A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at January 18th, 2007

Our neighbor, Dave, has a volunteer crop.  I am enchanted by this phrase volunteer crop, by its pithy elegance.  Dave farms for a living and grows on demand for a big processing company.  The first time I met him was when my not-yet husband (not even fiancé) was gilding my visits to the farmland wilderness in which he lives with what I saw as slightly seductive trips to a strawberry patch to pick the luscious red jewels I could take back to my city home and serve over ice cream and under port – and think of the day we picked them.  The strawberry field was Dave’s and seemed to go on forever, so big you could drive your car right up into the section you wanted to pick.  I remember wearing fancy jeans the first time we went.  I only had fancy jeans then and it was fun to kneel in the dirt trench between the rows and pluck the berries off their low-slung little arch stems.  If they gave easily into your hand, they were ready.  I probably ate as many as I picked that day.

          The next time I saw that field the strawberry season was over and the bushes had all been plowed under to give way for the next crop.  I was kind of amazed.  In my city mind I don’t suppose I ever thought about one field being more than for one thing.  I thought – if I thought it at all – that the strawberry field was just there for each year’s ritual trip for those of us who sought the country experience in picking strawberries or lavender or pumpkins.  Little did I know the earth gave up broccoli, corn, beans and strawberries all in the same place and that it would look so very different for each crop. 

          This year, when Dave plowed under the strawberries, he planted corn and, later in the summer, we ate sweet corn he harvested from the thickly swaying stalks laid out like graceful Rockettes standing backstage while waiting for their cue.  Wheat grew in the next field and, when he harvested that, a surprise was waiting in the fertile soil – a volunteer crop of clover.  This velvety earth clinging greenery with its sweet taste, soft fragrance and mop-head bloom had migrated on the wind and taken hold underneath the corn.  This crop just showed up as a lagniappe for Dave for all his hard work and job well done the rest of the year.

Most volunteer crops are regarded as opportunistic weeds and there is much information about controlling their subsequent appearances.   Since I learned the term, however, I have developed affection for them, almost animating their little stems, shoots and roots with personality.  The presence of this volunteer crop as a metaphor in my life has not escaped me because I am a volunteer crop in my now husband’s life.  As he is in mine.

I’ve known Jim for nearly 40 years, since before the time the Mets won the World Series in 1969.  I worked for Jim, as did my late husband and  Jim’s late wife hired me.  Over the years, we were only minorly in touch, saw each other now and then at the now-defunct company’s annual reunion or, once for a drink when I traveled to LA, where Jim and his wife were living.  A good friend to both of us kept us up to date on significant doings in the other’s life.  When Jim and Marilyn moved to Oregon from LA, and I was living in Seattle, our pal Larry took that as an opportunity for us to be in closer touch.  I talked to Jim a few times over the next three years or so, commiserating over woes in his marriage or when he fell off a ladder and macerated a knee (he raved and raged in that phone conversation but doesn’t remember it) and, again, when his wife died.  Curiously, as I think back about it, he didn’t question the state of my life very much.

One thing led to another and, some long time after the loss in my life of a significant other (stupid phrase), I did make the four-hour drive to visit him one weekend.  I only stayed the day, though, not giving much thought to anything more than seeing someone from a time and place in my life for which I still longed.

In the next round we started to talk more frequently and, I thought, flirtatiously.  As it was close to Thanksgiving, he invited me down for that weekend.  I decided to accept thinking it would be a time for us to see if we wanted to get to know each other a little better.  Three lovely phone conversations in the days before and, the last one, included his giving me the driving directions and his final sentence, “’J’ and I are looking forward to seeing you.”  J’’?  Who was ‘J’ and what was she doing there in that sentence in that way?  Clearly I had misread all the signals and promptly cancelled my plans.  I didn’t have the forthrightness to say it in that conversation so I called back and, mercifully, got his voicemail so I could leave it as a message.  I was quite clear that I had misread his intentions and was sorry for that.  He called back twice with imploring messages about how I should come down, how ‘J’ knew all about me and was looking forward to meeting me.

Obviously, I thought, this had little to do with me and a lot to do with his not wanting to feel bad that he had given someone a wrong impression.  But I saw no reason to go and didn’t.  Got a holiday card from him a few weeks later with a sweet note. 

He called a couple of months later, maybe three.  He was unencumbered and maybe I would consider a visit.  I had never had a romantic feeling about this man over the many years I’d known him and certainly not the three I worked for the company back in New York when he was a daily and persuasive presence in all our lives.  Why did I want to go down?   Was this opportunistic?  After all, I was alone at the end of a long and roiling partnership with another man I had known since 1976.  Like my husband, this man had died and even more suddenly.  I was ready to breathe easily for a long while but also ready for a more normal friendship.

Whatever my motives, I do have this tendency that, once I get the thought, it’s a done deed.  If I get the thought to buy a new tv or vacuum or camera, I know myself well enough to know I’ll do the requisite research and I can tell myself I haven’t made a decision to spend the money but my self will tell me that I’ve already decided to do it.  I knew I was ready to explore possibilities – of a friendship, at least.

I drove down and it was a lovely weekend, if a little awkward, in all respects.  He surprised me with a kiss one evening as he turned back from building a fire in the fireplace.  He told me he didn’t think I trusted him.  I told him it wasn’t him I didn’t trust but my own body; would it still work?  It had been a long time, years, given the poor health of my departed friend.  Although it didn’t work magically, it did work well enough but I was still reluctant to admit the idea of a relationship.  Think I told him he was GU and a sweet guy but left it at that. 

He called me a short time after I got back from a visit home to NY.  “Did you get married?” he wanted to know.  I told him of course not.  It was a flirty question because he knew I had another friend who might, under a million different circumstances, turn into something romantic.  “Good”, he said when I pooh-poohed the notion.   He invited me back.   I went.  It was nice.  But he was still too far away and I told him that.   He told me, way later, that I said I wanted a relationship that was no-strings attached.  This is ridiculous.  I’ve never said that to anyone about any relationship – I either wanted a relationship or not; hence, the decision to write him off as a sweet guy and geographically undesirable.

It got a little giggly after that.  He told me he’d answered a personal ad in the local newspaper and I encouraged the idea.  I heard about a couple of their dates.  Then came a surprising phone call in which he asked my advice about the wording of an invitation for the internment of his wife’s ashes.  Then he suggested that I should come down for the ceremony as, after all, I knew her.  I thought I could do that and did.

I told him later, during our wedding ceremony, that there was a moment of physical change in my life that weekend when a feeling swept over me – standing all alone on the staircase – that opened my heart to him.  Miraculously, he walked up the stairs as I stood at the top and, with a houseful of people, we were alone not just in the house but in the swirling universe for the next several, life-changing moments.

He thanked me for being open to the possibility and I knew I had landed, like a volunteer crop, smack in the middle of his field that was neither fallow nor yielding anything else but waiting for whatever would come next.

I don’t think either of us can depend on history to have prepared us for this astonishing marriage.  I make jokes about having controlled the closet and bathroom on my own for so long that adjusting to sharing is a challenge.  He wants us to move directly into the old-shoe nature of a relationship with all the surety that offers – and we can get away with that to some extent just because we have known each other for so long.   The early part of the story falls more easily when I tell it because I understand it and have worked over the phrases and the funny bits in my mind so my timing is good and the presentation is polished.  These next bits, the pieces we live every day, are more like the twirled recycled paper, crimped and with minds of their own, that are used to fill up party bags, cushioning the gifts so they don’t bang against each other and still giving them their individual space so each one is recognized as unique.  I never know how those twirly thoughts and deeds will turn out.  I find myself saying out loud the ideas that skim through my mind; the ones that are rarely caught and probably with good reason.  Half the time I’m amazed that the words have come out of my mouth.  How can I have found such a sense of safety so fast?  Is this the old-shoe sense of trusting someone enough to let down the single-person’s guard?  On the other hand, I’m caught breathless when one of those thoughts hits a target with unintended sharpness.  I am learning that the conversations I have had over the years with myself and an unimagined conversational partner really had only one set of responses – mine.  Now there is no dependability that my words and thoughts will exist harmlessly since they don’t just continue on into the ether but are stopped by flesh and bone across from me.  Suddenly, someone with real brain synapses and his own set of memories and feelings and reactions is my recipient and, sometimes, my foil.   I am surprised by the fierceness of feelings.  I guess I thought we were so far past needing to protect ourselves so hard that, really, why would we clash over anything?  What could possibly be this important to any man or woman who have circled for as long as we have that we would retreat into some kind of insanity and make us wonder if this is what we signed on for.  What is it I need to insist on? 

In clear, sweet moments – and most of them are those – I am surprised that something was so important that we were at each other’s throats.  I see this handsome, sweet man who built me a Tea House in which to be married, lets my cats sleep on his bed, seems to value talking out differences and once said he loves so much about me, including my stupidity,  and I don’t know how it is possible to get from there to screaming.

But it is and, likely, nothing will change that much to allow us to accommodate our serrated edges without an occasional mishap.  I can still cling to the notion that, of course, the grating is all because of his take on an issue, it’s his stuff to deal with and I can let it be.  He can do the same.  I suppose we can both be right if we need to be and let the other turn around inside for a moment and walk away if that will allow us to stay anchored to the earth and to each other.  It’s worth the momentary chill to have our roots take hold in this field because, while we are both here as volunteers and could, really, leave…it seems better for our stake in this world to stay, to sweeten our earth and to flourish.   

Posted by Holly at January 6th, 2007

The other night we watched Roy Orbison’s Black and White concert.  It’s probably the 1000th time I’ve seen it and that’s not counting the times it shows up on public television during a pledge drive.  I watch it then, too. I fell in love with Roy Orbison as soon as I found out about him.  It did happen to be after he was dead, however, limiting any fantastical possibilities of putting myself in his path.  It’s more accurate to say I fell in love with his voice, with the catch in his voice.  Before I knew anything about his story all I knew was this voice that touched something in me, stopped me in my tracks.  I found out he was dead when I mentioned to my two best friends that I had heard this incredible singer – Roy Orbiosn? – with a little upspeak at the end of my sentence.  They may still be laughing at me for being so dense.

This wasn’t really so surprising.  I grew up listening to Bach, Beethoven, Mel Torme and Friank Sinatra.  Rock and roll passed me by with the exception of two weeks in junior high school wehn I decided it would help me be in if I developed a crush on Elvis Presley.  I had, at least, heard of him.  Those were days when it was important and cool to have collections of 45s – much more than 78s – and when we would gather on Saturday nights in newly minted rec rooms of newly minted houses our fathers bought with GI loans.  For ten days I carried around a picture of Elvis in my wallet, bought a few records and turned as many conversations to him as I could.  Then I went back to Bach, so to speak.

 Later on I listened to a lot of folk music.  This was promise: this was music that made me jump out of my skin, anxious to get out of my Brooklyn family and into those Greenvich Village coffee houses with all of their steaminess and lives of protest.  Jazz was equally thrilling, hypnotizing, grown-up music.  Years later when I met Max and Lorraine Gordon, who owned the Village Vanguard, i understood completely when Lorranie told me how she used to take the bus in from New Jersey to go to the Vanguard and stand at the bar for hours, nursing the one beer she could afford, just to hear the music.  That she later married the owner was, to me, a real Cinderella story.

By the time i discovered Roy Orbison, I knew music.  At the beginning, i could only listen in small doses.  His sound made me crazy.  I couldn’t even hear the words; I was just stopped by the sound.  When i finally worked up the emotional shell to be able to hear him in big doses, I sopped up the sound and stumbled on the story.

The first time I saw what he looked like was on a tape of the B/W Night concert.  Here was this soft-faced guy with rounded shoulders dressed in fringey black, singing by reaching around inside and getting the voice out of the back of his body, pulling it around himself, tugging and digging into it and then, in a crazy crescendo, flinging it out to the audience to hang there until no one could stand it anymore and everyone was screaming.

Sometimes, when I have watched this concert, I have had to stop it and stand and stare at him, look up at his mouth, the shape oif his lips with – what? – a little smile at the corners?  How can he smile?  Doesn’t every lyric he ever wrote remind him of what he lost?  What is going on behind the dark glasses? Do tears well up in his eyes? Why does he wear those glasses?  Is it because he can’t face life after what happened to him?  And, of course, no.  He wears them because he forgot to take them off after a flight to Dothan, AL, in very bright sunglight and, by the time he got off the plane, rehearsed and to the night’s performance, he realized he’d left his clear glasses on the plane.  He had to wear the dark ones the next day, too, when he opened The Beatles’ tour.  After all the newspaper pictures came out, he just kept wearing them.

I look for signs of his story in his music.  He sings Cryin’ and anybody who’s ever lost anyone, even your first girlfriend or boyfriend in the sixth grade, gets what’s going on in that song.  He did write it about seeing an old girlfriend but I want to get into his head and find out if he’s thinking about his wife and two little boys; if, inside, he’s feeling all wavy and oily over how much he’s lost.  I never find any signs.  It’s as if he’s flattened against those emotions, deadened himself to them.  In the few interviews I’ve seen or heard, he talks about it as if it happened to someone else, as if it is so enormous a loss that he can manage to think about it only from some far away place where he is protected from having it happen to him over and over.

These sorts of crushes lead to some pretty weird things. I found a website of some guy in Germany who writes stories about encounters with Roy Orbison in which he always ends up being wrapped in saran wrap – cling-film, the guy calls it.  There are five or six fantasies, each with Roy orbison unexpectedly and mysteriously appears into the writer’s life.  Like this:

“It always starts the same way.  I am in the garden airing my terripin Jetta when he walks past my gate, that mysterious man in black. ‘Hello Roy,’ I say. ‘What are you doing in Dusseldorf?’ ‘Attending to certain matters,’ he replies. ‘Ah,’ I say.

From there, they exchange some pelasantries with an underlying terror and the man ends up wrapping Roy Orbison in the cling-film on the promise that it will be for just a short time but always lasts longer and concludes with Roy escaping and disappointing the writer who ends up broken and pitiful and then looking forward to the next encounter.

The obsession, at least, I understand.  The attraction is even clear – it’s that catch in his voice.  Certain voices have always done that to me and others with the catch at a different pitch, like Nat King Cole’s, repulse me.  Now that is the really interesting part to me.  What is it about our brain circuitry that can make us so responsive to such miniscule subtlety as the difference in pitch in the catch in someone’s voice? Probably take me years to ponder it to any reasonable conclusion.  All I know now is that Roy Orbison cooks…