Back To Memphis
I looked for him far and wide, my healer of hearts. I looked in Michigan in Ann Arbor, in the charming village of Franklin with its ancient cider mill and among the lovely old homes in Birmingham. I went to Nashville and Knoxville, and there in a lush backyard by the pool I almost fell in love. I may have needed him, but he didn’t need me, not really.
Bo, an Ann Arbor boy of course, all blond, muscular élan was too easy, only needing a calmer force in his life. Then Gabe, with southern Tennessee charm, his arms went around my waist so easily just as they would anyone’s who caught his fancy. No, it was a redhead who had me in full swoon. His photograph was what called to me, far stronger than the others, whom I had touched and known.
Hardly thinking, I boarded a plane to Memphis. It was May and the plane was full of the hip cool cats and zoot suit oldies that haunt the old clubs of Motown. The Beale Street Blues Festival was in full swing in Memphis. Detroit neighborhoods like Black Bottom and Paradise Alley, that once heard the scat of Ella Fitzgerald and the jive of Duke Ellington, now held the De Stijl architecture of a huge Mies van der Rohe complex and the carnival atmosphere of the Co-Pa (Tiger Stadium), but not in Memphis, not on Beale Street.
Perhaps it was inevitable, that I would fall so hard. Not just for a redhead, who had knocked me over with a look and a light touch of my hand, but with a city so like my own. Full of old memories, the places where great musicians not only performed, but also gathered to swap tales and down whiskey. It had all started, the whole cycle, when I first moved to my city and met Bert. I had long loved the Motor City and I came to love one of it’s resident, Dr. Egbert Gotzian Driscoll III, he was my best friend.
He was a brilliant biologist that had had species named after him. He wrote papers with titles like “Another nomenclatorial review of the Carboniferous lamellibranchs Macrodon, Grammatodon, Parallelodon and Beushausenia” and he had sailed the world. He once sailed from the coast of England to Detroit, two weeks after having heart surgery (performed by the Queen’s physician no less). He had crossed the Atlantic with just his young girlfriend, like me decades his junior, who panicking one night had caused a Dutch freighter to reverse engines and come full stop.
We discussed not only species Driscolli, but Castaneda and petty tyrants, the dynamics between men and women, politics, art and the current loves in our lives, his were many and varied. We used to laugh about his ex-wife, who once was the head of Michigan N.O.W., how perhaps she would think him a “womanizer”, but I knew better. Bert loved us all. To him the best species was always the human one.
Back from a new odyssey, Bert stayed with me just before he died. We were like old girlfriends he and I. I had spent Friday nights at his house since I can’t remember when, just so we could have a Saturday morning talk over poached eggs and coffee, about who was sleeping with whom and the neighborhood gossip. Now it was his turn to stay with me; he was not well. I came home one day and he had gone over to the neighbors to pick apples and cherries and had made all these beautiful pies. It’s one of those memories that will always stick in my mind. His heart was giving out and he was making me pies.
When he died, he was back at home again and at the kitchen table we had sat at so many times. I hadn’t come that Friday night. I think we both knew it would happen that way. His first Friday home, regaling friends on his latest adventure in the ancient Aztec city of Oaxaca, Egbert III had come home again, this time to die.
So I flew back again, to Beale Street, for a red haired dog that I named Memphis, who would heal my heart after losing my second Egbert had left it shattered. One dog named for a man that I missed and another for a city like my own, where I once had a friend who meant the whole world to me.
After Bert died, I named my first puppy (a gift), Egbert IV after my friend. That dog became affectionately known as "Ig". When he died I found, after looking and loving so many others, a red-haired boy in the south. Memphis, is a rescued golden and my "healer of hearts". He has had my heart for almost as long as them all. Today, my heart is again shattered, my healer of hearts is gone.
Bo, an Ann Arbor boy of course, all blond, muscular élan was too easy, only needing a calmer force in his life. Then Gabe, with southern Tennessee charm, his arms went around my waist so easily just as they would anyone’s who caught his fancy. No, it was a redhead who had me in full swoon. His photograph was what called to me, far stronger than the others, whom I had touched and known.
Hardly thinking, I boarded a plane to Memphis. It was May and the plane was full of the hip cool cats and zoot suit oldies that haunt the old clubs of Motown. The Beale Street Blues Festival was in full swing in Memphis. Detroit neighborhoods like Black Bottom and Paradise Alley, that once heard the scat of Ella Fitzgerald and the jive of Duke Ellington, now held the De Stijl architecture of a huge Mies van der Rohe complex and the carnival atmosphere of the Co-Pa (Tiger Stadium), but not in Memphis, not on Beale Street.
Perhaps it was inevitable, that I would fall so hard. Not just for a redhead, who had knocked me over with a look and a light touch of my hand, but with a city so like my own. Full of old memories, the places where great musicians not only performed, but also gathered to swap tales and down whiskey. It had all started, the whole cycle, when I first moved to my city and met Bert. I had long loved the Motor City and I came to love one of it’s resident, Dr. Egbert Gotzian Driscoll III, he was my best friend.
He was a brilliant biologist that had had species named after him. He wrote papers with titles like “Another nomenclatorial review of the Carboniferous lamellibranchs Macrodon, Grammatodon, Parallelodon and Beushausenia” and he had sailed the world. He once sailed from the coast of England to Detroit, two weeks after having heart surgery (performed by the Queen’s physician no less). He had crossed the Atlantic with just his young girlfriend, like me decades his junior, who panicking one night had caused a Dutch freighter to reverse engines and come full stop.
We discussed not only species Driscolli, but Castaneda and petty tyrants, the dynamics between men and women, politics, art and the current loves in our lives, his were many and varied. We used to laugh about his ex-wife, who once was the head of Michigan N.O.W., how perhaps she would think him a “womanizer”, but I knew better. Bert loved us all. To him the best species was always the human one.
Back from a new odyssey, Bert stayed with me just before he died. We were like old girlfriends he and I. I had spent Friday nights at his house since I can’t remember when, just so we could have a Saturday morning talk over poached eggs and coffee, about who was sleeping with whom and the neighborhood gossip. Now it was his turn to stay with me; he was not well. I came home one day and he had gone over to the neighbors to pick apples and cherries and had made all these beautiful pies. It’s one of those memories that will always stick in my mind. His heart was giving out and he was making me pies.
When he died, he was back at home again and at the kitchen table we had sat at so many times. I hadn’t come that Friday night. I think we both knew it would happen that way. His first Friday home, regaling friends on his latest adventure in the ancient Aztec city of Oaxaca, Egbert III had come home again, this time to die.
So I flew back again, to Beale Street, for a red haired dog that I named Memphis, who would heal my heart after losing my second Egbert had left it shattered. One dog named for a man that I missed and another for a city like my own, where I once had a friend who meant the whole world to me.
After Bert died, I named my first puppy (a gift), Egbert IV after my friend. That dog became affectionately known as "Ig". When he died I found, after looking and loving so many others, a red-haired boy in the south. Memphis, is a rescued golden and my "healer of hearts". He has had my heart for almost as long as them all. Today, my heart is again shattered, my healer of hearts is gone.