A Breath Until Forever (7 page)

He went on. “Adrienne was the first person to show me that star. I had just broken my ankle after falling off a bull in the rodeo. She said as long as I make a wish, get back on that bull, that anything was possible. She was right. I got back on that bull and I not only rode that bull, but I won the county championships! My heart was beating so fast that I thought I was going to die from a heart attack.”

He continued.

“When the sun goes down you can see it most, when the nice light and it's brilliant color seems to radiant in the sky, just for a few moments if you look hard enough the last of the sun bounces off, and there is a light that illuminates creating that little tiny dot that I think is so big and beautiful. “

Meredith said nothing, because nothing was to be said. She was also a little jealous that he and his old love had such a beautiful connection that it had included the beauty of a star. Her and Benjamin never had that kind of connection, and knew that they wouldn't ever have quite a connection like that either.

She wondered about a man, who wished upon stars like a little child boy, who didn't seem to know much of a difference between old meadows and sidewalk streets, who got excited about stars that really weren't stars and who didn't know much about life, except how to love family and work a job. Who earned his living working hard with sweat and tears, in a run down steel factory, and who carried a pocket knife in his sock, hesitation in his brow, a handkerchief in his back pocket. And he was curious about her. Who lived like a gypsy. Who moved like an unsettling breeze. Who would rather stray, then stay still. And was a traveling push pin on a map.

She slid her small hands deep into the flimsy pockets of her hippie dress. Her left sided pocket had a hole in it, and she felt her one slender finger, snake through the rip. With her other hand, she placed it carefully on her hip, as if she were a teapot, to give herself more theatrical flare. “And skin's appalling petals, how inspired to be living in the living room drunk naked and dreaming in the absence in the electricity over and over eating the low root of the asphodel gray fate...rolling in generation of the flowery couch as on a bank in Arden, my only rose tonight's the treat of my own nudity.” She quoted, verbatim, in a slow and steady rhythm to emphasize the rhyme with beatnik ethnicity as if she was the poetess and creator of such heavy lyricism.

She looked over at him. Told him the poem was by Allen Ginsberg, her other husband who she married in the celebration of poetic justice.

“It's beautiful, really.” Was his reply, amazed that she retained a memory equal to that of young woman in which he went to college with. She was intelligent, and he liked that, and not only that, but brought that intelligence to a higher degree which only made her smarter, almost genius like.

“Yeah, I've read some of his stuff back in college.” He commented, remember his English course he had taken, which also threw him into the depths of Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr.  He had liked Ginsberg. There was a sensuality about him, an enchantment of new visions that formed altruism and promiscuity alike. “I like poetry. Puts you under a spell you know. Something like what drugs do when they give you that hallucinogenic effect. They appeal to the moment of who we are in the now, and who we have been and who we have yet to become, all the while flying you on this wild and magical carpet ride.”

Meredith smiled. Evenly and large. Unlike anyone else that she ever met, like Benjamin and Daniel, the book club girls at the coffee shop, Appollo from Africa, Joshua got it. He actually got it! And that made her deliriously happy.

The crickets had started chirping and the opera of their hindsight of their insect violins dissected noisily in the air. There was something almost bewitching happening right now, as if she was in a fairy land whisked far, far away from reality.

“You went to college?” Meredith appeared rather surprised that Joshua had attended a higher education of any sort, as he didn't seem to be the type to study. Rather, he came into view before her as a strong and brawny man who would rather get his hands dirty on chopping up wood and doing manual labor, rather than sticking his nose in between the books.

“Yeah, up in Berkeley. University of California. For about a year.” He answered.

“What were you studying?” She asked, curious as to what a rough guy like this would ever possibly want to take up if he had the chance to go to college.

“Pre med.”

Meredith was both surprised, and instantly impressed.

“Pre med. Wow.” She repeated him, while her eyes popped wide with alert. “What happened?”

“Life you know? All that good stuff.” He kicked a small pebble on purpose. It lightly flew in the air like a tiny rocket, then dropped off, lightly splashing in a small mud puddle.

He couldn't face her. Too embarrassed about his bad choices that were also good ones.

“Dropped out. Got a girl pregnant.”

“You have a kid?”

All their talks about having children and he had a kid?

“Did.” He said. “Past tense.”

Sadness instantly filled the air.

“What happened?”

“He died.”

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have..”

“It's okay. Really.” Interrupted Joshua.  “It's been quite a few years. My girlfriend at the time was driving from Berkeley to Sacramento. She got into a car accident. She fell asleep. Dustin died instantly. As she did too.”

“Dustin?”

“That was my son's name.”

“Yeah, I saw it as a sign. Quit college. Moved back here. And been working at the steel company and taking care of the ranch ever since.”

Meredith tried desperately for words, but none came to mind. What do you say to someone when they reveal to you that they have lost their one and only child? Meredith instantly felt grief. Tears welled in her eyes, and her body began to weaken in the pool of sadness from which she drowned in.

The moment was killed now. She could live on with him, or go back to that dark place. She decided to move forward.

He discouraged her from feeling sad for him. He didn't want her to feel sad for him. Only to listen. To know more about his past. Have empathy, but in silence. “It really was a while ago, and I've made peace with it, so it's okay.”

He compromised the moment with the softness of his voice, and the tenderness of the forgiveness he felt for the evilness of life, and it quickly eased her pain. Her heart hurt. It ached for him. But the softness made her feel a little more comfortable and at peace with it too.

Joshua quickly changed the subject. “Tell me more of your poetry.”

“I used to belong to a book club.” She said. “And I would hang out at coffee shops where poets are more than welcome.”

She continued on. He listened, but kept looking at the beauty and length of her hair. “They compensated their words with words of great poets before them. I always sat in the back row and could hardly hear them at times, so often I'd bring my own book for reference and distraction. I'd labor for courage to get up there myself, and speak it, but never felt confident enough to do so.”

“You write poetry?”

“A little.” Meredith confessed. Writing poetry had been her deepest and sometimes darkest secret, and she never revealed her passion for the written word, not even Benjamin.

“Can I hear some?” He asked. “I like poetry.”

Meredith instantly felt a little flushed. Embarrassed. It wasn't every day that someone was interested in poetry, more then that, interested to hear her and share her poetry with others. Her poetry to her was personal, wholeheartedly intimate, reclusive. She was a longer Meredith Hurley when it came to her words, rather, a free spirit, an awakened soul, and she liked it that way.

However as much as she didn't want to share with Joshua, she could tell that Joshua truly wanted her to share it with him. She mustered up a simple “Okay.”; and allowed herself to share her passionate side of her, something that most people didn't get to have.

Meredith fidgeted around in her purse, until she found a coffee stained, and crumpled up piece of paper. She carefully uncrumpled it, and on it was filled with chicken scratch like handwriting, and unkempt random doodling. Her cheeks instantly flushed. It wasn't everyday that he read to anyone Sometimes she had read to her old dog Luca, but after a rambling preamble of a few rhyming lines he'd stick his tail in between his legs and go back to laying down on his bed by the fire place and fall asleep. Benjamin didn't have any interest in her poetry. It was something that she kept to herself. Poetry was a solitary enjoyment. She enjoyed putting pen to paper, all of her emotions and it seemed to serve more than a literary medium, rather it replaced a diary of her often troubled life and all the loneliness that she so often felt.

“Sometimes I feel so lost,” She began. She didn't look up, rather she kept her eyes glued on the paper, reading in a monotone voice, soft as a whisper, uncomfortable with bearing her soul, feeling the same hurt she felt when she wrote in on a balmy August 4
th
, 1968, right after coming back from a trip out to Anaheim California where she painted a family who owned a winery.  “Like I have lost my way. The path of which I wander appears more like a maze. Then the right way. Where will my next move be? Like the game of chess. I need a strategy. To get me to the next level so I can be my best. Be all I can be sometimes I feel so blessed. Been given such precious gifts. Given so many good things. And I appreciate this but I want more and more I wouldn't consider it greed. I want more than what I have been given. It is my hunger, my need. I want to feel full for this emptiness in my heart to be filed what will I fell it. I don’t know but I would be completely thrilled to find that special place. The place where I belong to be the journey that take same high and I can clearly see. I'm on the road to self Discovery. Maybe someday and sometimes I will find. Myself I and me with 20/20 vision and not blind perhaps I need a compass and point to a wishing star. So it can direct me to the place I want to be. Lord, is it very far?”

Upon reading the last word, Meredith crumpled up the paper again, than put it back in her purse, among old lipstick missing its case, a slightly fractured mirror, her leather Indian wallet, and other pieces of random paper with grocery lists, her goals and random sketches of this and that.

“Beautiful.” He smiled. He looked up at her, locked his eyes with hers, and tilted his chin towards himself. “Just like you.”

Meredith blushed, feeling the fire in her cheeks light up like hot fire.

Just by listening to the poem he knew that she felt lost. Lucky for Meredith, his heart had a compass.

He then quoted some poetry he learned in Berkeley that he knew himself. “Beauty too rich to use, for earth too dear.”

He cited his source of inspiration. “Shakespeare.”

“The royal king of words.” Meredith bowed down to him.

“Indeed.” He smiled, his blue eyes electrified her heart. And as if Meredith was a royal queen, he bowed back, and he knew in that very special moment, that the chivalry of respecting poetry was not yet dead.

“I took a Shakespearean class my first semester. I got it when nobody else did. It got through to me. Appealed to me in such a way that I would sometimes feel this strong heavy pounding in my chest. And sometimes, although I hate to admit it, when had too much to overcome, it saved me.” A flashback of all the times that Shakespeare saved him went flooding through his mind, and he began to remember all of the good times that had been raised from the dead, because of it. He had long ago put Shakespeare at rest at Berkeley, and now he wondered why he had not used the same resources as he did a long time ago when he had gone through some trying times here at the ranch.

Meredith swore she loved him more than ever now and more then love when he shared this poetic intimacy with her. Not only was he a kind and generous man, but he shared the love of the old words of beautiful prose that was a testimony of hearts.

Joshua took Meredith's hand, and held it, feeling the softness and warmth of such a romantic gesture capture his widened heart. They walked hand in hand, slowly as to take in every moment as if it were their last, leisurely strolling through the jungled wildness of flowers down nature made paths and headed back towards the house. A more sadistic darkness was slowly creeping in now, and was beginning to take shape.