must have been the roses

There are roses in my car this morning. I can't find a vase. Running late for Amelia's school, running back inside to grab a notebook, running down to the fumes and there are a dozen roses, a cantaloupe and three Grateful Dead stubs stuck in a card - June 21, 22, 23, 1993 - Deer Creek Music Center. 7 p.m. Rain or Shine. The purchase date, bottom left on the tickets, May 22, 1993. Who could have seen down this road from there?

Summer 1993. Been all week listening to '93 summer shows trying flush out memories. Buckeye Lake. Soldier Field. Deer Creek. Richfield. The Palace, did I do Auburn Hills that year? There was an electrical storm at Soldier Field? Why don't I remember being wet? Sting opened those shows? Did I go inside for Sting? Lighting bolt crisp down into the stadium, thunderheads over Chicago skyline. I have those crackle flashes of it. And that's all. Selling gourmet grilled cheese made-to-order after the show. Driving straight on through the Midwest night to Noblesville and daybreak sleep.

Nothing about any of it feels so real as those old tickets in my hands. Funny how a murderous prison riot can alter the course of a life. Really, that's why I ended up getting Deer Creek tickets early on a Saturday morning in May and not in the mail a month earlier. The longest prison riot in U.S. history. There were two ways to get Dead tickets - actually, there were many ways to get tickets - but two ways sanctioned. You could go the traditional stand-in-a-long-line waiting route or order directly from Grateful Dead Productions, mail order. I preferred mail order.

Two reasons. 1. Interesting tickets that looked more like this than standard issue black type on blue and white paper. 2. No camping out for hours on a sidewalk to get them.

Mail order was it's own precise art form. Everything had to be addressed and assembled exactly right, and postmarked the day ticket sales started. Deer Creek mail order opened on day seven of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility uprising. One hostage, a guard, had been hanged the day before. Another hostage, a local guy who's story I'd been covering at work, was freed. Supposed to be my day off. But I stopped at the paper to check on something and Tony Demons was freed and suddenly I was working late. The order was not postmarked on the day mail order opened. No tickets in the mail.

A month later Scott sits down behind me in line. He offers me a slice of cantaloupe that I take, even though I think I hate it. We talk, smoke and talk, talk, talk about nothing for hours until the ticket window opens. Then I go to change for work and he goes home.

On weekends the newspaper is dead. I'm putting away mail to entertain myself and listening to the police scanner for something better to do. There are only a couple of us in the newsroom on Saturday's and when the phone rings it's for me. My friend B, a photographer I went to college with comes to tell me I have a call.

"Hi, this is Scott from in line this morning," the voice says and I smile. All over smile. His voice is sure and unsure. "Um, you left before I had a chance to ask your last name, or your phone number, or what you are doing tonight. So, I got yesterday's paper out of the garbage to find your byline."

B. Asks me who called and I laugh, tell him it's the guy from this morning in line. He looked up my name in the paper and called to ask me out.

"You're going to marry him," B says. Laughs.

"Yeah, whatever," I say. "He's moving to the west coast at the end of the summer. But, he could be fun for a while,"

"No. You're going to marry this guy."

Summer 1993 blurs out from there. Mostly what I remember is sun, heat on my skin. Camping and music and suddenly I'm in love with my summer fling - the guy I wasn't getting attached to. Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own. And, he's moving to Spokane.

***

I soak in the tub every night because it's the only space that's mine. It's starts when I move in. Hot until my fingers and toes tingle baths; dark, steam, candles. Everyday and sometimes twice. At first it's about the water, this bathing. Soaking it in and soaking it out.Then it's about a habit, nightly ritual, some kind of normalcy, the only way I care for myself. Now it's about the space, the change of scenery. Just someplace to be out of the living room. So I can leave one room and be in another. It's crazy-making living all of life - eating, sleeping, working (sometimes relaxing) - in a single room.

The roses are in a spaghetti jar on the table, still can't find a proper vase. Fourteen years down this road. My girls sleep in the bedroom while I count tiles around the tub. Cream bordered by thinner black. Ten high by five deep. Who could have seen. That's the problem, not that I didn't see this. That I didn't see anything.

Watch the seasons change out that bathroom window. The line of oaks are all colors, then all bare. Puffy, wet buds that push out tiny bright leaves unfolding into bigger, darker summer. Just as I find the rhythm of one season the rhythm changes - odd time signatures - and I'm scrambling to recalibrate. Again. On still nights the trees look plastic bathed in halogen. Remnant from a long ago journey.

He says: "I can't believe I could have driven you so far from me. I hurt you so much you'd rather live in a one-bedroom apartment. You love the bed. You hate not having your own space. You HATE it."

I watch the door close, go into the bathroom and stare out the window.

That tight feeling of angry, isolation, smallness,trapped is gone. Can't remember how it was in my body, my head. Sure, I can rattle through a great string of insults and psychological injuries. But how was it under my skin? I can list the tangibles but even as I type them they feel petty. They don't feel.

How's this one: I get home late from work, 11:30, Midnight, the house is wrecked. I say "can you help with the living room and dishes so I don't have to start tomorrow in mess?"

He says: "If you spent half the energy cleaning it yourself as you did nagging me about it, it would be done already." Sounds horrible, but it doesn't feel that way anymore, it's just me telling. Like I can tell about casing the house, seething and screaming inside my head but there's nothing visceral left of it. Those body feelings - knowings from the inside out - evaporated into lingering caution. Why not go another round. Why?

Summer 1993. Been all week listening to Summer '93 shows. Buckeye Lake, Soldier Field, Deer Creek, Richfield. Never had such a good time. In my life before. I'd like to have it one time more. One good ride from start to end. I'd like to take that ride again. Lay on the lawn looking up at stars, boys in long hair and girls in long skirts. All of them spinning. Side by side so our arms and legs run along each other. I want to go back. Just for one night I want to go back. As long as I don't have to get from there to here again - I want to go back.

There's just all of summer and I can't put the details in place anymore. It's one long day spread over weeks, months. It's other consciousnesses and I can't reconstruct those either. I can talk about elastic time falling apart, bending and expanding. A day's journey that stretches over a single minute. Dissolving. Right there on the tip of my tongue, but I don't have the feeling. These stories are are just tellings.

*italicized lyrics borrowed from Robert Hunter.