anybody guess.
Fires to the north and fires to the south. The air is smokey and I cut my walk short. My slightly weakened lungs feel the strain. The sky has a hazy orange tinge to it. The sun’s scant illumination is foreboding as the afternoon becomes even more discolored. My throat is dry and eyes watery. Perhaps those crows in the jacaranda tree know something that I don’t.
08/21/2020 — Spent the day mourning my friend Ken Ryals who passed away suddenly yesterday. I listened to, a few times, his CD with Tony Ybarra, Elements of Sunday Jazz. Once again this year I am at a loss for words. The sadness of the sunset did not go unnoticed.
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