Laura’s Look- With Roger McGuinn’s “The Lady” In Mind
…she, Laura she, sat up on the stage, altar
or whatever they called it in U-U church land over in Waterville that cold
winter night (Universalist-Unitarian showing an interesting weave of Protestant
schism when they joined declining forces about forty or fifty years ago and always
at the ready for the good of the cause from folk concerts to anti-war struggles),
waiting to do angel-voiced back up harmony with her friend and musical
companion on a selection of one of that friend’s homemade songs. He, Peter Paul
Markin, could tell, tell even from a row in the audience about four or five back,
that she had that faintly determined look, that certain tightening of her jaw
when she was a little bit nervous about doing some task to perfection. He
called that look her swimming stroke look, the look he would notice most
graphically when she did her little doggie paddle in some sunny land swimming
pool in California or Florida and was determined to get from point A to point B
in the pool on her own terms come hell or high water. That look however this
night was not the look that he was focused on as he got ready to do his sound
check, his own personal sound check of her performance. No, that check was not
some technician’s sound system gismo affair, far from it, he would not know
step one of such a procedure, and would in any case be waved off, decidedly
waved off, by knowing hands if he tried anything so rash. He merely lowered his
head during the performance, put his elbows on his knees, placed his hands on
his eyes and closed them. And listened.
And it was while he was doing that ritual
listening, listening to get his ear tuned in to that angel thing she beamed out
to the world, that he thought about other looks, looks that counted, counted a
lot in her favor, the ones that made him glad, glad as hell, that he was
sitting in just that fourth or fifth row seat that night, and other nights too
for that matter. The look he was thinking about had started way back when he
first met her, first met her in some Harvard Square gin mill, all smoky and
dark enough to hide in for listening to the live music, mostly country rock in
his country minute days, old Johnny Fleet’s, long gone now, of blessed memory,
when he, she too, was looking, looking for something to take the curse out of
the night, something to hold onto, hold onto tight, in a ramshackle world, a
world neither of them had created, and certainly had not been asked about
creating either. That night, the night
they met (or “re-met” but that has nothing to do with looks and so is a story
for another time), they sat together at the bar, fumbling a little at first to
say things that made sense like a lot of people, like a lot sensitive or shy
people, like a lot of waifs in this wicked old world do.
What he noticed was that she would look
straight at him when he had something to say, would look at him with a slight
whisper of a smile, her headed at a certain angle like she was urging him to go
on with what he had to say. Like what he had to say, important or not, was the
most important thing for her to hear in the whole wide world. There is a
picture of her with that look, or the instant photographic representation of that look, on the wall of
her dining room, taken up in some desolate summer music camp in New Hampshire
that she love-hate’s to attend each summer in order stay connected to her
muses. With a pinkish orange summer sleeveless blouse on and sporting a slight
summer tan which made a lady not born for colds more perky anyway she gave off
that look aura, a picture Peter Paul never tired of peeking at when he
wanted think about that look. That is the look that intrigued him, held him
to her that first night, and many nights thereafter, and still held him.
And that “still held him” was what took up
most of Peter Paul’s thoughts after he flashed on that look. He would, and
gladly, harness himself to the work, spent an eternity trying to figure out how
a woman who had had her fair share of miseries growing up, growing up in some
foreboding upstate New York farming community with farm-centered (he was being
kind here) parents, her fair share of feeling like the odd-person out as a
result, her fair share of never feeling quite good enough, her fair share of
hurts and slights could rear back and kiss the world of those around her like
that. Then he thought about her struggles to find herself over her life, her
eternal search for some mystical connection, some one-ness with universe, some
sense of purpose and some late-found written expression of that search
through her music, her simple sweet mama music. And it dawned on him then that that mystical
search, a search that he, more prosaic and this worldly-driven, could not take, was
what produced that world user-friendly look.
Oh yah,
her performance that night, that head-in-hands night. Weren’t you listening
before? I said angel-voiced back-up, didn’t I- if angels had voices, and if
they were capable of that winsome look.
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