Jan Verkade: Memory (1893)

" … he'll forever overlook his homecoming."

No death seems complete until the survivors attend a Memorial. These affairs range from simple to elaborate, family to community. They represent much more than merely the memory of the recently departed; they embody an utterly unique slice of the departed's community. We trivially insist that everyone's essential and nobody exists as an island, but few ever suspect the depth and breadth of anyone's circle until after that center departs. Then, it's as if the central point of orientation has left the building. Even those otherwise related to each other seem somewhat worse for the absence without that one additional degree of connection. For instance, I could have sworn my friend Gary lived as a virtual hermit these past few years, but legions showed up for his Memorial picnic, catered with a massive hauled-in barbeque rig and a separate chuckwagon bar.

I came with my requisite pocketful of words. Being a writer, I tend to carry words to every alter rather than flowers. Others brought stories, and stories flowed between the assembled people even before we'd finished supper. So very many aspects of a life. Surprising asides along many more previously unheard but unsurprising anecdotes. The departed was a reliable habituae with usual predictable patterns. Former coworkers attested to what everyone already knew. A granddaughter, too, attested to the man we already knew. He was revered even as a largely absentee. His friend Pierre testified how he and Gary had been up in Troy, a remote mountain town far off every paved road, where John Fogarty of Clearance Clearwater Revival fame owns a few hundred acres. He and his sons played music, and Gary joined in, playing a dozen or more of his original songs. Fogarty offered to take him to San Francisco for a recording session, but Gary, under his artist pseudonym, Junior Waysouth, opined that he had a truck-driving job and couldn’t get away.

He had lusted after being discovered for more than a half-century by then, only to reject the offer when it finally came. He once saved Pierre's life. He was riding shotgun with Pierre, who was driving with cruise control engaged when Pierre just went limp. Gary reached across the console and steered the vehicle to keep it on the road. Pierre came to a few minutes later, and Gary insisted he kick off the cruise control so he could switch seats and take over driving. Gary drove Pierre to a hospital where he was two days later receiving stent surgery. The doctor there said he'd survived a widowmaker thanks to Gary's quick response. He was a big fat mother hen hovering over his friends. He was also a dedicated hibernator, apt to hover in his smoky basement studio for hours and hours on end, where he'd create lavish productions of his songs complete with software percussion and self-made bass. He could have been a one-person band.

I spoke through tears. The Memorial's conducted to induce those tears that might otherwise stifle a storyteller. I said:

"Gary Bruton was undoubtedly a genius. He was so genius that his identity proved insufficient to contain it, so he, like Mark Twain and many others before him, created an alternate identity, one under which he created his artifacts of songs and stories. I should not distinguish between his songs and his stories because his songs were stories, too, just ones with stricter metering and rhyme. He was an actor who painted his backdrops with words.

"As a genius, he was capable of inspiring and disturbing. Not one of us present was not at least inspired by something he created. Likewise, none of us were able to completely resolve into full acceptance, some of his choices. The worst of those, to my mind, was his penchant for talking himself out of his genius. He could experience deep disappointment and follow that sensation into the depths of withdrawal and depression. He could be the very soul of inconsolable. He could be cruel while striving to be kind.

"He was conflicted and used that gradient to fuel remarkable flights of fantasy. He probably suffered from ADHD, but he also benefitted from it, for that could fuel his excursions into Duckland or some similarly familiar world. He was more than a keen observer. He was capable of recreating the feelings we all experienced back when an extinct experience was still commonplace. He could dredge up pasts with the best of them.

"He was not conventionally domesticatable, and I hold Suzie in considerable esteem for trying. And for sticking with the task when it seemed unlikely to succeed. She never gave up on Gary and probably knew the difference between his creative personas better than he ever did. He was a showman frequently separated from his stage. He was a brilliance who would not always leave his isolation booth. He cared more deeply than even he ever managed to say, and that’s saying something! He leaves an almost silent legacy, one of those that everyone who knew him knows but cannot explain to anyone unfortunate enough to have missed that opportunity.

"He was an undoubtedly great man filled with doubts. He was a true believer but not always in himself. He was my valued friend with whom I spent far too little time. That final year proved excruciating, and both Gary and Junior seemed inconsolable. If he were here today and listening, I would whole-heartedly absolve him of any shortcomings. I’d revel in that great mystery that was always Gary from the first day I met him. The secret might have been that he was as much of a mystery to himself as he ever was to the least of the rest of us, just like most geniuses. May we never find the answer but revel in our warm and slightly unsettling memories of his presence viewed from The Shotgun Side."

Suzie said his last wish asked her to mix with his a bit of the ashes of each of their dearly departed dogs, especially Peabody, who he rescued from an overnight truck lot in southern Idaho and who always rode on The Shotgun Side. He most loved returning home on that long, winding drive down Cabbage Hill and into the Valley. He asked that she spread that mix of ashes along that road from the window of a Freightliner cab so he'll forever overlook his own homecoming. Man and dog. If that ain't Grace, nothing ever was.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz