Song of Cecilia -- The rock-novel begins

All original songs, writing and real-time performances

BY ANGELO M. BRUSCAS III
Copyright 2009, Real News Network and AMBIII Publishing

STRUCK BY LIGHTNING
The train pulled in with a crackling sound,
the way we laid our bodies down,
The time I stopped to turn around; And you were gone . .
.
The times you wore that haloed crown,
the things we said that were never allowed,
The train pulled out with a piercing sound;
And I was gone, gone

I was struck down, by a bolt of lightning
Running to catch the midnight train,
Shocked . . . by a bolt of lightning,
Flashing into the driving rain.

The storm came on low to the ground,
the cyclone way, upside down,
The train rolled along without a sound;
And you were gone, gone.

The times we rode across hallowed land, the lightning
bolts held in our hands,
The things we could never understand,
They're all gone, gone.

Sparks fly, like bolts of lightning,
Grinding wheels can't stop this train,
Crashing down, like a bolt of lightning
Night ablaze, through the pouring rain

The train seemed to leave the ground,
The way that light becomes unwound,
The lighting struck with a thunderous sound,
And you were gone . . .

I think of us exploring the trails at Kalaloch.
February, transition month between winter and
spring, us walking along a foggy trail and stopping to
wrap arms around each other.

You were leaning against a tree, I’m pressed against
you. Our mouths meet and tongues intertwine. We
throw our jackets to the ground and I slip your shirt
off. The moss from the tree hangs and sways
against the wind’s gentle motion. In a deep kiss, the
fog condensation rises and falls in slow motion, the
drops reach your shoulder, where they meander
down the small of your back while my fingers cross
your chest and linger at the tip of your breast and
nipples.

My tongue covers your stomach like the fog in the
air. I release you and you jump into the warmth of
my mouth where wetness meets warmth and back
again.

-- Cecilia in a 1988 letter to Mario

Song of Cecilia is a literary journey of love and a lyrical joyride
into the triumphs and depths of marriage and divorce through
these ever-shifting sands of economic, moral and social turmoil
– a novel about the mythic and mystical music two lovers create
when they begin to believe and then shatter the myths they adopt
for their lives.

The contemporary mystery-romance storyline of 112,000 words
unwinds as a modern twist on “The Divine Comedy” with
obvious similarities to “The Great Gatsby” -- told through the
eyes of a writer in the maze of a major life transformation; the
spiraling economy has put an end to his newspaper, sparking a
renewed search for personal redemption and reconnection with
the lost love and the lost music of his life. His lost love has taken
on the myth of St. Cecilia, martyred for the love of God, sacrificed
for the music of angels.

The central theme is the universality of love, the endurance of the
love of friends and family, even the love of God, through the love
of writing or rediscovering the love songs within us all: That joyful
noise of life.

The story is highlighted by the “language of love” crafted by the
central characters, Mario and Cecilia, in letters, songs, poetry,
factual experience and fictional expression, assuming and then
consuming their namesakes in the myth of an angel and the
myth of the patron saint of music .

Song of Cecilia
Chapter Nine

I’m angry at him, but I’m choosing not to act on my anger. I considered leaving him a note telling him to stay
away and why I want him to stay away. But I think of how he would keep my letter; it would be the only thing
he’d ever have that I’d written and I know I don’t want to do that. I always hated his ‘no one loves me but I
love you and want the best for you, but I can’t stand the way things are’ letters that I read once or not at all
and throw them away. I hate that shit and refuse to participate in it. Am I being a hero by being strong and
silent, or just another version of a coward? Too sensitive, or too insecure? I don’t fucking know. Where are
my songs? What happened to the poems?

-- Cecilia in a 1988 letter to Mario explaining she was leaving her third husband to wait for the songs, the
poems and the love of Mario.



                          SONG OF CECILIA: Real Good News From the Beach

Mario was never more proud to be married to Cecilia than when she came to visit him at work for the quarterly book
sale under the Post-Intelligencer Globe, a chance to buy all the new books sent to the newspaper for 10 percent of their
cover value. He not only loved seeing her beauty in the setting where he had first fallen instantly in love with her, he loved
what she read even more. He loved searching for hidden treasures in the piles of abandoned titles, hoping he might
find a nugget she would enjoy reading some day. Their love was not just a physical love; it seemed to be an intellectual
love of the highest order.

Their last date together had been like that, all about books and literary bravado. It was a glistening, warm Saturday in
mid-October, just four days before his life would forever change. He had gone for a run early and they had rushed out to
the Seattle Book Festival at Sand Point to catch appearances by noted rock writer Charles Cross and author Jonathan
Raban, one a Seattle native and the other a major new literary transplant to the landscape.

Arm in arm as usual, trading kisses and smiles often, and locked in a spirit of discovery and adventure together, they
had walked and talked with people spanning the universe of local literary existence. First, going in, he had literally run
into the head of one of the state’s leading watchdog groups on nuclear energy. Long ago, when he was a real news
reporter assigned to cover the Hanford nuclear reservation, the two had many wide-ranging conversations and the
activist from Heart of America still said he always respected The P-I and Mario for their dedication to the cause that
never would disappear in our lifetime. Next, it was former sports columnist/Intermediate Eater author John Owen, who
was with his wife to see their granddaughter read from her first published book. Then it was Charles Cross, and Seattle
City Councilman Nick Licata, someone who had penned a fantasy book in his spare time from a job that Mario had
always encouraged him to run for back in the days he was the maverick City Hall reporter. They had a warm
conversation with Diane Mapes, another upcoming Seattle writer who dated back as a close friend to the wild west
days of his City Editorship at the Skagit Valley Herald.

As they prowled, the two of them unearthed a pristine hardback copy of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” for just $10,
and bought the new book on the Mariners written by his newspaper colleague in arms when it comes to true sports-
writing journalism, the great and fabulous Art Thiel. Mario had been touched to tears to see that he had been mentioned
affectionately with many others of The Sporting P-I life in the forward to the book. Then they went to see Raban speak
outside in a wonderfully warm setting against Lake Washington and the Cascades rising in the background.

With his charming personality, Raban was in the midst of explaining the allegory at the heart of his new novel,
“Waxwings,” where he told of observing birds that flock from one overly ripe berry bush to the next until the birds
become deliriously drunk and bloated from their feasting on nature’s beauty and their wings become too heavy to fly.
They drop from the sky and become easy prey for predators.

He talked about being English and observing American sports, like baseball. He thought that every time a ball left the
field of play it was a home run, and he couldn’t understand why the scoreboard didn’t record runs whenever someone
hit a foul ball. He talked of going bald and finding a great use for the American baseball cap, just like Mario. He talked
of finding a writer’s voice and being true, being real, with the story.

On their way out, Mario and Cecilia ducked under the big tent’s opening behind Raban, who was heading for a
cigarette. Later, Mario stumbled into him again, this time just sitting down to start signing copies of “Waxwings” as a
special promotion for Third Place Books. He bought a copy, having never read Raban’s work before, and the author
kindly wrote, “For Mario, all the best wishes, Jonathan Raban.” He felt like a waxwing bird leaving with all his fruit of
pure, ripening knowledge, friendship, future; and the happy couple seemed to be walking on rays of sunshine as they
returned arm-in-arm to the silver Dodge van that had taken them across the West and back to life’s fullest adventures
over the past 15 years.

Mario had hoped they would make love in the afternoon after returning home, but they did not. He cooked steaks for the
final time on his well-maintained patio barbecue that Cecilia had once given him in a combined gift with his parents;
they had dinner and watched The Sopranos on HBO, and the day ended uneventfully with peace and reading like most
occasions. He might even have fallen asleep in his recliner and started snoring. He could not remember anything else
about what had happened from that point on until the following Thursday night and Friday morning when everything
changed and the next 60 seconds became an eternity left him writing the very same story to this very day. He felt like
Jack London stuck in San Francisco during the first big quake, recording the horror and the triumph because there was
simply nothing else he could do but write.

Dear Cecilia,                                                                                                      (From the beach, May 2009)

Here is another of the final chapters you have not yet received, and I now have 11 of the 12 completed, with the book of
our love truly taking shape.

The chapter I am now finishing includes another true and happy vision I had of my grandmother as I was getting out of
the shower yesterday, remembering the first song I can ever recall learning at her weekly “Joy Club” where she taught
Christianity to the neighborhood children. I remembered how my great-grandmother Kynaston used to whack me with
her cane if I ever got out of line during the Bible sessions, since I must have been only three or four years old and
restless with curious energy all the time. Joy Club was not always a joy for me, but I learned the fear of God all the
same, and before you became my patron saint of music, these were my true musical roots.

The song goes:

Good news, Good news
Christ Jesus lives today,
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
Good new, Good news,
Christ Jesus lives today!
You ask me how I know he lives?
He lives within my heart.

As those words popped back into my head, naked as a jaybird, I began laughing and crying tears of joy, realizing that
my grandmother was with me and giving me another memory of pure love that had to be a part of all that I am writing to
you and to God and to anyone who reads these words. I remembered right then one of the last moments I shared with
Grandma Copsey when she was in the hospital only weeks before her death. I had arrived to visit her about 45 minutes
ahead of my mother, and was surprised to find her fully awake and unattended when I found her room.

The orderly and nurse were on lunch break, and Grandma was watching the Pat Robertson show on TV, even though
she was paying no attention to it whatsoever. Despite her alleged advanced stage of Alzheimer’s, she recognized me
as soon as I walked in.

“Hi Angie,” she smiled. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve had to go to the bathroom for hours and there’s no one else around
to help me. Can you help me out of this bed?”

Befuddled by all the tubes connected to her and the fact that her hospital gown seemed to be loosely tied to
accommodate the IV injections, I figured I had to move Grandma and the entire medical machinery across the room
and certainly didn’t want to do something that might further endanger what precious few minutes she still had on this
earth. So I pressed the call button for a nurse and helped Grandma sit up so at least she would be ready to go when
someone official arrived. Of course, no one came and Grandma insisted that she could make it if only I would help her.

“Just unhook this tube in my arm, and we can do it,” she said as the hospital gown fell down to reveal a fully naked
Grandma I had never seen before. Nearly 100 years old, and here she was totally nude and covered with the bulging
veins and wrinkled flesh of life, with her grandson walking her to the bathroom for one of life’s most basic needs –
maybe a need greater than love!

By the time I had her situated on the raised toilet, the nurse finally arrived in a panic, and couldn’t believe I had been
able to move her, taking over and closing the door as I thankfully returned to sit by her bedside.

When they returned, the nurse dressed grandma in a new gown, hooked her tube back up, and scowled as she
checked her vital signs.

“Now Marna, I don’t want you wandering around again without me,” she chided. “You don’t want to scare your grandson
or me like that again.”

“That’s okay,” Grandma smiled. “Angie used to scare me, too, so I’m just getting him back for all those years in the
past. I remember when he and his cousins would climb up on my roof. All of a sudden I would be sitting there and would
hear these footsteps, like a stampeding herd of cattle above me. And then my grandchildren would come hurling off the
roof and into the yard. Imagine the scare that gave an old grandma in her day!”

Now I had completely forgotten about those days and the fact that we did, indeed, as children build a backyard “pole-
vault” pit and high-jump landing area with huge mattress of Styrofoam my father brought home from work. And we did,
indeed, climb up on my grandmother’s house, run across her roof and jump like angels without wings to tempt the law of
gravity at its most basic and thrilling level.

“They would come running back just laughing, and then get up and do it all over again,” my grandma recalled
triumphantly.

I could only cry and cry and laugh and howl with sheer joy that even my grandmother had remembered something from
my life that I had completely forgotten – just like the song that begins this letter, the first song I ever learned in my life
from the woman who taught me more about love and about music and about God than even you, Cecilia.
I know my grandmother continues to bless me with so many visions of her love and wisdom, her patience and joy, her
spirit and wonder, her faith and hope, her voice and her songs and her love of music. I know you knew that from her, too,
and I hope to pass this back to you in the same love she gave me. I learned from Grandma Copsey that love is not
something you want or need or something you ever lack – love is something you give.

Just mediating here on all the love my grandmother shared in her life makes me cry like a baby as I write, but I realize
that I now only cry like a man – not in sorrow or longing, not in pain or loss, but in sheer, unbridled, totally exhilarating joy!
After remembering the words to the song, I could feel my grandmother laughing at my naked body as I inspected it in
the mirror, my tan lines in three shades, my skin a little floppy like hers, strange hairs growing in strange places, a mole
on my hip, my face lined and streaked with the happy tears and the drops of water beading up on my bald head.
I knew right then and there she had given me this vision as a way to eventually bring this entire book full circle, the start
to the chapter I have been unable to finish all along – a chapter for the middle of the story that describes what we did to
each other the night of our complete fall from grace, the failed attempts at reconciliation, the second bout with cancer,
and then how you just disappeared with all my love in ruins. Leaving me for good to simply write like a fool.

“You don’t need to write that anymore,” my grandma seemed to tell me.

“Your story about love is already complete, that’s the Good News. Let people read what they want about the past, what
matters is the love you have to give right here, right now.”

So I thought to myself, maybe I should go back to that first song I ever learned in life, the very first words of rhyme and
rhythm, melody and lyricism, to find the enduring love of language all over again. As I did, I began to make up new
words to fit my story here. All apologies to you and to God and to Grandma Copsey, here’s the new version in my Joy
Club:

Good news, Good news,
Saint Cecilia lives today!
She walks with me, and talks with me
Along life’s unbound ways.
Good news, Good news,
Saint Cecilia lives today,
You ask me how I know she live?
She lives within my heart.

With the living, giving love of memories of you,

Mario

POSTSCRIPT FROM MY NEW LIFE AT THE BEACH: I am sending you a photo of the most amazing thing I have ever
found on any beach anywhere I have ever been -- an agate as big as your hand, larger than an egg, that has amazing
red streaks inside that held up to the light seem to produce a three-dimensional face like in a hologram.

I had taken BigCity Mike and another friend we play poker with, David Stanley, out to the Damon Point beach for a long
walk yesterday in the amazing sun we have been having out here. The beach is rumored to be the best agate-finding
beach in the area, so the two of them started looking immediately as I was playing around with the dogs. I told them that
it wasn’t really good to look until we got about a mile down the beach since the cove we were in gets fairly picked over.
. . . And just as the words left my lips, there at my foot was the agate of all agates.

I am calling it the Cecilia Stone in honor of your love of rocks and minerals and because the face inside kind of reminds
me of the stern way you would look at me when I would propose something silly, rash and borderline absurd, like when I
see faces inside of beach rocks.

Of course, the boys wanted to walk for miles after that and looked and looked for a similar find. David also found an
agate about the size of a large marble and a pendant-size piece of jade. We stopped and talked to some veteran rock
collectors on the beach, and each time Mike made me pull out my agate to show to their truly amazed eyes. One
woman who I see out there every time I’m at the beach told me it was the biggest agate she had ever seen on the
beach and has offered to polish it for me.

As we were walking, we came upon another amazing vision of nature -- a newborn seal with its umbilical cord still
attached, left on the beach as its mother fished for food on the rising tide. Holding the dogs back and watching it from a
distance with binoculars, we waited until the tide came up to the baby and it was reunited with its mother. David had
never seen anything like this, having grown up in Texas and in a computer lab, and the week was made complete when
we came home to two deer grazing in the lot next to my house and a true-blue heron fishing in my backyard pond. It is
days like this out here that help me to realize that I have ended up in exactly the place and space I am supposed to be. I
finally feel like a part of nature again. That I belong to the earth and the landscape. That it is part of me and I am part of it.
I understand fully that you must have moved to Yakima for very similar reasons -- that you felt attached to the peace and
the serenity, the sense that you are a part of that earth and climate, a necessary change to bring you enduring health
and sanity. It is good to return to roots, to grow, to change with the seasons, to blossom in the sun and bathe in the rain.
It is in our souls, in our blood, in our destiny to be born through nature and to return to nature, and I think only the
enlightened ones ever truly learn how to embrace nature in all its fullness in this glorious life we have been given through
some natural act of sexual happenstance.

That’s naturally about all I can say. That pretty well sums up my philosophy of life from here on out until I, too, return to
nature fully embraced by the land and the sea and the sky that receives me now and the words that I write here to you.
My dog sleeps at my feet as I write this morning and a doe nests in the meadow out my window, napping, too, after
grazing on the dewy grass. The fog is rolling in with a mist that is sure to send thunder showers your way and blast
through the rest of the region to the east. It is still cool and clear out here. My view is to the southwest and all I see are
trees and sky and seagulls and berry bushes and darting hummingbirds headed for the salmonberry patch.

Should it ever grow too hot and humid out there, or should you ever need a change of scenery and total serenity, I offer
up such experiences to you as my true gift in life. I always hoped or wanted to give you such a world but never really
could at the time it might have been most needed in our life together. We sort of got there in fits and starts, but I think
this might finally be the full-circle, wholly spiritual culmination of all of our love and heart and soul and the way we
managed to make it a world of our dreams by turning our dreams into true-life realities.

I owe a great deal of all of this life view -- these wondrous experiences, the place I am in now -- to you, Cecilia, and it is
a gift I can only attempt to honor for all the right reasons in my life to come. You and I both know that inner peace and
harmony, happiness and joy, integrity and truth, are worth giving up everything to achieve. I have learned that what you
are willing to give up, nature gives back to you in more abundance than could ever be imagined. And that is the whole
truth, Amen!

With love and an agate that has rolled into my hands across the landscape of time,

Mario

THE TIDE

The sky swells with pride
The sound echoes with resolution
It is in your soul where I reside
This is the place of final solutions.

The world turns with the tide
Gravity pulls us back without confusion
It is on your wings that I now fly
This is my angelic illusion.

The rain falls from the sky
The curtain closes ‘cross the horizon
It is in your eyes where I can hide
This is our new day rising.

Time leaves us high and dry
The voices fade from recognition
It is in your arms where I will lie
This is my love beyond suspicion.

The world turns with the tide
Waves bash the shore for retribution
It is in your sails that I still glide
How could I ever refuse you?

Song of Cecilia soundtrack player:
Control chapter music selection here