July 7, 2011

Dear Julie,

While transferring her old reel-to-reel tapes onto CDs, my mother found a tape of my old friend David playing and singing three songs he'd written, including one we co-wrote for a creative writing class. It was about horses and Georgia, subjects we knew nothing about. That didn't matter to us then. Twenty-year-olds want to write about what they don't know, not what they do know.

David and I have known each other since we were 20 and played in the same rock 'n' roll band. He's like you and me. We go long periods without seeing each other and then call or write at just the right time. Somehow we know when.

Last weekend in St. Louis I delivered that CD to David along with a belated birthday present. After dinner with his family he and I went to the Woody Allen movie "Midnight in Paris." A screenwriter who wants to be a novelist vacations in Paris with his rich fiancee and her tea party parents. The fiancee wants him to be satisfied with being a Hollywood hack. He yearns for the Paris that nurtured and inspired the greatness in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Cole Porter and Josephine Baker, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Dali. Late one night the screenwriter finds himself time traveling to a Left Bank nightclub and real encounters with the Lost Generation. He returns night after night. This life seems so much richer than his own in the 2010s.

Who would rather live in the era of terrorism and global warming and marry a fiancee with no faith in him? Yet during this artistic ferment, the acid of World War II was building. Beauty and love must exist in every time.

Afterward over whiskeys and beers in a bar next door to the movie theater, David and I talked about conclusions and beginnings, about doppelgangers and responsibilities, about things we know and things we don't. We did some time traveling of our own.

Before I left on Monday David played me a song by the Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn. "Pacing the Cage" is a beautifully simple tune. He sings about reaching a point in life where you wonder what happens next. About being different people at different times in life but always giving everything, "all the spells that I could sing."

David and I are both 60 now and in different ways wondering what happens next. We've learned the choice is ours, that a door is always ready to open. That whatever the circumstances, the quest to find out what's next lasts forever.

Cockburn's song ends:

Sometimes the best map will not guide you

You can't see what's round the bend

Sometimes the road leads through dark places

Sometimes the darkness is your friend

Today these eyes scan bleached-out land

For the coming of the outbound stage.

Pacing the cage. Pacing the cage.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.