Beyond my Back Yard

This is a strange kind of grief. Although it’s been nine years, I didn’t know him all that well. He was the man on the other side of the Wrigley field style fence in my back yard. The fence is covered with the most hardy ivy. I’ve spent nine hot summers trying to kill it; it claws through my garden and sneaks into my lawn. But it will not yield. Even as I waged my death blows to the creeping foe, part of me always worried that he wanted it on his side of the fence; and now I’m kind of glad the ivy never died.

This week, though, my neighbor did. Seventy doesn’t seem that old to me anymore, and I’m not even sure what happened, but I heard through the grapevine this week that he had died.

It was a strange relationship we shared. The fence is high and sturdy and with the ivy practically impenetrable. I never did see him much. Unless I was in my kitchen window and he was headed, shirtless, to the hot tub on his patio. I will always remember his wrinkled, sagging skin and tousled hair. I never saw his legs.

There was the summer of the Frisbee. My daughter was four then, and took every delight in chucking the darn thing over the fence whenever I turned my back to pull a weed or start the mower. Then we’d find it, tossed gently back on our side, the next time we went outside.

We didn’t talk much either. One summer he saw me digging up the grass to create a garden, quite near his sunny corner of my yard. He must have heard me sweating and cursing so close to the fence. He offered me his rototiller to make the job easier. I’d say that’s the only conversation we ever had.

Oh, I heard him plenty. He and his wife used to fight up a storm. One or both of them was hard of hearing, because they’d come at each other at megaphone volume and their insults would fly over the fence like a Cubbies home run. Fast. And hard.

The pair loved to be outside, and apparently didn’t work. They’d bring their television out to the back yard and watch re-runs of Homicide at top volume in the afternoons. They’d sip their cocktails under the faded umbrella and Wheel of Fortune would spin them through the evenings.

This week the noise from the other side of the fence has been markedly different. Laughter. And more laughter. Stories about setting fires and walking dogs. Do you want beer or wine? the newcomers hear. I hear his widow’s voice, somehow less sharp these days. Reminiscing with her many children and the siblings of her husband. It has been a weeklong wake. I do think they’re Irish. And the drinks and the stories continue to flow tonight.

But the television’s off. The hot tub is silent. And I am left here on my side of the fence with my grief. I hate to think that I could have been more for him, that I could have had a more active role in his life. But I’ve always felt that good fences make good neighbors. And I didn’t want to get too involved.

Now I realize I’ll kind of miss him, that presence in my back yard just beyond the fence. And as of now, I think I will just let the ivy grow as it will this summer.

Texas Angel

James Hunter. Richard Lowrie. Sam Baker. These men perform a morbid ballet of sorts in my head tonight. This trifecta has come inexplicably together to teach me a few things about life.

I first met James when I was a teacher at Firelands High School. He and I walked the same dingy halls, cursing the Tostado Pizza Day every Wednesday in the cafeteria and the grotesque animal odors coming from the Ag Science room. Although I never had him in class, I knew of his love for his family military tradition and his inquisitive nature. But fate intervened with his plans for a lifelong military career when he was killed this week in Afghanistan on his third tour of duty, serving as his unit’s photojournalist.

Last night I went out to forget. It seems I’ve waited a lifetime to meet one of Texas’ gems, singer-songwriter Sam Baker. Okay, it’s only been a year. But when his haunting, seasoned voice began, I knew that his music had the power to do more than just entertain.

“There’s a soldier. He’s in the way of harm. A girl holds a baby in a blanket in her arms. Boys laugh. Boys play.” Figures he would play “Baseball” first. It was difficult to listen to these words on the heels of the loss of yet another soldier. But somehow comforting as well. “Another Saturday comes and goes.” And life continues to blow.

The man and his music have power all right. I’m not sure if it’s the Texas boots and swagger or the piercing blue eyes or the way he closes his eyes to let the songs envelop him, but to watch Sam Baker play is to watch a man who is breathing life from every moment. And well he should. He almost didn’t make it himself. Caught on a train many years ago that was blown-up by terrorists, he watched those nearby him die and sustained many life-threatening injuries. The surgeries healed his body and I’m pretty sure the music healed his soul.

I know it was working on me last night.

Earlier in the day I had heard another story that was disturbing me. Richard Lowrie, an eighty-six year old man and husband for three and a half decades, was killed in a bizarre accident at a McDonald’s drive-thru. News accounts say he had gone to get his wife a cup of decaf coffee, dropped his glasses out of the window, and crushed himself when he reached out the door to retrieve them and accidentally hit the accelerator. A lifetime of love was shattered in an instant.

Sam had a song for that too. “Waves” tells the story of a man who has lost his wife of fifty years and goes to the ocean to write her name in the sand. The waves wash it away. “So many years, so many hardships. So many laughs, so many tears. So many things to remember. ‘Cause they had 50 years.” The first time you hear this song takes your breath away. And every subsequent time makes you want to breathe forever. And find true love.

Another song starts with a woman with a limp. “Don’t worry. It all turns out okay,” Sam chides the audience. And that is what strikes me about the music this night. He’s got the stories of the huddled masses. The good, the bad, and the ugly. He’s experienced it himself, and he’s a confessor who hears peoples’ stories at gigs throughout the country. These stories are his songs. And they aren’t always pretty. But they are always powerful.

James, Richard, Sam: these three men meld in my head. Like Dicken’s classic, they are my specters come to teach the lessons I need for the journey. And it reminds me of the song “Angels” that I didn’t get to hear Sam sing, but that speaks to his music and my own melancholy: “They ease all suffering. They heal all pain. Her angels come like healing rain. Love and angels conquer all.”

And the trick is to recognize the angels by their cowboy boots.