So I have been holding on to Johnny Adams copy of 'On The Road' for the past year. It's high time I returned it to him. But first...
Just one more of those lingering must share items .. that keeps getting put off. It keeps waiting for a better day. Push forward again Guy, clean up one little something on your oversized to do list with the last few days of old 2015 left.
Zooming through America, the two young Adventurers, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise...
' And he talked all night. As in a dream we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother's door at eight A.M.. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms. You remember Sal when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicted wrong. You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking.. It's all this!" He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. "And not only that but but we both understand that I couldn't have time to explain why I know and you know God exists." At one point I moaned about life's troubles---how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter. "Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung up. My head rings!' he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes---that furious ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails.'
Last year I read and reread this book... savoring the moments. Carrying it with me in my backpack
like I was 18 years old again. Neil Casady or Dean Moriarty as Kerouac renamed him was a pretty high energy man who not only helped define 'The Beats' in the 1950's, but as many of you know
he became a force, a heroic figure in the Counter Culture of the 60's, Cowboy Neil who was on the bus to Never Never Land that Tom Wolfe wrote about in the 'Electric Kool Aid Acid Test'. Con man
, genius or psycho drug taker at the end, counting railroad ties in Mexico..
How many millions and millions of humans who have had the glimpse beyond the chaos? Seen the rushing world through our windows and then suddenly getting the Wow as it is all revealed to be orderly rows, for one split second you see. Then it falls back to chaos again.
Last year I was winding up my days as a cab driver. My constant back ache was way too much. Occasionally I would take day shifts in total disregard of my exhaustion in getting up at 5 AM, frequently after a night at Peri's Open Mic or whatever, whenever I was not an early morning person
and I was struggling to maintain the persona of friendly, safe, cab driver. All I wanted to do was shut my eyes. I pulled up in front of a College Hall over at Dominican College a few minutes early for a time call picking up some unknown person for some unknown destination. I pulled 'On the Road' out of my backpack again... and cut to the chase. I'll just read that ending again. And I do.. and I am so tired that as I read I feel a tear forming in my eye or eyes, got all emotional. It happens more often when I am really really tired.
I am not going to ruin this book for you If I share that last paragraph. The book is about the journey
not what imaginary moment the author decides to end his tale. If you want -- don't read the rest, but here it goes...
Jack and Neil have split up again, not necessarily upon the best of terms, not on the worse just ... kind of sad.
Kerouac wraps it up with this paragraph.
'So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.'
Something about that melancholy blessing. Anyways that sunny Fall day around midday in San Rafael I wiped away a couple of tears and waited for the person who needed the taxi. Young college students were going hither and fither oblivious to some ancient manuscript and some ancient cab driver. (Not hardly ancient) I told myself who ever stepped in my cab I was going to read that paragraph to... and see what if anything happens. I will test some young mind I say to myself. Finally there appears some round, slow moving, graying, female with a walker (I seem to remember, maybe just a cane). She gets herself into the cab, I don't remember if I even got out to help her.
She tells me she is going to Sausalito which is a lucrative ride from San Rafael and I will have time
to talk a bit. So I find a way to tell her that she is going to have to listen to me read her something from a book. I ask her if she knew much of anything about the 'Beatniks' of the 50's, the Beat Generation.. Yes she says. She and her husband were young then, they hung out in campuses, yes my Husband was aware, maybe even was part of something... Is what I picked up from her. So At the first stop light I begin to read.. but this proves difficult and I put the book down as we drive down to Sausalito. Her name is Jackie, afterwards I scribbled a few notes in a notebook. 'So... as we parked over near the Sausalito Library where who knows.. maybe Kerouac spent an afternoon there. So I read it again... and I was getting choked up again. Kind of embarrassing actually.
She seemed very receptive as when I was finished she said Oh My.. Yes God is Pooh Bear. She says her husband passed away a few years back. Apparently it wasn't sudden. The Family gathered, their children, grown up as it were, around the bed. In her Husbands arms she told me was a Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal one of the kids had brought for Pop. 'Yes, God is Pooh Bear. God is Kindness.'
She told me. I had tears on my cheeks again. We hugged. She thanked me. 'This is one of the jewels of life moments' she tells me...
Anyhow that's what happened, more or less, time to finally return this great book to Johnny Adams.
God is Pooh Bear? said Kerouac. Hmmm.
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