An Ode to Walt Grace

I am one of three people left in the United States who still buy CDs.  Though I have owned an MP3 player for the last two years for the sole purpose of convenience during my weekdays trips to the gym, I confess I still relish the feel of a slick, shiny CD in my hands.  Though bulkier than it's stylish compact offspring, the CD offers something that the IPod fails to deliver: the CD jacket with the treasure of written lyrics within its folds.

As a teenager, I would lie stomach-down on my bed in the evenings after homework, fully plugged into my stereo system paid for with babysitting money and boasting waist-high speakers and cockpit-style headphones.  From this position, I would pore over the painful, delicious lyrics of the CD jacket that gave me the insight I desired to connect with the artist and the message he delivered through the pounding foam covering my ears.  It was here in the CD jacket that I discovered that Steve Miller never intended "Big Old Jet Had a Light Out" but simply "Big Ol Jet Airliner."  The CD jacket cleared the air for many misguided listeners who got their information previously from the one-dimensional jackets of cassette tapes.

Today I bought the new John Mayer CD "Born and Raised."  I had not purchased a CD in a few months and decided that it would be the perfect soundtrack to a nippy but clear fall day and some banana-bread baking at home.  As soon as I crossed the parking lot of Walmart with my buy, I nestled myself into the driver's seat and commenced to nipping the CD cellophane with my teeth and trying to pull the adhesive strip off of the case so I could preview my new tunes on the drive home.

By the time I turned into my driveway and triggered the garage door opener, the CD had already progressed to the ninth song on the disc.  Earlier in the day, I had spent the afternoon with my mom at a lakeside cafe having bowls of toasty chili for lunch as we dished on life, the pursuit of happiness, and the beauty of the world around us through the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the lake.  I had already been contemplating my life's direction and evaluating past and present decisions.  The ninth song on the CD interrupted my getting out of the car and carrying my groceries into the house.  I turned off the ignition and leaned into the dashboard as the song wrapped its melody around my ear and had curled my attention toward a man named Walt Grace that Mr. Mayer found worthy of praise. I followed along with my eyes and got lost in Walt Grace's plight.

                                             "Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967"

Walt Grace, desperately hating his old place
Dreamed to discover a new space and buried himself alive
Inside his basement
The tongue on the side of his face meant
He's working away on displacement
And what it would take to survive

'Cause when you're done with this world
You know the next is up to you

And his wife told his kids he was crazy
And his friends said he'd fail if he tried
But with the will to work hard and a library card
He took a homemade, fan blade, one-man submarine ride

That morning the sea was mad and I mean it
Waves as big as he'd seen it deep in his dreams at home
From dry land, he rolled it over to wet sand
Closed the hatch up with one hand
And pedaled off alone

'Cause when you're done with this world
You know the next is up to you

And for once in his life, it was quiet
As he learned how to turn in the tide
And the sky was aflare when he came up for air
In his homemade, fan blade, one-man submarine ride

One evening, when weeks had passed since his leaving
The call she planned on receiving finally made it home
She accepted the news she never expected
The operator connected the call from Tokyo
'Cause when you're done with this world
You know the next is up to you

Now his friends bring him up when they're drinking
At the bar with his name on the side
And they smile when they can, as they speak of the man
Who took a homemade, fan blade, one-man submarine ride.

As I write this, I have listened to song number 9 at least a dozen times and I just bought the CD 3 hours ago.  I have tried to decide if the song was simply fictitious or maybe a metaphor for something going on in in Mr. Mayer's own life at the time the song was written. Perhaps Walt Grace was a real man who simply had enough of the unsatisfying circumstances of his life in 1967.  I reckon I could just ask Google while I'm online tonight if Walt Grace was a real person or just a fictional musical subject like the Beatles' "Mrs. Robinson" or Barry Manilow's "Mandy", but I am not sure I want to disrupt my image of Mr. Grace, the squatty, be-speckled, milk-toast family man turned maverick with a library card and a desire to formulate a blueprint for a means of encapsulating himself and propelling him where the current may sweep.  Beyond the pun, if I look beneath the surface, I see Walt Grace as a man deafened momentarily by the weight of the sea who facilitated his escape and then later re-birthed him from her watery womb. Upon another repeat of the song and now a familiarity with Walt Grace, I could conclude that sadly Grace succumbed to the numbness of suicide and perhaps even going so far to say that the fan blade which propelled him under the water was a knife that generated a pair of sad incisions to his own wrists in a bathtub.  Perhaps he vanished into thin air and resurfaced in Toyko, where it was here, by the blade of the fan in his hotel room, Walt Grace dogged the heels of death until the two were reconciled at the end of a rope for eternity and it was his casket that transported him beneath the waves of time.  As he surfaces, the sky was set "aflare;"  I can see that it would only be the real hell had awaken to find himself in and at the same time, I can't help but think how Walt Grace ended up there with purpose and intent.

For whatever reason, I find myself standing on the shore in this song waving to a man I have never known, in person or in fiction, silently mourning him on as he glides out past the breakers. I am slightly relieved to know that the unfulfilled, laughing stock of a man eventually came up for air in a painless new world by means of death in metaphor or by literal re-appearance in a humbly cobbled watercraft. I can say that Walt Grace was a man who managed to live on through the tales told by the casual naysayers who doubted he had the guts to go through with it, be it pursuing life or running down death.  I do know, he has been haunting my thoughts all afternoon and his ode plays on in my mind long after the CD has come to rest in its entirety.



Nicely done, Mr. Mayer.  Something to be said for finding the great importance is printing the lyrics and letting us become fully entwined in the music....and in this case, the man.

*Video link posted above*

The Dousing of Dreams

There are some things I just have to be in the mood for.  Can you relate?  For example, food has seasons. You don’t see turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie served at a Fourth of July picnic and in the Midwest where I live, you have to practically finance a mango if you can find even one in the supermarket after July.  Some of us get antsy when our neighbors fail to dismantle their Christmas light displays after the first of January and I tend to grant myself leniency in terms of bra strap exposure until somewhere around Labor Day when the tanks tops that have been exposing my fashion faux-pas get put away in their respective storage tote where they will slumber until I dig them back out in May.  There are some matters in which we have expectations to when and how certain things are to occur.

I lived in Italy for a few years and they were, without hesitation, some of the most phenomenal, colorful years of my life.  I had possessed a bucket list of things I wanted to see and do in Europe during the course of my residency. One of them was to spend my Christmases in Tuscany in a quiet farmhouse, me and my husband, and a little Andrea Boccelli on the portable stereo I trucked in.  (Remember the whole “life soundtrack” thing?)  It was a simply magical experience that I had carefully crafted and articulated right down to the scarf I wanted to be photographed in while leaning against the cascade of bougainvilleas just outside of our guesthouse.  We would pack up our tres-chic rented European sedan and stuff it with the wrapped Christmas gifts we planned to open during our stay. Along with a suitcase full of clothes, and a handful of maps we gathered from gas stations along the autostrada, we headed north toward what would be our first of multiple Tuscan escapes.  During the course of our weeklong hiatus, we relied on coin-flipping (left or right?) rather than examining the map for navigational guidance. Few Italian streets have signs and my finger pointing made our navigation all the more confusing.  Mid-navigation, I would inhale sharply and say, “Wow! Would you look at that beautiful balcony! Remember how that looks so when we build a house someday you can make that for me!” My husband, white-knuckled and intense, would tell me to pay attention to the road and stop peeping in people’s villas as we dizzied ourselves on the roundabout. When we weren’t bickering over roundabouts and peeping in people’s villas, we danced by the fire in the fireplace of our farmhouse and drank wine. We laughed while people-watching in the piazzas of medieval towns right out of a King Arthur tale.  I tasted dainty marzipan confections from sugar-frosted bakeries and licked the remnants of dark Perugian chocolate from my fingers.  My husband and I held hands and listened to the youth choirs that lifted their praises in Latin from the open church halls in the glisten of night.  Something happened to me when I was there. It created a frame of reference for me that suspended me in time. 

I have to be in a mood for certain things these days. I can’t watch “Saving Private Ryan” any old night I happen to stumble across it on late-night cable. It’s just too heavy. I need to prepare before a movie like that. I need to be told about it two weeks in advance. In a perfect world, a friend or coworker would read it in the TV guide two weeks prior to its running and relay this information to me. I would have enough time then to get a full eight hours of sleep the night before,  a nutritionally sound breakfast the day of, a workout in the afternoon to stockpile the feel-good endorphins I would later need when I had turned to a puddle on my living room carpet. I would also pick up a bottle of wine on my way home from work to mellow myself out, and then make sure I had enough toilet paper to blow my nose after my heavy-duty bawling two thirds of the way through when I realize Matt Damon looks really good in army fatigues and he really isn’t a Marine in real life. I need to prep for an event like this. 

Perhaps my need for preparation came from a childhood where my mom made ordinary events extraordinary. When I would lose a tooth as a small child, my mom would spray a dollar bill with cheap hairspray and sift a handful of craft glitter on it.  We didn’t have much money, but we enjoyed the ride to wherever it was we were going, whether or not we actually had the money to buy an admission ticket once we arrived.  It was much the same way living in Italy.  You don’t need anywhere to go, just an open window and an open heart.

I cannot watch “Under the Tuscan Sun’ without being prepared.  Other than the main character being a divorcee on a gay tour of Tuscany, the main character and I have much in common. We are both writers at heart with longings, with a penchant for metaphorical living.  This movie (and I know it’s only a movie) but it yanks my taut heartstrings the way Roy Clark plucked a banjo. Give a girl a warning, please!  Frances describes everything she sees, smells, and experiences in Italy and it had a way of engraining itself into who she was.  You become what you eat, sleep, and breathe.

A while back, my husband and I went to the movies; this particular action flick we were seeing seemed harmless when I found it in the local newspaper’s movie listings.  However, seven minutes into the film, it is obvious that the film was filmed in Venice, Italy and I started to feel as if I had a cantaloupe maturating in my neck. I was not prepared for this and had really wished I had scrutinized the plotline and setting a little with a little more discrimination.  I shoveled fistfuls of greasy popcorn into my mouth in hopes of deterring the growth of that pesky cantaloupe that had now doubled in size.  While an unannounced Matt Damon flick can sneak up on me before I am “in the mood,” anything Italy is my trigger these days.  I confess that once I even cried at a Barilla pasta commercial on television.  There he was that bugger! Andrea Boccelli was crooning in the background while a beautiful, young Italian couple hovered over a steaming stockpot of penne pasta while their open kitchen window exposed a view of the Tuscan countryside that I cherished so much.  I wanted to slap that happy couple.  They were having penne in Portofino and I was having a hotdog in my sweatpants. I was totally unprepared for the new commercial and considered contacting the people at Barilla and letting them know that this commercial needed a warning that went something like, “The following advertisement is a paid commercial by Barilla pasta. If you have ever lived in Italy, and more importantly, if you have left your heart there, please exercise caution when viewing the following paid program.  While Barilla pasta is delicious, the content you are about to see might cause a cantaloupe to spontaneously sprout in your throat. Call your nearest travel agent if you experience any discomfort. Buon appetito!”

Though my memories of Italy have been subject to years’ worth of fading and bleaching, they can be reconstituted with a snippet of something from an herb garden or an overly-romantic noodle commercial. When something has begun to show signs of wither, like a plant in a windowless office, it is usually time for some schmuck to dump a coffee cup’s worth of water into it.  Thank you, Lord, for those unexpected “dousings.”  Thank you for not allowing my dreams of Italy to fade into oblivion.

"Like My Father but Simpler"

I've seen him before but I'll be damned if I can't remember where. His eyes were polite, soft and darted back and forth in their own rhythmic twitch as if set to his brain's own timer. I sat in my booth holding the ceramic mug of coffee to my lips and watched him as he slipped two quarters into the newspaper box outside the diner window.  He looked to be my dad's age but with a much gentler face and the smile of a mischievous child.  He clapped his hands together as he waited for the coins to register in the metal slot and then he looked inside the vending machine like a child waiting for a sheet of cookies to be taken out of the oven.  He rolled the paper up under his short arm and he bounded into the diner where I sat with a plate of pancakes and a pot of black coffee. His black mustache might make you think he was a husband or a truck driver or an alcoholic, but the moment he walked in the door, I could see he was a man who had never been kissed, driven a car, or tasted a beer.

I could never understand how my heart could pick out the adult in the crowd that looked like life had dealt them a stack of cards that no one wanted to hold; the hand of the simple-minded, the lonely, the picked-on, the put-down; men without shells.

I watched the man who looked like my father but simpler, high-five the waitresses that wore too much hairspray and called everyone "sugar" as he strode in with his paper.  The diner was filled with pairs of pock-faced, red-nosed men in camouflage as turkey season had begun that day. They slammed their coffee cups down with weighted fists and they discussed union benefits and truck parts.  They ate their breakfast meats first as this is the custom of whole, hard men.  To fill their bellies with the flesh of other animals, those conquered by men like themselves that now lied in a puddle of ketchup, asserted their high place in the universe.  I was more interested in the man who looked like my father but simpler and watching him wave at people from the interior of the clear bubble than encased him.

He smiled a toothy smile and skated his way to a corner booth where someone I assumed was his mother waited for him. He delivered the paper to her waiting hands before he slid into his corner of the booth. I became happy because breakfast was being eaten in pairs all over the diner and the man with the soft black eyes would not be rendered defenseless on a stool with his back to the hungry crowd if he was without company or protection. I was relieved that he had someone  there who could protect him from the whole, hard men who stared at him with full bellies and hard, unbroken minds.

Was I sad because the man who looks like my father but simpler will never know how it feels to have a to-do list on Saturday morning like I did? Will he ever know how it feels to have self-satisfaction from earning money from a job when one has a whole brain?  Would he ever know what it would feel like to sit across the table from a woman that wasn't his mother and dream life's dreams over eggs and toast with her?

Or was I sad for me because the man who looks like my father but simpler will never know how it feels to have a to do list on Saturday morning and I was jealous?  He will never plagued by migraines headaches that scrape away at his brain over the to-do lists that dog our heels to the grave.  He will never waste his weekends beautifying a home that he works his knuckles to the bone to pay for whether or not there comes any self-satisfaction in paying for it or keeping it up.  He will never have a job that chains him to a pension, an unused college education or a mound of insurmountable debt that siphons the oxygen out of his soul.  He will never have his heart broken by a woman or have a child taken away from him too soon.  His bubble kept the pain out swirling around in our world, where we had the capacity to feel it and be devastated by it.

I watched the man who looked like my father but simpler scan the smudgy plastic menu in his hands. He held it close to his nose like a child reading a comic book and he smiled a toothy smile before deciding on waffles with lots of strawberries and whipped cream. He had the best of everything. A sunny corner booth in a diner, a breakfast that threw caution to the wind, and a broken brain that kept him safe from the whole, hard world outside.