“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise ... this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive ... [it] comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field,” and it came to T. Michael Stone last Saturday afternoon as he was going home.
(The quotation is from Jack London’s The Call of the Wild.)
I wasn’t even in a particularly good mood and didn’t expect any ecstasy, but I reveled in it as long as I could.
After it was over, it occurred to me that the Almighty must have been planning that moment of euphoria for 40 years.
“So, let it happen on the first day of Spring.”
The Lord moves in mysterious ways, brother!
Bear with me as I try to explain.
Once upon a time, I’m sitting in the berthing compartment of the U.S.S. Brownson (DD-868) trying to play “I’d Love to Change the World” by Ten Years After on my guitar.
Victor Wright, a shipmate I barely knew, walks in and listens for a few minutes.
“That last chord is wrong,” he says. “Let me show you how I play that.”
Reluctantly, I hand him the guitar.
He changes the last chord to a B7, and I realize he is right.
At that point, the only thing I knew about Victor was that when quitting time came, he would always start singing a tune I thought was Elvis.
I’m going home to see my baby. I’m going home to see my baby. Gonna love you darling, love you all night long. It turned out to be the TYA song made famous at Woodstock in 1969: “I’m Going Home.”
Wouldn’t be long before I knew the TYA catalog front to back.
Victor and I would become good friends, and when I met his wife, I understood why he sang at quitting time.
Victor had a Gibson ES-335 (same guitar Alvin Lee played), and I eventually bought a Strat knockoff, so we could jam. Through Victor, I became a huge Alvin Lee/TYA fan and bought every album I could find, eventually the CDs, too. Even got my own ES-335.
Fast forward 100 years or so to this past Saturday.
I received a text from a good friend who told me her father had died, so it looked like the beginning of a somber day, even though the weather was perfect.
We met for lunch at Tequila’s in Madison. She told me about her father’s final days and hours with tears flowing from her eyes, and I started getting misty-eyed myself. Both of my parents are gone, so I knew all too well the profound sadness in her heart.
Later, we went to Walmart, where both of us kept running into things. I crashed into a display of cleaning products, and she kept ramming a buggy into shelves. A guy walking behind us was laughing and probably wondering what bar we just left.
Our antics in the store seemed to put her in a better state of mind, though, and we said our farewells.
When I climbed in my truck and turned on the radio, an Atlanta United soccer game was being broadcast, and I had no interest in that. Then I remembered that I had a CD wallet under the seat somewhere. When I found it and unzipped it, the CD in the first sleeve was “Ten Years After Recorded Live.”
Well, hello there, Victor. How’s the wife?
From the jump, Alvin’s guitar work had me strumming the steering wheel and playing air drums. Every phrase of “Slow Blues in C” seemed to flow into my fingers, and I felt them squeezing the wheel as if it had strings on it.
I rolled down both windows and cranked up the volume and sang “Help Me Baby” to some cows wandering in a pasture. When I passed Gil’s Auto Service on Parks Mill Road, I stopped singing long enough to shout, “I’m Cowboy Gil and I like to make balloon animals.”
*As Alvin hit the blistering opening notes of “I’m Going Home,” I was lifted out of this mean old world for a while.
So, if you heard a crazy old man screaming “go put on your morning gown cause it makes you look so fine,” from a white truck Saturday, that was me.
Selah.
*Kudos if you got the “Parenthood” movie reference.