You Just Get Lost....

It's that time of the year --- the days get hot and still and the humidity is higher than you want it to be but every now and then a breeze lifts the curtains and rattles the wind chimes and you just get lost. This happens to me ever summer. It is this sensory pastiche of heat and the glare of the sun off the water and gulls floating by silently on a current and heat and more heat. You start remembering things like nights on the beach in Galveston listening to a samba beat drifting across the water from the Balinese Room or an afternoon in a courtyard in New Orleans listening to a a guy in a bar across Decatur Street playing the piano like Doctor John... You just get lost.

I remember the last spring that I spent in Houston. I knew I was going to be leaving and I knew it was time to go. I'd left my job, a romance had ended, and I was restless and ready to go... but still... but still... It wasn't going to be easy. I had developed the habit of driving around the downtown streets late at night listening to music and just sucking up everything. Memorizing every flower box and every shop window and every Urban Animal whizzing by on roller skates laughing, longneck in hand. I'd drive past those gorgeous sculptures in the Lyric Plaza and the Joan Miro sculpture by the Chase building. Then through old town, which I loved --- the old Kennedy Bakery and the old Rice Hotel with its gargoyles and dragons. I'd stop at Treebeard's on Prairie Street to get a dish of their jambalaya and a piece of the best buttercake in existence. Past Sam Houston Park... Sometimes I would drive until the sky was getting light. I loved Houston at night. It was the sort of city that was really at its best at night.

So my friends decided to give me a treat and they got tickets to a concert at AstroWorld. I'd been to a lot of concerts in Houston. I lived right across the highway from the Summit where concerts were held all the time and we used to go over there all the time. Tickets were cheap back then. My friends and I had seen the Rolling Stones and U2 and The Cars and Neil Young and The Boss and Santana (3 times) and Stevie Ray Vaughn and, of course, ZZ Top with the Fabulous Thunderbirds --- I can't remember them all. So they got tickets to an outdoor concert and they wouldn't tell me who was playing.

It was a gorgeous, hot, sultry spring night. The cicadeas were screaming and we packed a picnic and plenty of wine and ate on the lawn and just lay there talking about what we were going to be doing in the next few years. I was heading out for Maine. I needed to get back up north but I didn't know exactly where so Michael had invited me to stay with him in Camden until I could get a feel for what I wanted to do next. I was excited and sad at the same time. And it was a beautiful night in Houston and I loved my friends. And then the concert started and Bob Dylan was first.

I had actually seen him way back in college a million years ago. Him and Joan Baez and the Jefferson Airplane. And here it was almost 20 years later and he still hadn't learned to play that damn harmonica. But it was the best. The moon came up and the cicadeas got louder and then the second band started. It was Dire Straits and I was so happy. I loved them and had never seen them before and it was about as perfect as anything could be. We danced on the grass and did the walk of life and swung with the sultans and... well, you know... And then it was time for their very last number and they came out on the stage and played this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful instrumental solo. And I cried because I knew what it was --- it's a song called “Wild Theme - Going Home” and it was the song that they played at the end of the movie Local Hero which I had watched about ten times. It was one of those Perfect Moments that Spaulding Gray talks about. A moment when everything, EVERYTHING --- from the moon, to the smell of honeysuckle in the night air, to the screams of the kids on the roller coaster beyond the stage --- just came together in a moment of perfection.

What made me think about it was the last few days of heat and quiet and my own strange emotional state these days. I'm a mess and yet, and yet, I have someone precious to hold in my heart and cherish forever. And I came across this:

Thank you, Mark. And thanks for reading.