Hasten Down the Wind

            A story. We were all eighteen; just graduated high school; Marty, Kevin, Doug, and I. the world was out there. Three of us would leave in August for colleges out of town. One would spend a year at the local community college and work before also heading out. It was our last summer and we were all lean and tan and thought we knew everything. And life was easy. Every weekend we’d play cards, we’d drink more than a few beers (the legal age was eighteen back then), and we’d listen to music; the music mattered.

            Saratoga Springs was two hours away. Saratoga Springs and the performing arts center with its open-air pavilion and long, sloped hillside. We went five or six times that summer to see bands and performers I still listen to. We’d load up the family station wagon, crank up the cassette deck, and it was road trip time with coolers and a Frisbee, and all the bravado four teenage boys trying to find their manhood could muster.

            I remember the concert; I remember her. Her music captured us; her looks were like, well perfect. She had shoulder length brown hair and big doe eyes, and tight jeans with a silk button shirt. We sat in the second row and we watched her sing; God, that girl could sing.

            It was Linda Ronstadt. She was a few years older than us but she looked like the girl next door. And, she had all these musicians playing with her – longhaired guys who played with Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Guys with names like Kunkl, and Sklar who spent their lives on tour. The music moved us; the music meant something. She meant something. And at the end, when her last note was hit, the four of us did something we’d never done at a concert. We each threw a red rose on the stage. And Linda Ronstadt walked over and picked them up and mouthed “thank you” and smiled and – as Bob Seger once sang “my heart began to rise …”

            She could sing. She was young and beautiful and healthy and she had her whole life ahead of her. I saw all my teenage dreams in Linda Ronstadt that night. I was eighteen; I was living, moving forward. I was going away to college and I was going to discover life. I was eighteen and I had my whole life to live …

            “Tell us a little about yourself.” I said matter of factly, “Well for starters I’ve been in here, locked up since August 2008 – you want the exact minute when my life stopped? I stole two million dollars from people who trusted me. I broke the hearts of two young men who deserved better from their father; I lost the woman I loved. I hurt my family and friends and lost everything.” The words just came out naturally, easily. “And no matter how dark it got, I knew all I had left was my self-respect and my soul. So I started telling the truth.”

            I read the other day that the Library of Congress deposited a Linda Ronstadt recording in their collection of seminal recordings (U2’s “Joshua Tree” was also included). Linda Ronstadt couldn’t attend the ceremony. She suffers from Parkinson’s disease. That beautiful voice and face and life – all the things I saw that night in Saratoga – were in the past. Age, reality, had changed for Ms. Ronstadt. And yet there she was, her picture in the paper, with a smile – a serene smile. She’d written her autobiography and reviewers agreed: she was candid and honest. And I looked at the picture and I saw her eyes. They were the eyes I remembered all those years ago.

            “Are you married?” He nodded yes to my question. “Then maybe you’ll get what I’m about to say. I called her from the sheriff’s department and told her I’d been arrested. I told her to divorce me. It was the worst phone call I’ve ever had to make and I still hear it. I let the woman I loved down; I ruined everything. I need to live a long time to atone for that. I do what I do because that’s on my heart.” He nodded again, and I knew he understood what I meant.

            In the last two months people I would have never guessed could find my blog have read it. I keep writing about “this” – prison and the people in here – warts and all – hoping it matters because the truth is, most days I’m not sure it does. This place, the way we act and treat each other – and ourselves – it just wears you down and saps the life and the hope out of you. And, I know, I understand, why this place is here and why it’s full. And it is so dishonest, and destructive, and dehumanizing. And I wonder what that eighteen year-old so long ago, who knew everything, how would he have held up. Did Linda foresee this future when she smiled at me?

            “Seems like yesterday

            But it was long ago …

            I remember what she said to me

            She swore it would never end

            I wish I didn’t know now

            What I didn’t know then

            Against the wind

            We were running against the wind

            We were young and strong and running against the wind.”

            And now guys – young guys that is – in here laugh at me because I’m the grumpy, moralistic bastard who says, “Get your head out of your ass! You don’t want this for your life.”

            “The years rolled slowly past

            Found myself alone

            surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends

            further and further from my home

            And I guess I lost my way

            There were oh so many roads

            I was living to run and running to live

            Never worried about paying or how much I owed”

            I had a difficult week. Life in here will do that. I got hung up on thoughts of someone remarrying, of another graduation being missed. I found myself talking to people I didn’t know about things in here I’m trying to ignore. And through it all, I wondered if I could have even imagined this all those years ago when I was captivated by that voice.

            “I found myself seeking shelter against the wind.”

            There is no shelter in here. You are constantly bombarded by ignorance and dirt, and guys who cut corners and quit a long time ago. Most days you write them off. You aren’t like them you tell yourself. You can use this and grow and overcome. Then, the doubts, and the memories. And you see why they all gave up … until you read a small verse. It’s been there all the time. It makes sense immediately. Isaiah tells them,

            “Do not call to mind the former things,

            Or ponder things of the past.

            Behold, I will do something new,

            Now it will spring forth …

            I will even make a roadway in the wilderness”

In the background, I hear Bob Seger singing “Like a Rock” –

            “And I stood arrow straight

            Unencumbered by the weight

            Of all the hustlers and their schemes

            I stood proud, I stood tall

            High above it all

            I still believed in my dreams

            Twenty years now

            Where’d they go?

            Twenty years

            I don’t know

            I sit and wonder sometimes

            Where they’d gone

            And sometimes late at night

            When I’m bathed in the firelight

            The moon comes callin in a ghostly white

            And I recall

            I recall”

It was the dreams of that eighteen year-old man-child who heard that voice, that beautiful, soulful voice of that young girl with the brown eyes that brings me back. Parkinson’s couldn’t rob her; I still hear her exquisite voice. I get it I sigh; I get it.

            “Hey, don’t think about the exile; don’t think about what was. Our God is making it all new.”

New. This place is a wilderness. This place is an exile. This place is a desert. And I close my eyes and I hear her sweetly sing that “he tells her to hasten down the wind.” I look at myself in the mirror and in my eyes I’m back there, back at Saratoga Springs. And the dreams are still there. The eyes tell me so.

            It’s been a difficult, emotional week. I questioned my mental toughness. I questioned God. And then Isaiah showed up. And then I heard her voice … and I was young and strong and running against the wind.