Old Songs in a New Cafe

by Robert James Waller

Those words have haunted me for two decades. And, as I move around, I think they apply to a fair number of people I meet. I now keep Tagore pasted above me more out of tradition than necessity. Somewhere, around forty, I began, though somewhat imperfectly, to get the instrument tuned, the words in order, and the melodies flowing. Ice skaters are required to learn school figures, basic stuff. Living is a little like that. You have to get the school figures down, get ‘em cold, so you can execute them subconsciously.

  When that happens, when the words began to flow and the melodies take shape, the search for meaning does not end, but life starts to become meaningful even as you seek to make it more that way. Others apparently get there earlier than I did. Many never do, and that is the great tragedy of our times and the failure of our civilization, for neither our religions nor our schools nor our informal social structures provide us with the tools to search, diligently, for meaning in this present life.

  How do you know when you’re getting there? Well, things feel right; there is a sense of unification, as if you are becoming a tapestry rather than a conglomeration of tangled threads, and you are doing the weaving yourself, almost effortlessly. Personally, I think the pursuit of trivia and rapacious, material acquisition so honored by this society thwart the search and inhibit the weaving, and that the arts are the prime vehicle for clarifying and accelerating the search. But that’s another story for another time.

  At some point, you have to deal with a hard and essential fact: you discover that the things you’re good at and the things you love are not necessarily the same. Whatever wisdom I have, I tend to get much of it from strange places. One of them was an obscure film, The Gig, about musicians. A first-class professional is talking to a man who wants nothing more than to be a professional, but obviously cannot cut it. The pro is tired of the amateur’s whining and obsequious pleas to join a band and says: “Music is not like religion; devotion is not enough.” There it is. It’s a good thing to know.

  There’s also the problem of doing away with the clutter. Like good composition of any kind, coming to grips with life requires a certain elegance of lifestyle, not in the sense of being fancy, but rather a consideration of what can be discarded in favor of simplicity. I propose there is an insidious plot to steal our time in the world we have created, and it’s important to get rid of as many encumbrances as possible, including lawn care and excessive housekeeping. The sign my wife posted a long time ago says it rather nicely: “Today I Cherish, Tomorrow I Dust.”

  Even being a little antisocial helps. A friend of mine is fond of quoting something I said a few years back about my reluctance to attend events of borderline value: “You have fewer people at your funeral, but you get more reading time.” There are krakens out there gobbling your life, and it’s crucial that they be spotted and nullified.

  Then there are the quantity people who want you to try and live forever. You’ve got to watch them, too. I’m not talking here about commonsense matters of diet and personal habits. I’m talking about those who resent flyers and do all they can to ground them. They’re everywhere with cautious, chirping advice: “Keep your hands in the boat,” “Hang on to the latchkey,” “Stay away from the road.” Some people see dragons all about them. Avoid those people and fight the dragons when they come along.

  When you feel yourself starting to become whole, it’s all right to accept positions of power, but not before then. The overriding problem with our country, and our world in general, is that we are, in large part, managed by incompetents. Most of these are men who have spent their lives seeking power rather than themselves.

  Consequently, we are confronted with the grotesque spectacle of working for childish figures—halfbaked little generals with overblown egos and no more understanding of the search for meaning than some primitive, base organism spending its time feeding on the lives and feelings of others, guzzling them up like strained peaches, cackling to themselves as they play shell games with other people’s destinies.

  Moreover, somewhere along the way, I think it’s crucial to deal with the damnable issue of mortality. There is, of course, the inevitability of it all—the end of life. As children, we are brought slowly to this understanding through events rather than introspection. A grandfather dies when you’re eleven. It seems incomprehensible, at first.

  But at the funeral parlor there are lowered voices and solemnity. The old man who was, more than anything, your friend lies there quietly. And it comes to you, maybe for the first time, that all of this is not unceasing. The first sense of loss is that of ice cream on Sunday mornings and the wonderful, atrocious lies with which he embellished the stories of his cowboy days. The second is more haunting: We are not everlasting.

  So you begin to understand mortality, dimly though, and with a vague assuredness that it applies to others, but not to you. Around twenty-two, however, I endured what I call my “mortality crisis.” For six months, almost involuntarily, I lay in bed at night examining the edges of my physiology, seeking peace with the tenuousness of it all. I lay there in the darkness, thinking and sweating, terrified at the prospect of my own death. That period was excruciating but healthy, I believe, for I determined that time and I should be wary allies, not opponents.

  Then life gets busy, fears recede in the tumble of daily life. And nature helps in this. An inherent kindness exists in the process of aging. Except for the unforeseen miseries of homicide or wars or sudden catastrophic illness, we are allowed to move along gradually. Imagine, for a moment, that we looked and felt exactly the same at fifty as we did at twenty. But, then, on our fiftieth birthday, suppose we changed suddenly to the physical condition and appearance of, say, a ninety-year-old. That Wouldn’t work, psychologically. We graciously are given time to adjust. (Incidentally, I’m not denigrating the appearance of older people; I’m merely talking about change.)

  In my bathroom mirror at home it works just this way. I see myself every morning. The changes are unnoticeable from day to day. But there are other reflections.

  For the last ten years I have taught in an executive development program at the University of Richmond. I always visit there in June and am lodged in undergraduate student housing along with participants in the program. Such quarters are standardized, obviously, so even though I may shift from room to room over the years, the uniformity of the place provides the illusion that I am staying in the identical room each year.

  This provides a benchmark of sorts. On each visit, scraping the shaving cream away, I have a chance to examine what twelve months have done to me. There is, I admit, a certain trauma connected with this annual experience. Yet, perversely, I also look forward to it as a kind of gruff and unforgiving timepiece, measuring my progress, telling the truth, refusing to lie.

  And every June I am given over to marveling at the human capacity for handling the certainty of our own deaths, for writing our own obituaries even as we live. That we can comprehend our own demise and that we do not constantly whirl about in rabid frenzy at the thought of it is part of our magic, a built-in mechanism for sanity of the most powerful kind.

  But the borders are there. They are stern and ineluctable, and I see them approaching. Clearly I see them, on summer mornings, as I stare at myself in the mirrors of Richmond.

  Yet, there are voices that speak to me along the rivers, along the way. With scolding words, they counter the momentary sag born of distant mirrors and honest appraisal: “Saddle up, caballero, and stop sniffling.” They are right, of course. When Odysseus cried, “There is nothing worse for men than wandering,” he was correct in the metaphor but wrong in the physical reality. There are Yaqui drums in high plains arroyos and ship engines north of Cairo I have not yet heard. There are beaches where you can still run naked at dawn and visions within a yard of my house that I have not yet seen through the lens of my Nikon.

  I missed the last packet boat down the Missouri. It left from the Fort Lewis, Montana, levee in 1890. How I wish I had been on it, coming by places with names such
as Malta Bend, just to have gathered in the sense of history and change that must have been stacked along the decks. But there are other boats. Some are Arab dhows with saffron-colored sails. They move through the waters of Ocean India, and I aim to sail upon such a boat along the Somali Current.

  The voices of the river remind me that neither chemists nor alchemists can save me. And they tell me it’s all right to remember, in Kipling’s words, “That night we stormed Valhalla, a million years ago,” that it’s allowable to sing sweet lamentations for the death of blue autumns, but not to dwell upon those things entirely. For in the pleasant sorrow that comes from remembrance, time shifts in character. No longer an ally then, but a legendary bandit who’ll steal your woman and take your passion and ride the evening train.

  So the voices settle me. And I remember most of what I know that is good and true and lasting has come not from scholars but from minstrels and gypsies, from magicians and magic, from jugglers swallowing fire. It has come from small bands of travelers who followed the rivers and told me old stories and chanted old warnings of young women dancing through late afternoons and into the firelight, leaving only a footprint for the morning that follows.

  Listening closely, then, I have learned that languor is not the price of serenity. I know there is more ahead of me than discounted airline tickets and shuffleboard, or a condo on the edge of a Scottsdale golf course. And, if it’s all right with everyone else, I think I’ll skip the midlife passage involving gold chains and Porsches and suntans.

  Instead, I’m lacing up my twelve-year-old Red Wings, loading the cameras, putting new strings on the 1957 Martin flattop, getting ready to go where egrets fly. Like an old rider of the surf, I can already see the next wave coming. It looks fine and fair. It looks worth the effort.

  I Am Orange Band

  ______________________________________

  The thought is a haunting one. It comes to me at odd times, unpredictable moments. I might be playing my guitar or reading or just driving along in the car. And suddenly I’m thinking about a fellow named Orange Band. I never met him, and I never will.

  His name resulted from a small strip of plastic around his leg. I used to think he deserved a better handle. In Latin he was Ammodrarnus nigrescens, but that seemed too coldly scientific and species-like, in the same way I am Homo sapiens. What was needed, I thought, was a name that captured in a word or two his unique place in the scheme of things. Something that identified him as being the very last of his kind, that succinctly conveyed the isolation of his existence. A name that somehow reflected the infinite loneliness that must accompany a state of undiluted unity. For he was perfectly and unalterably alone.

  But, in the end, I decided that Orange Band was a good name for him. He was plain, and he was gritty, and it suited him well. Besides, the simplicity of such a name is more than fitting if you are the only remaining dusky seaside sparrow and there is no one left to call it out. If I were the last of Homo sapiens, I think I would take such a name. And I would sit with my back against a granite ledge, near a river in a distant twilight colored blue, and say, “I am Orange Band,” listening to the words come back to me through the trees and along the grass.

  How do we measure loneliness? If the counting bears any relationship to the number of your species still around, then Orange Band was lonely. It had not always been so. The duskies were common once in the marshes of Merritt Island, Florida. They were six inches long, blackish above with a yellow patch near the eye, streaked in black and white lower down, and sang a buzzy song resembling that of a red-winged blackbird.

  That was before we slowly pitched our faces skyward and murmured, “Space “Along with the mathematics of flight and the hardware to take us there, we had to deal with the nasty problem of mosquitoes that plagued the Kennedy Space Center. For reasons known only to people who conjure up such things, flooding the Merritt Island marshlands nearby seemed to be the answer to the mosquito problem. The water rose and took with it the nests of the dusky seaside sparrows.

  There was one other place, just one, where the duskies lived. Propelled by conservationist pressures, the federal government lurched into action and spent something over $2 million to purchase 6,250 acres along the St. John’s River. There were two thousand of the little songbirds living there. Ah, but highways came. Always the highways come. They come to bring more people who will need more highways that will bring more people who will need more highways. The marshes were drained for road construction and fire swept through the dry grass of the nesting grounds. Pesticides did the rest.

  By 1979, only six dusky seaside sparrows could be found along the river. Five of them were captured. None were females. The last female had been sighted in 1975.

  The New York Times duly noted the problem in the August 31, 1983, edition under a headline that read: “Five Sparrows, All Male, Sing for a Female to Save Species.” And just below the Times article, in one of those ethereal juxtapositions that sometimes occur in newspaper layouts, was an advertisement for a chichi clothing store called Breakaway. The copy above a photo of a smartlyturned-out woman went like this:

  You strive for spontaneity

  To take life as it comes

  The perfect complement to your dynamic Iifestyle

  Our natural silver fox jacket

  Now during our Labor Day celebration

  Save $1000.00 off the original price

  Originally $3990.00, now $2990.00

  In the swamps of Florida, spontaneity was on hold. So were dynamic lifestyles. The five male duskies were brought to Disney World’s Discovery Island, were pensioned off and made comfortable. Orange Band was about eight years old.

  So it was, not far from the place where we launch for other worlds, that a different kind of countdown began. By 1985, there were three of the little males left. Then one died in September of that year. On March 31,1986, a second one died. That left Orange Band, by himself.

  Now and then, I would think of Orange Band alone in his cage. The last member of the rarest species known to us. He became blind in one eye, became old for a sparrow, and yet he persisted, as if he knew his sole task was to sustain the bloodline as long as possible. I wondered if he wondered, if he felt sorrow, or excruciating panic at the thought of his oneness. Surely he felt loneliness. Charles Cook, curator of the zoo, issued periodic bulletins: “As far as we can tell, for a little bird like that he seems to be doing fine.”

  Still it was inevitable. On June 18, 1987, a Washington Post headline said: “Goodbye, Dusky Seaside Sparrow.” Orange Band, blind in one eye, old and alone, was gone. He died by himself on June 17th, with no one, either human or bird, around.

  But the day Orange Band died there was a faint sound out there in the universe. Hardly noticeable unless you were expecting it and listening. It was a small cry, the last one, that arched upward from a cage in Florida, ricocheted along galactic highways and skimmed past the scorched parts of an old moon rocket still in orbit. If you were listening closely, though, you could hear it… “I am zero.”

  Extinct. The sound of the word is like the single blow of a hammer on cold steel. And each day the hammer falls again as another species becomes extinct due to human activity. This is about 400 times the rate of natural extinction. Norman Meyers has projected that, by the end of this century, species will be vanishing at the rate of 100 per day.

  In open defiance of the International Whaling Commission, Japan and Iceland continue to slaughter whales under the guise of “research.” The real reason, however, is to supply the inexhaustible Japanese appetite for whale flesh. The great California condors are all in cages now,* Less than twenty of the black-footed ferrets remain. The number of mountain gorillas has declined to under 450. The black duck is in serious trouble; nobody knows just how much trouble for sure. Over six million dolphins have been killed accidentally by the Pacific tuna fleet the last thirty years. And have you noticed the decline of songbirds in Iowa?

  The count rises, year after year. Rou
ghly eleven hundred plants and animals are identified specifically on the endangered and threatened species list at the present time, but nobody really knows for sure how long the list should be. The reason is that science has not yet determined exactly how many species exist, and the job of identification is a long way from completion. With the clear-cutting of the tropical rain forests throughout the world, the numbers could be astronomical For example, the current rate of forest loss is two hundred thousand square kilometers per year, and some estimates of species yet unknown in the tropical forests range as high as one million.

  But we press on. With highways and toxic waste and all-terrain vehicles and acid rain and pesticides and the straightening of pretty creeks to gain an extra acre or two on which to grow surplus crops. In the name of progress and something called “development,” we press on, though we seem reluctant to define exactly what it is we seek. That definition, you see, likely is too frightening to contemplate, for the answer along our present course might be nothing other than “more.”

  More of what? Nothing in particular. Just more. We must have more, always more, for if we stopped, we would have less of that nothing in particular.

  So the citizens buzz over blood and money around the boxing rings of Atlantic City and worry, ludicrously, about holding wineglasses properly and titter in a breathless way over Cher’s ruthlessly salacious gown at the Academy Award ceremonies. And each day the hammer falls again. And each day another small cry arches upward; slowly and forever it arches upward. And sometimes I sit with my back against a granite ledge, near a river in a distant twilight colored blue, and say, “I am Orange Band,” and the words come back alone through the trees and along the grass.

  Drinking Wine

  the New York Way

  ______________________________________

  Just when I was settling comfortably into my middle years, confident that I possessed a certain stock of savoir faire acquired from decades of living and travel, comes now Diane Roupe to remind me of how far 1 have yet to go. In one of those punchy and informative articles common to newspaper society pages, The Des Moines Register published a piece on June 29, 1988, that contained directions for holding a wineglass properly.