The World According to Chuck

I’ve said this before, although that’s sort of silly given the last week or so, dipping into the column vault. I will, though, say it again:

What I do here is not about self expression. Self expression is a tattoo, a bumper sticker, a poem in a drawer, a buzz cut, a blog.

Writing is about readers. For me. Readers, and a check in the mail. Mostly readers though. The checks aren’t very big.

So my responsibility, self assigned, even though I’ve had the freedom for the past eight years to write pretty much whatever I want, minus a few bad words, is to not be boring, mostly. Make some jokes. See if I can glean a constant or at least a familiar feeling out of my measly observations and trivial experience. And try not to repeat myself too much (good luck with that).

This — archival footage, sort of — is different, though. I apologize to those of you who’ve read it all before, bought the books, follow the column, check the blog. I’m sweeping stuff into a pattern for my own amusement, but also because I have old friends who are new readers.

These are Facebook friends for the most part, and as I see their names and pictures they’ve fallen into place in my life. Most of them are from high school and college, and a few share with me a couple of summers, some of the happiest times in my life, singing and dancing in a little dinner theater in a small corner of a southwest state. You know all this, many of you.

This has been on my mind, then. This, and them, and then. And today, for whatever reason, probably the same reason I wrote it five years ago, I’m thinking of

One Particular Spring
(Originally published 4/28/2004)

I have been chasing after moments my entire life.

I want to snag them, slap them in some amber and study them. I want to know what will happen, what might, what could, what did. I am a temporal archeologist, looking for answers in slivers of time.

There’s a subjunctive sense about part of this; I look at a particular moment and wonder if it will mean something someday, and what. But we can’t, we can’t know, we can’t have any idea at all, so mostly I just look back, see how it all turned out, and hope maybe I’ll learn something.

I’m not talking about choices, although choices are important. The decisions we make in life, though, are tempered by a lot of things, among them our sense of morality, and fear. Keep the baby, take the job, return the wallet, hold your tongue: Minor or major, these are the choices we make that send us spinning down life.

But there are other moments when things happen, coincidences and random encounters and just odd things, and those are the times I like to look at and remember, and wonder about. And lately I’ve been thinking about Butch.

His name was Allen, but we called him Butch and I don’t know why. He was, among other things, an actor. He was a big man, tall with broad shoulders and huge hands, and movie star looks. If he had been born 30 years earlier, I could see Butch in those 1950s epics, driving chariots or scaling castle walls. He had an epic look.

His best friend was Paul, who happened to be my best friend, so it was an uneasy relationship at times. We tended to circle each other, a little wary. Still, we were friends of a sort, and then one day he did me a favor.

I’d left college for three years, trying some adventures and then working to earn enough money to return. At the end of my first year back, my savings were history and I needed a job, and this is where Butch came in.

He’d worked the summer before at a dinner theater, and even though by this point Butch had left town, heading for bigger dinner theaters and, we assumed, eventually Hollywood, he came back for visits and that spring he decided I should take his old job.

I’ve written about this little dinner theater before; it was a nice gig for college students, steady pay and fun, but singing and dancing weren’t exactly jumping out from my resume. So Butch had to twist my arm a bit.

He drove up the morning of the auditions, hovering around me like a mother hen, giving me advice, telling me to relax, making sure I had my music, and whispering in the ear of the director from time to time. Whether or not this made the difference, I don’t know; Butch said I did it myself. I think I probably got some help.

The job was mine, though, and I had a good summer and I met a cast member and fell in love, and so on. My life would have been different, no question. So I owe Butch one.

A couple of weeks later, Butch came back into town for a visit. He and Paul went to a restaurant and sat in the bar, talking and drinking. In the dining room, a young woman was having dinner with someone she really didn’t want to be with, much less be seen with. She got up to leave, finally, and now I have my moment.

I wasn’t there, by the way. I can still see it.

The young woman heads for the door, glad to be done with an awkward dinner. She passes the bar on her way, and Butch sees her. He’s met her a couple of times, knows her slightly, and he calls out.

Butch is not someone she wants to see, either, at this particular moment. So she ignores him and keeps walking. Paul is not paying attention to any of this.

This is where I freeze the frame, and tell you what would happen, and why I take this moment out from time to time to look at, and wonder about.

A few months later, Paul would move to Seattle. He’d call me and describe the Northwest in glowing terms, and I’d eventually follow him out here.

The young woman heading for the exit would, in a year or so, stand one day on a hill overlooking the red rocks of Sedona, and marry me.

And later that night, after leaving the restaurant, Butch would fall asleep at the wheel on a desert highway and die.

It’s just a moment, I know. A chance encounter between three people whose lives and actions were and are inextricably bound with mine, on a pivotal night. A moment that now belongs to me.

Looking back, I have great affection for all three of these young people, and for that one particular spring. Paul is still my friend. My wife is still my wife.

And Butch is now forever young, reminding me and others of a spring of change, when most of us had lots of life to yet live, and one of us didn’t, and none of us, of course, had any idea at all.

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BONUS – Below are six minutes, a highlight reel of the show the summer we got married. I’m the one with the beard trying to dance the Charleston. Julie is the one with the lip.