Far from home - three thousand miles across water, to be exact. Halfway to Japan, in fact. Somebody else living in our home, occupying our lives like pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Renting a convertible, open to the sun and wind and looking for all the world like ordinary tourists. Like all the other people, none of whom are ordinary, all of whom look like ordinary tourists.
Driving home from dinner after a rainstorm, the moon quoting Spenser among translucent clouds. Stopping to put the top down and turn on the radio. "Son of a Preacher Man." A perfect record. Everything perfect. The bass line, the tautly architected horn charts, the way the song stays on the V chord at the end of each verse ... and Dusty, the most perfect of all (even though perfection shouldn't be a relative thing; in this case it is) ... Dusty, singing as if she had not left this world behind, Dusty as she was in her prime, as we ride in a Mustang convertible.
Buying a lot of used books, as usual, and finding a lot of Asian literature as I typically do in Hawaii. Finding a book of Japanese death poems and reading this:
This, then, is the day
the melting snowman
is a real man
“Taking time to make time,” Dusty sings. A phrase worth contemplating. Obviously it’s an erotic reference, since “making time” meant “making love” in those days. But there is something about taking time, slowing down, that makes more time. That’s why we have vacations, isn't it?
The negative version of “making time” in this sense is the one used by that character in Catch-22 (was it Yossarian or one of the others?), when he tried to stay bored so that time would last longer and he could live forever. The other kind of manufactured time, the one we yearn for or else forget to yearn for, is the kind we pursue by traveling three thousand miles.
I don’t know if I’ll compose a poem when I die. It doesn’t seem likely, not being a Japanese monk of the 18th century and all. Still, if I do, I could do worse than remember a night with the top down, Janet next to me, the air the temperature of a perfectly drawn bath … driving out beyond the gas stations and hotels and garish restaurants with their tiki torches burning along the road, Memphis bass line on the radio, out to where the ocean and the strip of road are exactly the same pearl color of reflected moonlight, their gleam highlighted against the pitch black of the land and stars and moon and translucent skies overhead, at the end of summer as autumn approaches, Dusty Springfield forever young and still singing in a tiny Muscle Shoals studio.
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