Certain professions should require mandatory uniforms, I believe

She was one of the most striking women I’d ever seen. Undulating, ink-black hair trailing like dark rain over delicate shoulders, eyes greener than a St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, a shape that might have prompted the Pope to look twice. Her voice was pure music, avian poetry, even when competing with the noise of the crowded bar.

I wasn’t in love, but I figured I would be within the next 20 minutes or so.

And here she was, sitting with some girlfriends at the club in which my little bar band was working. Every guy in the joint cast furtive glances her way – except for those who simply stared openly: hungry wolves contemplating a wounded lamb.

To her credit, she seemed unaware (and unimpressed) by the attention. My guess was she had grown used to it.

The band went on break and I said hi as I walked past her table; too smooth and cool to actually be hitting on anyone, y’know, just an employee of the bar being polite and all that. That’s the vibe I was going for, at least.

Maybe I hit my mark, maybe not, but one of the young ladies at the table stopped me and requested a song. It was her sister Mary’s favorite, she said. Mary, as in the raven-haired beauty of my dreams to whom I was currently not paying any special attention. There’s an art to this sort of thing and though I was at the time a clumsy practitioner, I at least knew which end of the brush to dip into the paint.

I turned to Mary, planning to say something charming and witty, but my voice got all tangled up around my heart somewhere. Seeing her up close made my knees go all funny. I struggled mightily to hide this, and failed.

“Um, yeah, we can do that tune,” I said. Everyone can do that tune. But nobody wants to. Not even Van Morrison, who wrote it and has probably made millions off the thing. It’s one of the most hated – and most requested – songs in the bar band business. Not as hated as “Freebird,” but real close. But for Mary, I’d have happily beat the tune out on my skull with a rubber mallet.

“Oh, thank you so much,” Mary said, taking my hand in hers for the briefest of moments.

What I wanted to say was, “It’s my pleasure! I love you. Will you marry me?” What I actually said was, “No problem.”

I made to stumble away to the bar, where I hoped a small shot of whisky might serve to steady my knees. Mary had other ideas.

“Would you like to join us?” she said.

I felt it took me waaaay too long to process her words and respond, but it was probably only a few clumsy seconds.

“Uh, sure, thanks,” I stammered. I sent up a quick prayer of thanks, grateful I had chosen music over plumbing as a lifelong profession. Plumbers rarely get invited to join a table of beautiful women, although they make considerably more money than do guitar players.

Mary and I spent the next 20 minutes chatting, laughing. Her direct gaze was disconcerting, disorienting, but I soon fell into the rhythm of our conversation and even managed to scare up a little wit and charm after all.

I went so far as to break my long-established rule and buy a round for the table. That left me broke, but Mary was worth it. I even liked her friends, or family, as the case must have been. Two of them, after all, repeatedly referred to her as “sister.”

And I suppose you can see where this is going. Mary was a sister, all righty. A Catholic sister. A nun. I figured it out just before going back onstage for second set.

My memories of nuns, accumulated while attending St. Isadore school as a child, are not good ones. In my youth, nuns were dark engines of rosary-fueled destruction; black-and-white bastions of God’s wrath, ready to unleash torrents of righteous punishment on any wayward fourth grader. I had been wayward a lot.

To my recollection, those nuns never dressed in “civilian” clothes and none looked anything like Mary. If they had, I’m sure my current math skills would be better than they are.

This all happened nearly 30 years ago. But I learned my lesson well: never buy drinks for married women, especially those married to deities.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530

MTRealityCheck.blogspot.com

Maybe someday I’ll be able to say goodbye, but not today

It was the first time I’d seen my son play baseball. Little League; the summer before he started middle school. Just a practice, not a game.

We’d never been sports guys, my son or I. Nothing against sports, the topic just never created much of a blip on the Taylor family radar. To the best of my recollection, the closest we ever came to sports was tossing a Frisbee at the beach. Which made it all the more impressive that Jordan was good. Real good.

His coach took me aside prior to the start of practice to complement me on all the work I’d put in with my son. He was surprised when I asked him what work he was talking about. Jordan was a natural. He could pitch, he could hit, he could run like the wind. None of that came from my side of the family.

But like I said, he was good. I stayed the entire practice. As the team ran through its exercises, Jordan kept watch on me from the corner of his eye, gauging my reaction, making sure I was paying attention. I was. I was about as proud as a father can be of his son.

I was proud of him long before that, though. Not for his sports prowess, but for something far more important: Jordan was a genuinely good kid, a good person. He had a big heart, a giving nature, empathy that stretched for miles. If the people around him weren’t happy, Jordan wasn’t happy.

By way of example, I began giving Jordan and his sister an allowance when he was six or seven. Just a couple bucks; a fortune to kids that age. That first week, he and Aubreii walked to a little gift shop two blocks from our front door. He came home with a small, plastic statue of a puppy. For me. He’d spent the first real money he’d ever had on a gift for me.

I still have that puppy and I hope to one day be buried with it.

Many years later, while working in New York City, Jordan risked his life to buy me a knock-off Rolex from a shady-looking guy in a truck parked in a back alley near Canal Street, home of shady-looking guys selling bootlegged luxury items. His phone went off while he was making the deal and the shady guy pulled a gun on him, thinking he might be a cop, or working for the cops. Jordan managed to convince him otherwise and purchased the “Rolex” for $45.

Why would my otherwise intelligent son do something so stupid? Because when he’d asked me if he could pick me up a souvenir from the Big Apple, I’d said, “Sure, get me a Rolex!”

It was a good knock-off, too. Even fooled the jeweler who resized the band for me. But it was nothing for which I was willing to risk my son’s safety. It was that important to Jordan, though, because he wanted to make me happy. He cared what I felt, what I thought of him.

He was like that.

Last Sunday, I listened as weeping friends and relatives shared similar stories. About how much he’d meant to them, how much kindness he’d shown over the years, how many people he had helped, how many lives he’d made better just by being the kind of guy he was.

The next day we buried him. He’d just turned 37 and the world is a poorer place without him in it.

His sister, younger brother and I perched on metal folding chairs in the cold, grey morning light of the cemetery as they lowered his casket into the frozen earth. The best of me went into that hole with him. I’d always thought of Jordan as the me I should have been; kinder, less self-absorbed, more caring. What sort of universe takes someone like him while someone like me lingers?

It’s not fair and I’m mad as hell. I don’t want to hear about faith, a “better place,” being called home … any of that. Maybe someday, not now. Now all I want is to see my boy again. For a day, an hour. A few minutes.

That’s not going to happen. Ever. And I just can’t come to grips with that.

I want to tell him, one last time, how much I love him. How proud I always was of him.  How much I’ve always cherished that plastic puppy statue, the video I shot that day at Little League practice, that damned Rolex.

But he’s gone where I can’t follow, that place where phone calls, texts, emails go forever unanswered. He’s gone. He’s gone. I could write that a million times and I still wouldn’t believe it.

I’ve had friends over the years who have lost children. I’ve never understood how they manage to go on. Now I know. You go on because you must, because you have no choice.

If you have little ones, even if they’re 37, don’t wait to tell them — to show them — how much they mean to you. We are, each of us, allotted only so many days on this green earth and when they’re gone, they’re gone for good. All we’re guaranteed is now, and even that is as ephemeral as an early morning’s mist tenuously clinging to a cornfield.

For my part, I plan to be better than I’ve been. Kinder, fairer, more loving. My son’s passing has left the world a little short on goodness. I hope to do my part to pick up that slack, in his memory. I don’t know how successful I’ll be at the task — God knows it doesn’t come naturally to me — but I want to try. For my boy.

MTaylor325@gmail.com

(616) 745-9530