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Song of Cecilia: assorted additions to the real-time novel

REAL NEW ABOUT BODY SURFING; OR IS IT A DREAM?
When I was young, it was more important:
Pain more painful, laughter much louder
Yeah, when I was young
When I was young
-- Eric Burdon and The Animals

Dear Cecilia,
I can only hope and pray that this finds you well and happy and at least forgiving enough to see the words for what they
are – an attempt to amend a larger mistake in ever trying to re-write the past. The present for me is filled with much new
hope and new life and I see how utterly damaging my letters of the past have been to something I want as much as you:
the simple freedom to live and let live.
While it’s true that I have lived to fulfill all my dreams and most of my schemes, the indisputable fact remains that
dreams of life with you simply will not die, not in a haunting sort of way but in a subliminal consciousness that I can’t
control even if I truly tried.
Like this morning when I awoke at three dreaming we were circling that big telescope on the hill above Victoria and you
kept dodging away from my efforts to photograph you in your flowing white sundress. Strangely, your step-brother Tom
was there and asked me for the camera so he could take a photo of both of us. He had us posing like ballerinas. Too
vivid to be true but too true not to be simply a dream, maybe a statement of something far deeper within my soul. I
couldn’t go back to sleep after that and ended up taking Babe for a run to the beach in the glistening fog.
That’s not to suggest anything other than there are moments when I suppose you feel my presence in dreams or
thoughts, too, and it’s far too much of an actual experience to try to pretend that it’s not true or valid or real. The
funniest dream a few weeks back was that we were all at your old house, minus you, celebrating Christmas and then
had to leave in a rush when Ryan told me you were on your way. As we were driving up the hill, we got caught in a
snowstorm but were able to navigate around all the other stalled cars only to find you stuck trying to come up the other
way. I woke up before finding out how that one all came out.
I’m curious if you ever have similar experiences or put any stock in how the mind works funny tricks like that with
memory and anxiety and love and fear, even hope and wonder, all human emotion for that matter? For the past year, I
have succeeded well in putting your conscious memory from my immediate thoughts and actions, realizing how
seriously damaging my writing could be for your ability to live the rest of your life free and happy.
I never meant to make you even more fearful of me but I know I did and that is something I will live with and let die for all
time as a means to achieve the artistic and literary goals I’ve set for my life. Being back in journalism as a reporter
serves me better because it brings me back to the very conscious world of objectivity, and I now fully objectively see
that making fiction from fact won’t set either one of us free, especially not me. That you set me free, also looking
objectively, has been the best thing that ever happened to me. No excuses. No bullshit. No pipedreams. I had to make it
happen myself and I had to do it on my own and on my own terms. Until then, I was always going to blame someone, or I
was always going to be angry with something.
So here I am, writing you yet again. What’s different, what’s new?
I’ve pretty much given up the Spinal Tap life, only writing a few new songs that I want to remix over time as a soundtrack
to life experiences on Highway 101. I love the fact that I have to travel 101 every day now on my commute into work,
and living back in a small coastal town has served to be the inspiration I always knew it would be. I had a grand time
recently at the Satsop River Festival reunion show where Eric Burdon was the headline act. He was far, far better than
could be imagined at 69, especially when he sang, “When I was Young,” and gave a much better performance than we
have seen from either Van Morrison or Dylan.
The beach has been cool and foggy this summer with a few amazingly spectacular days thrown in between. Went to the
Fremont Fair with Tom B. and Brian, who is now 18 and graduated from high school (he was chosen to be the class
speaker at Eastside Catholic, and did an amazing job). Greg and Lorna still come out every month and Greg’s about
done with his book on the coast. Wallace is in Chicago and happy and broke. My family still ticks on and relative peace
blesses us all. Mike just got back from Spain, Greece and Istanbul, even survived having his pocket picked. Becky cuts
hair in Juanita and turned out more beautiful than either of us could ever have imagined, too.
Does time heal wounds? No, I really think only love heals wounds. Time only makes wounds worse. I write to offer this in
healing love, not in possessive love or needful, wanting love, not in lacking love or fleeting love, but the simple fact that
love exists, which is all I was ever trying to prove in the book or the letters in the first place. It’s difficult, I know, to be an
objective, not selective, reader when much that I have written seems like an assault on all the love we truly shared and
created in our time together. I still find it magical, thoughtful, truthful, purposeful to explore in words, more so than
anything else I have ever attempted to chronicle in my life. I guess that’s also the way I always felt and will always feel
about you, too, like you are a part of my writing and a part of my soul, a part of my family. I think that’s my trinity and I
wish I could use it all to bless you or honor your spirit and beauty without fear of recrimination or consequence.
I would never in this life want you to do anything other than what you thought was best for you, like I would not trade
what I have now or what I have accomplished in the past to move forward from our marriage, certainly not at the
expense of the emotions that we wasted in anger and vain illusions of a time that is better left in the rear view mirror.
Looking forward, all I can do is smile like a headlight and try to shine a few glorious rays of memory through the foggy
dreams that remind me always that you are embedded within me in words and spirits that I might never be able to fully
understand until I can literally write no more or you begin to write back once again – hah, in my dreams on that one, I
can hear you say!
Dream on . . . and sweet dreams are made of this . . .

Dear Cecilia,

Sometimes when karma returns like wild lupines in the summer sun, like salmon to spawn, it seems to wash over me in
waves, one after the other until the seventh wave simply lifts me out of the water and lands me on the beach where I
belong all along.
That’s what my job search of the past year has done, and now I have returned to the beach of my dreams with a
position in REAL news once again – writing like I was born to do, running like I have been all my life, living exactly in
rhythm and harmony with all my natural surroundings.
On a crystal blue-persuasion day, I am officially a reporter again for The Daily World, having turned down positions in
television for KING in Seattle, a managing editor’s position in Coos Bay, a freelance gig for a diving magazine, my
Seattle Examiner’s post, a chance to work for the AP in Chicago, and, of course, halting further writing in the novel of
our love and our lives together.
I see new stories everywhere again, and they don’t just involve you and me or anything out of ordinary reality. Single
and free, drug free, pain free, free for the taking, free floating, free falling. Yes, I know freedom – finally – and it looks
like I never had to go anywhere at all except back to everything that is my soul and under my soles.
The job will allow me to stay at my beach house, improve the surroundings, expand the deck over the fish pond and
maybe buy the vacant property next door. Eagles soar above the lot just now as I write. Deer graze on my blueberry
bush. Babe rolls in the grass. A flicker pounds at the eucalyptus tree and jays cackle to drown out the barking frogs or
the hoot owls in the distant woods.
I don’t even have to move – literally and figuratively – to feel the spirit of nature all around me, and I know this new job
is just a natural and wonderful gift from God.
“Instant karma’s going to get you. It will knock you off your feet. You better recognize it brother, in everyone you meet.
“
So, how can I bestow some of that karma back to you? I know the novel about our 15 years together is not so fictional
to you so I’ve simply stopped it where it is, even if I truly believe the ending and the concluding chapters that are not
published do, indeed, clarify all that precedes it and even supersedes us as characters in this very real world. I can’t
take back what it is written, just like you can’t ever take back what choices you have made, either.
All we can do is move forward with the waves and the tides of life. Simple, if you know how to float, but damn hard if all
you do is keep flailing about.
When I was a boy romping in the ocean with my cousins, we would body surf all day, noon to night, in the perfectly
timed and evenly matched waves off the Santa Cruz coast – Rio Del Mar was our favorite spot, where my uncle often
had access to a beach house only yards from the sea. By the time my aunt finally called us back for dinner, our chests
would be scraped and scratched and bloody like we had run through brambles, and our shorts would be torn in tatters
as we always waited on the big wave and caught it time after time after time. To body surf just right, you have to get
right under where the wave eventually will break and then float in place until the back-tide begins to suck you in and
then up. Just as you rise to the crest, you then start swimming with all your might as the wave begins to curl, hurling you
forward like a surfboard sans rider for the most thrilling adrenaline jolt of your life.
Most body surfers nowadays have wet suits that give them some protection or “boogie boards” that make swimming a
secondary consideration. But we did it raw and we simply thought it was the greatest thing a boy could ever do. Stare
down a wave and master it. Become one with it. Ride it. Fly with it. Succumb to it. Submit to it. Adjust to it. And make it
your own. Be it.

Mario