It is a cold otherwise impersonal dark autumn morning in Seattle as I sit here held in Love by 1971 David Bowie. Why did I not more fully explore the depth of your catalog until after you died; 26 studio albums, were you mortal? Life on Mars is currently holding me tight. Its beauty allows me to cry, literally. Oh, tears are so cleansing. So beautiful and comforting. I know this is partially because my only daughter and I share Bowie, it is one of our little secrets. She is just my little one when I close my eyes and sing along with Ziggy. Bowie swaddles me. I feel safe and warm and protected and immune from the human condition listening to that prophet. Thank God you walked the Earth David Robert Jones.
Music has always been way more than music to me. If I want or need to feel something, music helps so very much. How many times have I listened to Moonage Daydream? It still is as fresh and relevant and full of Love and mystery today as it was when it was released. My own life was measured in months still at that point. And now the curated streaming music service feels we need to move right to the end, Lazarus off of Black Star. It was your self-penned obituary for us as the cancer so cruely ate away at you. The c-word took you home less than a month after the release of that single. And don’t get me started on the Velvet Underground or early Billy Joel or anything flowing from the lungs of John Coltrane. And how blessed, I get to sit in a beautiful cathedral tomorrow night with likely no more than a few hundred other searchers to witness Kristin Hersh baring her soul. You are such a beautiful soul Kristin, I hope you know that.
It is not just music that comforts me, that makes me not fear death so much or pain or small little bumps in the road that seem like death as I pass over them. Returning to magical places that I have been embarrassingly blessed to visit reminds me that life is beautiful. I could glide around the Louvre any dark evening just by closing my eyes. The floors, they creak just perfectly. The walls are covered exactly correctly. I am hundreds of years old then. I can still become anything. And of course my Love and I would float down (Rue de Rivoli?) up to where it all began, to that little restaurant that exists just for us, I just know it. I promise to come and eat whatever you are serving that day any time I am fortunate enough to be able to step on your black and white tiled floors (or are they green and cream?) And I will completely lose it if you actually serve Coq au Vin that day. I mean it.
Wandering again and again along the canals of Venice taking the same picture over and over of the same bridge. Does that bridge understand just how magical it is? Ptarmigan Ridge on a foggy day, a bright sunny day, early or late in the hiking season. There I go, crying again! Oh how I ache to see Klimt and Schiele again in Wien. I can no longer take the 3:59 pm train out of Ingolstadt to Vienna, but I walked there again this spring. Thank you Marie, you have no idea.
I get to make soup again as soon as the salmon bones defrost in the kegorator. Summer, you will always be spastic grab-as-much-as-I-can season, desiring so badly to clone myself. But Autumn, you understand swaddling. Soups and merino wool and fireplaces and leaves reminding us of our own season. Autumn is the gift to carry us deep enough into the dark days of winter before being allowed to realize that Autumn is no longer holding our hand and bravely just be. We go round and round the sun year after year kissing Spring until we no longer circle, unaware that Spring has left us with only stardust kisses on our pillowy fingertips.
