August 26, 1983
Good morning.
The day begins with the quiet before the madness of
customers: a container of OJ, a glimpse at The New York Times, and a moment of
reflection.
We seem to have arrived at yet another great moment in time,
a conjuncture of importance that comes with Jimmy’s return to Passaic.
It hardly seems as if three and a half years have passed
since his last being here.
He seemed to live in Towaco for an eternity.
This has much to do with his infatuation with Ginger.
A huge portion of Jimmy’s soul inhabits that large house,
like smoke rising from its chimney into its wooden rafters, embedded permanently
along with the scent of burning wood.
Jimmy and I spent a number of evenings seated in front of
the stone hearth, talking, playing guitars, listening to classical records.
It was the earthiest of places, full of last century’s wholesome
feelings, and yet close enough to civilization to seem practical.
In fact, too close, with civilization creeping closer inch
by inch, hemming in that little hill so that you could not go a mile in any
direction without running into walls of concrete.
I remember one Christmas climbing up that hill with rain at
its bottom only to find the top covered with snow, making me realize that each
visit there was traveling into another time and into another world, a magical
world that somehow defied the temptation of civilization during those years
when Jimmy was there, and is perhaps part of what attracted him there.
And for those three or so years, I often found Jimmy
puttering around outside, digging the earth with his hands, painting in one of
the remote rooms upstairs, tending gardens, clearing stone and glass he found buried
in the slanted back yard.
Each time I visited him; Jimmy was up to something there.
Yes, he and I both understood that it would not last –
everything came to an end eventually.
But at the time, the end of dreams such as this were hard to
visualize.
Jimmy appeared to have found his place in the world,
becoming the Merlin character he so envied from the Mary Steward books, the
aging Merlin who was learning the arts of the earth.
I thought the end would come differently than it did, that Mrs.
Fennelly would finally come to realize that the place was just too much to
handle for her to keep up alone and would sell it back to civilization and the
tide of progress – which always tends to ruin thins like this in the supposed journey
onto better things.
I think this is why Jimmy worked so hard, struggling to delay
that inevitable day, knowing down deep in his heart, even he couldn’t keep it
back forever.
And even though he had minor victories, it was always a
losing battle.
But even the struggle was a delight: the smell of lilacs in
season, the grinning faces of the orange button marigolds, the gray faces of
the dusty millers, and for three seasons, he struggled to grow radishes,
carrots, pumpkins and tomatoes, stirring them up out of the soil like children,
green umbilical cords clinging to them as he gave them birth.
He hoed up the thick black soil, dug, planted and even
begged for those plants to grow, raising them from seedlings in the kitchen
when it was still too cold outside to plant, even after the thaw, they hanging
in pots from every window, he petting them like pets, their green limbs
overflowing their pots, like green rain, sweeping down, creating veils
throughout which he could squint out at the world beyond.
The sunlight through these veils alone created a kind of
magic.
But there had to be a price for all this, and part of this
was watching the woman he loved drift away.
For much of what he did in this magical world involved her
with the presumption that if he created paradise, she might be enticed, he
always assuming that paradise required two people.
Jimmy made Ginger into a goddess long ago, and I fully
believe that he thought of her when he tended his flowers and plants, she the
greed buds he prayed would blossom into something grand, her face in each of
the flowers he tenderly caressed, he holding her at each stage, at 17 when he
met her, and 22, when she left him at Pine Street, and on and on, each a growing
monument to a magical time we all knew could not last.
I like to think he tried to protect her from the inevitable
pain. Oh, yes, there had to be pain – for in the end, even Eden came to an end,
and in fact as much as Jimmy wanted this to be Eden, it was not.
He and she were two souls with differing visions of the
world.
Jimmy was essentially a mystic with a hazy view of the real
world. He was not a dreamer the way many were. He understood the darkness and
evils that could work their way into the deluded dreamer. He simply avoided the
whole issue, pretending such things did not exist when he knew they did.
To me, early on, it was Ginger who attempted to blind
herself to what the real world was about, making awakening all the more
painful.
In Eden, it was knowledge that devoured Eve – ambition for
something more. Ginger seems to want to be something more than she is, and
wants Jimmy to be something, too – and seems to see Jimmy as wasting his
talents.
Jimmy could have become president had he wanted it.
Ginger seemed to learn from Jimmy the rudiments of survival,
but having learned them, began to grow beyond him and away from him, using Buddhism
to obtain something Jimmy could not provide, meeting others who could help her.
She would be something someday with Jimmy or without him.
Now, Jimmy returns here, devoured by Beowulf’s dragon,
learning for the first time that Ginger is not a goddess at all, but a dark
queen whose sin – the need to be more than she is – cannot be erased merely by
Jimmy’s love.
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