Years ago, I had a themeless website where I collected and recorded things that interested me. I don't know what became of most of the stuff, but one thing I managed to save was a series of posts I wrote that I titled: "John Prine, You Wrote My Life."
In honor of John
I have no doubt John's songs have written millions of folks' experiences. These are mine.
John Prine, You Wrote My Life
a life unstuck in time (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr),
so this story can go on and on in dis-order, added to at any time the whim (or need) arises
Chapter 9
Way Back Then©
---The Missing Years
Night has fallen, I've said the things I did
The only baby sleeping is when I was a kid
Do you remember when you were my friend?
That's the way I'd like things
Just like way back then
"January 15, 1979."
That's all she ever had to say. It was code for: none of this would be happening if not for the fateful day I first walked through that door. The saying goes that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Luckily for me, Bean came into mine for a lifetime when she showed up for employment at the San Francisco law firm where I was working.
Bean actually was her given name - we gave it to her, since she didn't have a middle name. Sheila Bean had a certain ring to it, so we engaged it. It didn't take any time for the two of us to become friends. In many ways, we were opposites, but maybe that's what helped us fit together. I managed to push her sensitivities to the border of outrage from time to time, but whether she knew it or not, it was always unintentional. It was just that being around her brought out a certain boldness in me that otherwise lay dormant.
We did find a common sense of outrage in our workplace, however. Working for attorneys without being outraged takes a certain amount of indifference to decency. Or maybe just a different sense of morality than Bean and I shared. We got a door slammed in our faces one day for squealing out loud. We couldn't help it. It was an automatic reaction upon overhearing one of the attorneys telling his trial witness over the phone, "We're not interested in the truth here." And we got brushed aside for complaining that one of the secretaries only created more work for us because, as she herself had whined, "This is too hard. I'm not used to using my brain." We didn't think she had one.
But most of the time, we had fun. And we became friends outside of work. She was from Camden, New Jersey - "a slum across the river from South Philly," as she described her home town. As far from the midwestern farm I came from as you could get. Two unlikely backgrounds for such comraderie. And I give the credit to her. She was, and is, the most tolerant, sharing person I've ever known. No jealousies, no pettiness. And how she ever put up with me all those years, I'll never know. But I'll always be thankful.
Sheila was softspoken and considerate to a fault, while I was always coming a bit unglued around the edges, and sometimes in the middle. I've always been unwilling to conform, or be quiet when I felt the urge to shout or rage about one or another of the world's injustices. She was calm. I was crazy.
But then, mine wasn't the mouth from which sprang, "Like my grandmother always said, there's two things in this world I like hard, and one of them is ice cream," now was it?
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