I hope you don't mind if I venture off the usual topic for something personal, something that I want to share with others. Perhaps, in some ways, it defines me and what I write.
For Max. . . .
A
friend of mine passed away. Actually,
she was much more than a friend she was someone I cared about in ways that don’t
make sense--at least to some people. Her
name was Maxine and I called her “Max,” which is what she preferred. I learned about her death last weekend and it
has had me in a slump that has been hard to shake. Just when I thought I was coming out of it some
little memory would be triggered and my mind would insist: “it just isn’t so.”
I
met Max 39 years ago last September. I
was a Marine Sergeant and she was an Air Force Sergeant. True, I was married at the time, but I was no
longer happy in the marriage and I already knew that at some near point in time it
would end. It did. A few years later I was alone. Opposites, I had learned, may attract but
that doesn’t build a life.
Max
and I met at the military’s journalism school, Defense Information School or
DINFOS. It is the same school that
Hunter Thompson, the Gonzo Journalist, attended. A lot of other famous people received their
introduction to journalism at DINFOS, and after graduation we were all “DINFOS
trained killers.”
Once
Max and I got past the awkwardness of the problems facing us we were together
as much as possible, and it was never enough.
There are a lot of stories I could tell, because the time we had we
filled with whatever adventure we could find around Indianapolis, Indiana. Finally, however, graduation came and we were
forced to go separate ways, but we made promises to each other. One of the
promises was to try and make my marriage work.
Ultimately, it failed. It was more
my fault than my then wife’s. When it
failed I tried to find Max but didn’t because her father, who had become
estranged from the entire family, spitefully lied to me about Max. He told me she was dead. Twenty years later, by accident, I ran across
her mother and she told me Maxine was alive and where to find her. But by this time all the chances for Max and
me to finally be together had become dust in the fields. We could only be friends who had a past. That past, those days we were together, were
dreams for us then, and still are. We
held hands and walked in misty rains, we sat in corners of coffee houses and whispered
to each other, we went to parks and built campfires and sitting together we shared
our warmth and the fire’s heat. When I
had my third operation on my hand, she typed my assignments so I wasn’t dropped
from the school.
Maxine
and I were in love. But for simple
reasons we never took our love to that intimate level where you can never have
another first. That’s probably why, when
I think of Max, I remember walks in the rain and sitting by the river with a
bottle of Sangria, and putting sticks in the fire while we leaned against each
other. One night, in the shadow of a
covered bridge, she said, “You talk to the trees. I think that’s a good thing for you.”
Yesterday,
after mourning her for several days, I had begun to think that I should drop
this blog, stop publishing The Pines
Review and concentrate my efforts on something else. Maybe I should give more time to my book
about Afghanistan in 1980. Then, with shaking hands I began to read her
letters and her email letters that she’d written me after I found her
again. “You always had the passion,” she
said. “I remember you talking to the
trees and the birds; you said their answers will always be in the voice of the wind.”
I
don’t know about you, the readers of this blog, and the ones you love or have
loved, but when I close my eyes I can still feel her hand in mine and our hands
wet with autumn’s misty rain. When I am
sitting in the grass of a tree row while hunting, or just walking, I can feel
her hair brushing me. And, now, when I
write, or sketch, I remember her, leaning over my shoulder to watch me write or
draw, and her hair tickling my neck and face.
“It’s what you are,” she wrote. “It’s
what you were meant to do--to write.” I now
know I can’t stop writing this blog, The
Pines Review, or any of my other work.
In
her last email letter to me she said, “I hope you are still talking to the
trees.”
I
am, Max, I am.
Rest in peace, my love.
Love,
Galen (Gale’)
