Maybe life is a mirror inverse to our dreams. As men we
visualize tasks, to do, to be, to set foot into position to be worthy in
stature. We study. We play. We work.
Older brother takes us to see Green Day May second 1998 on the
Nimrod tour eleven years old on Canal Street in New Orleans and a seed begins
to germinate. We rollerblade with a kid we met in kindergarten and he gives us
a hug at our bachelor party as adult musicians. We put in hours of worry to
make sure the world gets its hug. We show up and juggle logistics in guitar
picks and coffee cups. We meet a comrade bandito at Loyola blowing trombone and
go Community empire of one day at a time with others in mind.
That manly provider part of you sees a Latin American man
picking a coffee bean on the mountain and says I want to be able to feed both
our families. I want an Earth where the air we both breathe is not flustered in
smog that is worth giving a damn. Praying I can try against the grain. We find
a comic caricaturist sketching Alabama sun-worshipers spying Magazine Street
and make a pact. Maybe we stand behind a counter hands pressed for a hot cup in
a city that feels like the inside of a dog’s mouth crunched and wondering how
the hell does this work, how to be a person when the whole damn place seems to
say stay afraid, do not put your heart into the fray, and maybe a woman walks
in and alters the scope and terms of the game.
Maybe she comes back in and smiles and you muster the nerve and
you tell your older brother her name in a nadir spot that you know her name
feels like light, warm and knowing that there is a softness and embrace in her
caress that makes this boat upon life’s waters steady. Maybe she looks at you
standing on a speaker at a rock and roll festival you co-organized in the
streets of New Orleans like a preacher man worthy of her as a helpmate. That
she’s professional, smart, capable to care for her own self, and breathes a
relentless faith and a watershed feminism of what the word punk means that she
is intrepid to love that man back.
Maybe we get together in this world to honor that, to toast the
brave sailors tattooed and writing songs and sketching buildings for art to
bloom out the seeds to say yes. Yes there are storms in the seas and brilliant
horizons and we will sail them. That maybe you both stare down into the mirror
of that ocean’s surface into the cauldron of adulthood and realize these great
big plans of us having to fix ourselves to be worthy or valid was never it; it
was the other readying to make space for our magnanimity in our mutual
audacious light. Joy and wonder stares back at us in that deep well human place
of Truth. The tangency of our spouse’s touch does not shatter the glass of our
illusions, but as we approach the other, the fabric of the universe seen at a
distance is made intimate permeated by true presence.
Your whole damn world changes. You smile like water. You are no
longer parched, not from what the other gave you, but by that deep resonating
Truth that has always been inside you about what love is. There was another
mariner out there sailing hoping to find you and now you are here, entwined,
staring down that brilliant horizon together.
G, R. Congratulations.
I love you both.
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