I love you for shattering.
-Dean Young
Someone has to.
Six new books of poetry arrived yesterday. This morning, with a steady rain tickling the leaves outside, I sat by an open window and started in on Bender: New & Selected Poems by Dean Young. A few weeks ago Young passed away. I had never read his poetry before. When he passed, people began posting his poems on Twitter. I read a few and ordered the book as part of a September poetry splurge. The first words on the inside cover read: “I love you for shattering. / Someone has to.” When I first read those lines, I thought of the either/or connotation – one person shattering because one of them had to… then I saw it the other way, I love you, a shattered person, because someone has to. I geek out on this type of language. I love subtle and deep double meanings. It reminds me of a song lyric which I may or may not be quoting correctly: “I saw the part of you that only when you’re older you will see too, you will see to.” The word to/too is doing a lot of lifting there and it’s fantastic. This is my rainy Sunday vibe.
I didn’t write much yesterday. I went to the Penn State game where I mentally tut tutted at a woman who brought her newborn (the stadium is far too loud for such tiny unprotected ears). Penn State games are the opposite of zen. Every moment is filled with some type of a distraction or call for attention – music, announcements, t-shirt toss, videos on the scoreboard, students racing on the field dressed as bags of salty snacks, dancers, awards, a lion riding a tricycle… When the game isn’t being played, I find myself numb and zoning out – my attention doesn’t want to be yanked through hoops of fire and juggling clowns on stilts and this circus of calamitous noise.
Last night I went to a backyard concert at a house surrounded by trees up on a hill just outside of town. Mitch, a guy I sometimes see at the bar had told me about this concert series – good people hanging out and listening to music. He made it sound like a secret club and it felt good to be in on it. The club isn’t so secret – they have a website and invite anyone who wants to be on their mailing list. It’s called Moonstock – a mashup of where it’s located (Moondance Lane) and Woodstock. The owners of the house are hippie-ish folk – so were almost all of the attendees: gray hair, bushy beards, well-worn and relaxed jeans – former engineers and professors who look like farmers who might get up and dance a jig – or so I’m guessing. From a small wooden stage that looked like a shed with a porch, lit up by a string of lights, the band played Americana music which felt like a mix of folk, country, and rock. It was small and intimate and between songs you could hear the late summer buzz of cicadas and crickets counting down the days till fall. This was the perfect antidote to the football frenzy that is a Penn State weekend.
More than once during the show last night, I thought so-and-so would really like this. So-and-so was specific to two so-and-sos: women I had dated who enjoyed live music as well as the dark quiet of a porch-lit evening. I do this a lot. In the middle of enjoying something, I begin to think I bet this person would enjoy this too. It doesn’t detract from my enjoyment, but it does add a level of wistfulness to the moment. I’ll then wonder if other people (sometimes those people) have similar moments when in the middle of an experience they pause and think, I bet Matt would love this.
The music told stories the way Country/Americana music tells stories: whisky nights and rusty cars; lovers always leaving and the abandoned sometimes wanting them back; scrappy, failed attempts to escape small town life. Influenced by the songs and my occasional desire to be remembered as someone else’s so-and-so, I wrote a note to myself on my phone: “wanting to be missed part two: or my life is fucking country song…”
But that wasn’t quite it. There was a fullness to the night, the description of which felt just out of reach, somewhere in the trees. It wasn’t heartache, it wasn’t longing, it wasn’t a lonesome country song or darkened road, but was an acknowledgment of sorts… a quiet realization that if we’re lucky, we come across one or two so-and-sos for whom we would happily share all of our experiences and whose mutual curiosity would rise up to meet the challenge. I came home feeling like I had some gift burning a hole in my pocket. My thoughts were caught up in the crooked branches against a nighttime sky – I was stuck somewhere between giving and receiving, fullness and hunger. I reminded myself that at one point I had set out to be the person I wanted to find… Last night I got the sense, that maybe that’s who I’ve always been and that what most of us are looking for is appreciation for our tiny enthusiasms and a willingness to share in theirs… minor competitions in giving it all away… which will always be our happy ruin.