!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Next morning, I found one of those bulging envelopes from Mike, meaning it held a poem or poems. I ripped it open, reading it right there in one of dorm lounge comfy chairs. This one was five pages long, titled “Seeking An Unknown Master, I Had Some Friends Over For Dinner”. I read it more as a lyrical story than purely poetry:
I seek an unknown master; I sit patiently at my writing table, waiting for his arrival. How then do I seek, while I must wait? A high chair is not the best for waiting, but an easy, cushioned soft and sinking one is what I wait in.
I thought that while I waited, I’d have some friends over for dinner. They weren’t very tasty. Not only that, they couldn’t understand the candle in my window. I tried to explain.
“Look,” I said. “See that candle; its flame will soon expire, but not the hope that my waiting will wake into seeking. Not by sleeping, but by trusting, here with you, our after-dinner chatter. Like, ‘How is Margaret’s daughter, can she still hide her belly? And the butcher, does he still cut off too much fat? The important things we do are not resting on that mantle with my candle; they are hiding here with us – let’s go and find them, please.”
My neighbor raised her nose, and the rest of her head followed. She appeared to be ready to speak. While I waited for her favour, I remembered it was her son who’d helped young Margaret with her hidden bulge. “But why a green candle?” she fairly shouted. “Don’t you know that nothing can be representative anymore? There’s always been something slightly fertile about green, as far as I’m concerned.”
People hushed and then agreed, all gabbing at once, each explaining why every color of the rainbow was best suited for my candle.
“But!” I screamed, But But But I shouted at them ‘till they heard that I had said, “My candle does not wait, it only shows the way.”
“For whom? Or what” they asked, at last intrigued.
“For whoever wants to come, that’s who. All of you were able to find, to follow, to come to here to me by its wavering, dying light, weren’t you?” They all had to agree.
And then one, more clever than the rest (a postman, I think) looked thoughtful, and hushed the crowd. He said, “Was it we you were waiting for? Could it be perhaps that all you seek is us”
“Perhaps,” I granted, “But you’re not an unknown master. I know all of you very well, don’t I? I mean, once you’ve sat down to dinner with someone, and shared what’s really important, Well, you can’t help but end up knowing them.”
“And liking them, a whole lot,” a slightly flighty little lady gurgled.
We all agreed with a warm, comradely mutual laugh.
“Well, it certainly is pleasant to spend an evening with one’s friends, discovering who they really are, now isn’t it, one said. And we all sort of nodded and looked down at our half-eaten pies, smiling, shaking our heads, and clicking our tongues. We were privy to our lives, privileged to be privy.
But now they’ve gone. I’ve cleared away the dishes, fed the scraps to the dog and cats, and brushed away the clouded air of too many laughs and too many pithy observations. I’d vainly I sought with them; I now must wait, here in my easy chair.
“It’s time for musing, not amusing,” I murmured under my beard. “I’m not as lonely as I was yesterday, I’ll be more lonely tomorrow. I guess I can say, with a quiver and a break in my voice, constricted in my throat, welling in my eye, that I’ve never been so lonely in my life. Not just feeling, but being, Lonely.” That made me slightly melancholy, so I went on –
My unknown master, I wonder what he’ll wear –
A rainbow-colored Joseph cloak,
and a tassel made of silk
He’ll look like everyone I’ve ever known,
and most of all like me.
He’ll be so wise,
and I’ll read in his eyes
any story, any preaching
I’ll ever need to know.
Oh, he’ll mean so much
to me,
he’ll feel so much for me,
He’ll be my own, my very private, privy
Unknown knowing Master –
He’ll be me!
Under the final line he’d drawn, with the Rapidograph I’d given him, a curving arrow down to the words, “I think he’s also you, Janie; But then you are so very much me.”
Maybe it was the lingering effects of my experiment with marijuana, but I felt he’d been with me at the party the night before. Or perhaps he had foreseen it somehow, for surely this had been written some days earlier. And, it was obvious he was missing me – “never been so lonely in my life. Not just feeling, but being. Lonely.”
“Damn that boy!” I thought. Why can’t he let me be? Hadn’t he heard what I’d said? This story, filled with pride and loneliness, said he was not going to simply let me go. I spent the weekend flipping between imagining a life without him, one in which I was the master of myself, free from expectations of the past, free to create the person I knew I could become; and aching for more time with him, to give him another chance to come along with me, on my path, not just his.
The next two weeks, that battle in my head consumed me. I couldn’t eat, took hours to get to sleep, and drifted off in classes. Finally, I realised I could not purge the Michael Harrison of my mind, from my mind. I knew I needed him as a friend. He knew me better than anyone on earth. And, worse, it seemed, I could not drive him away from my heart. Each time I imagined myself without him, I felt an aching, a stabbing, through my gut, a fear I might never find another like him. That fear grew to anger; I did not want to be so dependent on anyone else, but did not yet know how to depend solely on myself.
He didn’t write or call after sending that poem/story, during the two weeks I was driving myself crazy futilely trying to wrest my thoughts and feelings away from him. I stayed inside, spending most days at a hidden carrel in Hilles Library during reading period, writing, studying, intent that my at least my grades not suffer, even as my sanity, my very sense of self, was dissolving.
Mid-May, my papers written, confident I’d studied enough for the final two exams, I called him up.
“Hello?” His familiar baritone, smooth and questioning, sounded impersonal. Until I spoke, I could be any one, I knew. I froze.
“Yeah? Hello? Who is this?”
“Mike, it’s me, it’s Janie.”
Now it was his turn to be silent.
“Mike? Mike?” This was going nowhere fast. Or maybe ending fast. I flashed that if neither of us spoke, that would surely be the end. He must have come to the same conclusion, because we both spoke at once.
“Janie, it’s you!” Eagerness enveloped his voice.
“Mike, Mike, we’ve got to see each other…” I wanted to say more, something like, It’s not over, but I still didn’t know it wasn’t.
We talked awkwardly for five more minutes, as if testing the other’s resolve to stay on the line, probing our feelings, finding our rhythm again.
Mike eventually pointed out that, “I’m done here this week. Should I come see you? I’ve got another birthday poem for you, I can get a present, I guess, or…”
“No, I need to study this last weekend, my final exam’s on Monday. But, I’m gonna go home after that, maybe we can drive back together, stop at the Vineyard one more time, maybe break down on the turnpike again?”
His familiar laugh meant yes, I hoped. “Uh…OK, sure. I guess I can find something to do on the weekend…”
That tug inside won the battle. “No, it’s OK, you come up this weekend. Stay with me, just stay out of my way if I need more studying. Maybe we can go out Saturday night, go to Boston, eat somewhere.”
“Um, yeah, great.” A pause. “Oh, I forgot. Did you hear that Bob Dylan’s gonna be on TV?”
“What? He never does anything like that.”
“Yup, that country singer, Johnny Cash, has a summer TV show, and Dylan is his first guest.” Then, “I thought you were staying in Cambridge, to work this summer.”
“That’s still happening, but my parents said I had to come home for a week, so I go back on Sunday, the 8th.”
“Great! He’s on the 7th, we can watch it together then!”
With that, Mike and I carved out a three week island for ourselves.