U.S. COPYRIGHT 2005 by John B. Lombardo -No reprint permitted without permission

THE ECHO CHANTER:

THE CLEANSING FIRES OF REALIGNMENT By John Lombardo

“If I have even just a little sense

I will keep on the main road, and my only fear will be of straying from it.

Keeping to the main road is easy

But people love to get sidetracked."

Tao

Te

Ching #3

Chapter 1

That day finally came when I erased an entire section of my memory. It must have been a mix up of floppy disks of the mind. A door swung open, and all those little pearls of wisdom that I so greedily clung to disappeared before my eyes. My chest was for some reason beginning to tighten, when I began to feel nothing. This must be what happens when memory disperses on whatever line of energy it chooses to follow. It loses momentum, and just kind of goes away. Writers block and muscle cramps, with old stationary, burned, crumbling, and brown on lonely dying winds of something poetic. Rustic images of a cast iron heart, hot coals, dead wood and the smell of hot bone drilled through with metal. One side joined to the other, with horizontal vision apparent as planes meet in an unfiltered juxtaposition of realities, where space is created from the powders and particles that remain.

It is this miserable vagary of a certain and unique reality, that one day comes knocking at your door. You do not want it, but there it is, obtuse, and standing in front of you, tall, blind, misguided, and alone.

I suppose it is time to take a shower. Days happen too quickly, as they turn again too quickly into weeks and months. Time passes faster at a speed of its own choosing, paying heed to no one, on its journey past everywhere that we have been. Reality continues to accelerate, twisting its selfishness into a form that we,  the residents of this eternal city, will never understand.

Chapter 2

I am not sure when life itself becomes symbolic. Maybe things happen this way all along. Or maybe none of this matters anyway.

Staggering to the blindness of my own self-possession, and turning around the many corners that get in my way has become a way of life for me. From the concrete to the abstract to the ethereal, that is the way the things that make up everyday reality make themselves apparent. They do not yield to time or space. There is no need, or occasion, for these things, to yield to anything; for it is the way that things have to be, as reality creates and holds on to a life of its own.

Asking when life becomes symbolic is a pretty tough question, but I am sure the answer lies in the ultimate simplicity of life itself. Simple beyond comprehension is the way I would put it, the ability to tell a story of its own accord: a story that would just as easily become what it is with or without my help. This is the essence of the universal singlet, the universal timepiece flowing back and forth, dependent only on gravity for its motion, and for its ultimate momentum. It is a courageous act of heroism to physically move in any direction at all, given the current memorandum of humanity's need of wasted action and closed loop circles. It is a tremendous act of strength and will, implying by its very nature that eternal struggle between where we are and where we are going. We move but we do not move. We take ourselves to different orientations in space and time, but we do not actually go anywhere.

Why? Perhaps because we exist in this shell we call our body, laughing at the wind as it beats against our faces and flows through our hair. Giggling at the motion of up and down as we reach those low points in our arcs before starting back up again, leaving whatever it was that was following us back in the distance. We are nothing but a receding vision of what we have left behind, as we move too quickly past all that we can see in front of us. Layer upon layer of broken space peels off in patterns that we can recognize only by the sound of church bells resounding in an early morning, as visible as their message, as meaning flashes somewhere inside our heads, or in a feeling inside our bodies. Vibrations pass through and around us, eventually dying a quiet death in another place or dimension with which we are unfamiliar. We reflect off some of these things, and absorb others, basking in the glow of a pastel sunrise above a dark green tree line, holding in our hands a poetic epic that fills a dark Saturday night with a well lit Sunday morning.

Man against man as the woods open their doors, fitting all premonitions in their proper time slots and in their proper sequence. Maybe we can escape what we are, or maybe we cannot. I guess the real question then, is why we would ever want to escape in the first place.

Chapter 3

It was Saturday morning, and I had a nine o'clock starting time, a regularly scheduled weekend game of golf with my good friend Al, a man of seventy something years old who is still flexible enough to kick his hand held up over his head while carrying a golf bag full of clubs on his shoulder and walking at full stride.

Al knew both my mother and father when they were all in high school, and played football with my dad. Before that, as young boys, they caddied at one of the local country clubs. Al joined our current facility with bunch of other people in a mass exodus and revolt against the owner of the place where they had all belonged for many years, the same place where he began his career as a caddie. I never knew him, except by name and reputation. He was weird sort of guy who stood around and stared at people. I always got the feeling that he was trying to make people uncomfortable or intimidate people for some reason, only known to him. Whenever I entered the pro shop,  I would see Al standing around, but never spoke to him before that day, a long time before this Saturday, when I finally asked him if I could play with him, if for no other reason than I was tired of playing alone all the time, and he was always hanging around anyway. Al was teeing off on the first hole, so I hurried out, and asked if I could join him. He nodded without saying anything, so I hit my shot, and off we went.

It was sometime near the end of June. My brother Mike called earlier in the week and said he was coming home for the weekend. He had been living with his family in the Boston area for the past twenty years or so, and we had not seen much of each other over those twenty years, except for an occasional visit to his home, wherever that may have been at the time.

I decided to keep my golf date with Al, despite the fact that Mike said he would be at the house on Saturday morning. I was looking forward to seeing him again, but could sense somehow that seeing him this time was not going to be pleasant. I was nervous all morning, and do not even remember how I played that day. I was just going through the motions, thinking all the while of what I would find when I returned home.

Ma started preparing for Mike's visit by going to the local IGA store down on the corner, and buying all kinds of food, especially all the Polish delicacies that Mike grew up eating, but did not get a chance to eat anymore, except on those rare occasions when he would return to Auburn.

The summer before this summer, we drove to Boston, at Mike's urgent request, telling us that something was going on between him and his wife, and he wanted us to be with him. It turned out that his wife was filing for divorce, and that he was just served with the first set of divorce documents. Mike said that he was really surprised by this entire series of events, and that despite the fact that things were never good between him and his wife, he did not expect a divorce. He said that he spent the last twenty years wrapped up in his work in an effort to give his family what he thought they needed, and now this was all coming to an end. Ma, Lou, and I were happy we honored his request, and went to Boston to do whatever we could to help.

I live in the family house of well over sixty years with my mother and two cats. This is the house where I was raised, and where I have spent some of the best and some of the worst moments of my life. It is a huge thirteen room house that was built sometime in the 1850's, and is filled with over fifty years of memories. I have an art studio in a room that is attached to the rear of the house. My father built this studio room as a back porch storage area for many years, until art became my vocation. The computer that I use to do my writing used to be up on the second floor of the house, on an antique desk that had a roll-top attached to it, until Mike and Lou decided, one day in their youth, to take the roll-top and smash it to pieces. The house itself was a two family dwelling before my father set out to make it a one family home, and proceeded to remodel it. Right about the time my two brothers destroyed the roll-top, they also demolished an old spinet piano, and the two car garage that was at the back end of the driveway that ran about one-hundred fifty feet along the side of the house. I never could figure out why they went on their destructive rampage of selected antiques. I wish I still had this desk, and the two car garage, and the piano too. I wish many things that happened never happened. I wish didn’t't do many things that I did. Regrets, I guess you call them. I regret many things that I did. This weird sort of emptiness lives inside of me, an emptiness that never seems to go away. It permanently inhabits a space all of its own, that is detached from every other part of my being. It lives in me like I live in this big old house. Day after day, only the time changes. The reality remains the same.

Now I write in a corner of the downstairs living room, underneath the curve of a beautiful spiral wooden staircase, and inside the curve of a wooden bookcase that my father built when he remodeled the living room. The first step of the stairway sits about five feet from the front entrance that used to serve as access to the upstairs apartment. I moved my computer as a direct result of Mike eventually coming to live with us. Because things change, sometimes unexpectedly, and sometimes more than you can ever comprehend.

Mike said he was bringing a lady friend home with him for his visit. We did not even know he was seeing anybody. Not that it mattered, it was just a surprise. We had not seen much of each other since that previous autumn, when Mike came home to spend a couple days, and to talk. We went to dinner at the Gould Hotel in Seneca Falls on a Saturday night, and ate until we could not eat anymore. Mike had a habit of doing that. He would roll up his sleeves, and eat and start to sweat from the effort. We also sat round at watched some football games on television.

Lou stayed home with Ma while I went to the golf course. The day was sunny and warm, and the golf was what it was. I had this overriding fear that something was very wrong with Mike. I had been having bad dreams for a long time, and Mike had made a few strange phone calls home. I did not want to look at what I was seeing. I was restless for a long time prior to that day, and it affected my painting, writing, and my golf game.

When I returned home from the golf course, Mike and his lady friend were not home. Ma said that they were there for a while, but then went back to the Holiday Inn on North Street. I started to eat my lunch and sat around talking to Lou, who was home for the summer from Norfolk, Virginia, where he is a teacher at Old Dominion University. Lou comes home every summer for a few months, because the weather is cooler than the summer heat of coastal Virginia, and he gets to spend some time with Ma, relax a little, and play some golf. The television was playing as we sat in the living room, it was always playing, and it was always there. The summer heat was beginning to intensify, but the living room was cool and darkly lit. There is a big picture window on the east side of the house, just over the side porch, with a huge soft maple tree next to the sidewalk that is next to the porch. The side porch winds around the house from the front, giving entrance to either the front door or the kitchen. Most visitors to our house enter through the kitchen door. If you enter through the front door, your have never been to our house before, or you have come with someone who has not been there either. The roof of the porch keeps all the sun from entering the downstairs, and keeps the downstairs cool in the summer time.

We supplement our heat with a wood stove in the winter. The upstairs stays warm all the time, as the wood heat rises, and because it gets sun all year round, at least when the sun is shining. Winters thirty miles southeast of Lake Ontario can get really cold and damp, especially during the shortest days of November and December. The sun only seems to shine when the temperature goes to zero. Then the skies clear and the winds pick up, usually after a bout of around a foot of lake effect snow that forms as the direct result of cold air that comes from the north passing over the warmer waters of the lake, and if the wind is blowing in your direction, the snow can drop at rates of two inches or more per hour. It can and does get depressing some times. It is the nature of the environment. We average about one hundred thirty inches of snow per winter. The cold and freezing temperatures kill off the bacteria, giving things a fresh chance to grow again in the spring. They say it is good for us. All I know is that the cold hurts, and the lack of sunlight makes it even worse.

Ma came into the living room and had a worried look on her face. She said that Mike really looked bad. I sat in the big easy chair recliner with my head turning from side to side and my mouth full of food as I listened to Ma and Lou describe how Mike was thin, gaunt, and pale, and that he looked somewhat green in color, kind of like he was right out of a picture of people from the Nazi concentration camps. My head felt heavy and very large as it moved in unison with the two voices that were telling me the beginning of a horror story. I felt like a ventriloquist's dummy, my mouth voicing an occasional empty response, and my head turning around and around on a swivel as the rest of my body remained stationary. I started to feel trapped and uncomfortable, and my skin started to tingle and crawl, as it bunched in a tight knot at the very top of my head. There was nothing pleasant about this day. I continued to eat my lunch and waited, in a frightened silence, as I watched the invisible images that came from the television screen flash in front of me. Only the continuous slamming of the kitchen door, as Ma kept going in and out, registered on my brain.

Mike and his lady friend finally arrived back at the house. From where I was sitting in the recliner chair, I could see Mike's head pass in front of the picture window as he walked on the porch toward the kitchen door, from where he disappeared into the kitchen. He made the left turn from the kitchen and entered the living room. His entrance into the room distracted me from the television. I stood up to greet him with a handshake, and immediately noticed that his face was smaller than his moustache, and that he seemed to weigh about a hundred and thirty pounds, with a gaunt steel green ashen white complexion. Mike played tackle on the high school football team, and went to Holy Cross on a college football scholarship. He was also on the track team. Tackles and hammer throwers are pretty big guys, but Mike now looked literally like all he was, was skin and bones. His untrimmed moustache, that looked huge because Mike's face was so small, covered his entire mouth and part of his jaw.

Mike is the only one in our family that has any facial hair. I have tried to grow a beard many times, but can only get through about four days without shaving. The sandpaper beard that I inherited from my father starts to itch so bad that I have to shave it off. Besides, I look stupid in a beard. Mike taught me how to shave one night when I was about ten years old. He said my moustache was getting too dark, and then he led me into the bathroom, put some shaving cream from a can in the palm of my hand, gave me a razor, and told me to shave. He watched in the strange green light of the small downstairs bathroom just off the kitchen as I removed the lather from my upper lip, taking the dark hairs with it. The whole scene was like a neon surreal painting reflected in the mirror in a strange green-blue-yellow light, as the dark doorway to the laundry room stood ominously behind us.

I remember going to the high school football fields and training facilities with my brothers as they prepared themselves for the upcoming year of football games, basketball games and track meets. Those summer afternoons were beautiful and quiet, as we were usually the only ones at the stadium. Ma would occasionally go with us, and kick a ball through the uprights or take some movies of what we were doing. I was relegated to chasing footballs, and running around. Ma was always an inspiration to me, and always gave me pointers on how to kick a football or hit a baseball whenever I got into a slump, a little later on in my life when I had my chance to participate. On these particular summer days, I was just a kid and usually got to take my turn at trying whatever it was Mike and Lou were doing. Most of the time it was a half-hearted attempt that was never good enough. I wanted to do it just like them, but it never seemed to work out that way. So I chased footballs, and watched angrily as they practiced all those things that looked so easy to them, but were a source of frustration for me. I was totally intimidated by their prowess, an intimidation that would stay with me to this day. It got so I would rather look at the skies and landscapes around me instead of trying to do what I could not do. It was a pleasant release from the drudgery and turmoil that I shared vicariously with my brothers as they entered their arena of battle. They were practitioners of the art of discipline, and a fine example for a little kid. But there was always this sinking kind of feeling in my stomach that I was aware of even then. It was a constant companion that lived in me, and that I identified as pain, a nebulous, nameless entity, without substance. But the sinking feeling was, and is, always there nonetheless.

  

One day out in the discus field, as I was retrieving a discus, I happened to look up at the sky, as has always been a habit with me, when I caught a glimpse of a glider airplane drifting effortlessly through the air. My eyes followed its path as it cut the high blue sky in two, when it suddenly started to make a gradual nose dive into a wooded area a few hundred yards past the fences that surrounded the fields. I felt nothing in particular, as the amazing sight of this cross falling from the sky disappeared into some trees. I think I mentioned it to my brothers, but I do not really remember. The light blue sky turned a little colder and harder. We read a story about the accident the next day in the local paper. The pilot of the plane was killed.

It's funny how they say that past lives have a big impact on what happens to us in this current life. Past life events filter the pace and texture of our current reality. The plane falling from the sky seemed totally expected and normal. There was no apprehension, no fear or panic. Though I was just a little kid, it just seemed like another part of the day.

I took a deep breath as I stood up to greet Mike as he entered the living room and I could feel the bottom of my stomach fall out as the image of my brother, in his current state standing in front of me, imbedded itself in my memory. I extended my hand to shake his hand in our usual form of greeting each other. We were standing in the middle of the living room when I asked Mike, “How's it going?", for lack of anything better to say. Mike just kind of nodded and looked confused. His lady friend was standing at his side, Louie was standing in front of his chair, and Ma was leaning against the doorway that Mike had just passed through, with her right shoulder against the door jamb with most of her weight on her right foot, and holding a stirring spoon in one of her hands. The living room seemed very small all of a sudden, becoming overcrowded and dense.

That was the last deep breath I would take for a very long time. God, was I afraid. What the hell was wrong with him? He looked like death warmed over. What was he doing here in this condition? Who the hell was he, anyway? I did not recognize him. An emaciated prisoner from a Nazi death camp right here in our living room. I looked at the television again, and wondered what the hell was going on. I did not need this.

I thought back to another time some years before, when I walked through that same doorway, home from school for lunch, with my sister Francine trailing behind me. The Price Is Right was on television. As I looked into the living room I saw this sickly looking semi-bald man in a wheel chair sitting in the middle of the room. Ma was cooking at the stove in the kitchen, and said, “look who's here." As I looked at the man, I wondered silently, who it was. After what seemed like an eternity, that was in reality probably only about a couple seconds, I realized that the man was my father. Sherm had a brain tumor, and had undergone a series of cobalt radiation treatments at the VA hospital in Syracuse. He was unconscious for a very long time, but due to my mother's constant attention and prodding, he eventually came out of it and regained consciousness.

I remember shaking hands with Sherm in the reception room at the VA before he was admitted for a series of tests to find out why he was not feeling right. He was wearing his regular clothes, as he disappeared for a few minutes. The next time I saw him he was wearing those familiar dark and light green VA pajamas, with the VA bathrobe, holding nothing in his hands but his shaving kit. As I looked up at him from my lower vantage point as a child, I could see how young and handsome he looked, when suddenly a deep seated feeling of total fear and panic swept over me. This feeling seemed irrevocable, and shook my nervous system with wave after wave of bone chilling terror. I stood motionless, looking at my father's handsome face, while at the same time trying to contain this raw feeling of fear and panic that was sweeping through my nervous system. It was not easy to stand there, with so much activity happening in my invisible world of consciousness that no one else could see, feel, or comprehend, and act as though nothing was wrong with the world, and give no hint of the enormous power and shock that was shaking my very being. 

I learned to repress and hide these kinds of things very early in life, even though I could feel them, and identify with what it was that was happening to me. We were always told to try to stay positive and look on the bright side of things. I was a child with great instincts, and a great understanding, which at the time was also instinctual, of the way things were in regard to my experience, and how that experience related to things in general. My instincts, especially for survival, would carry me through the rest of my life.

As we entered the kitchen that day, FE and I were laughing, happy to see Ma at home at lunch time, and grateful to get out of school for a little while. After seeing my father in the wheelchair, I did not feel happy anymore. He was home again, and part of the family. Somehow, I did not know him. He was not the same man that I shook hands with at the VA in the waiting room, looking at his delicate, gentle face that was a handsome silhouette against the dimly lit ceiling. There, at the VA hospital, he smiled and joked a little, kind of telling me not to worry. Sherm never panicked, and never let on how he was really feeling, and always tried to stay positive, so the rest of the family followed his, and Ma's example. Why isn't he going home with us, I asked myself? Why is he staying here? Jesus I was scared, I was shaking on the inside, and calm on the outside, as terror continued to rush inside me, and fill my being.

I eventually forgot Sherm for a while since that was the only way I could survive. Even when I went to visit him in the hospital, I forgot him. Ma was all we had at home with us, she was always there, she was our safety net. I was too afraid to worry about what any body else was going through, and I was just a little kid. My hands were gripping the edge of an airplane wing as the plane was speeding through space, and I was holding on with all my strength, trying not to let go.

My brothers were gone to college, and now someone else who I did not recognize was in the living room in place of my father.  He was not the same man I left standing in the VA waiting room with his shaving kit in his hands. That man I said good-bye to in Syracuse, had been replaced by someone else, an imposter. I felt a shield go up around me, a wall that reflected everything off me and back into the environment, and I never letting anything through this shield except those things I wanted to get through. Sherm and I did not say anything that I remember when I finally recognized who he was and went to greet him as he sat in the wheelchair, we just shook hands. Sherm looked really nervous and uncomfortable, like he could sense what was going on, like he sensed what I was thinking and feeling. What did FE think about all this, I wondered to myself in silence? Why didn't I ask her? 

So here I was again, standing in the middle of the living room, listening to the television in the background, talking to my brother Mike. After we shook hands and exchanged some small talk, Mike turned and introduced me to his lady friend, telling me her name was Charlotte. She had semi-blond highly styled hair and was wearing purple shorts and a light colored short sleeved blouse. I shook her hand, which she pointed at me anxiously, looked into her eyes, said hello to her. Charlotte had a deceitful smile that unsettled me all the more. For some reason then and there, I wanted to tell her to leave and go back home, and I did not want to bother with her. She looked weird with a strange look in her eye, and my dislike for her was immediate. The rest of that day became a blur. I looked forward to going to sleep, to my only escape, and to not thinking of what tomorrow would bring.

Mike came home by himself that night, and talked to Ma until very late. I do not know what they talked about, but I could hear their voices through the kitchen ceiling, which is directly below my bed and bedroom upstairs in the house. Mike ate some of the Polish delicacies that Ma prepared for him earlier that day, before he went back to the hotel. I finally closed my eyes and fell asleep.

Echo Chanter

Chapters

1-3