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Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Reminding ourselves of the best in people

      This is mostly true to the best of my exhausted memory. I spent so much of my life storing useless information in my head I forgot about the moments that are what it is. I'll update or edit it later but if I let it sit here it will fester and never get done.

       The interns were always a way to place a time or age for me. My memory of those early years has been a blob for as long as I can recall. Who knows, maybe I'm hiding some trauma or maybe that's the way I am. I know it can't be awful because I always felt so much love around. That could be the way people shielded me.
     There are two intern Seans. Sean K. is a super rad dude who makes some meticulously cool stuff. I would say he's a bit nuts but that's true for all of us. The Museum is a screwed like Wonderland that way. And the other Sean. I forget his last name and I have only fleeting memories of him. Cooper talked about almost kicking his ass and he was intense.
     A supremely crucial fact to the Metal Museum and known to everyone who has ever been through that space is the space. There is no finer view of the universe's glory than the sweep of the Mississippi River and the profoundly fecund Arkansas Delta across the way. As you stand at the top of the high bluff, the river stretches a half mile across, you can look to the North and nearby are three old truss bridges carrying the world through the distribution capital. At night, you can see cargo plans lined up for hours on end. Massive rafts of barges power around the river. The bridges are over a hundred feet off of the water. From a distance, the river seems to amble along but once you are on it that it has all of the force and turbulent dynamics to always remind you that it goes where it goes.
Periodically, people would jump off a bridge to commit suicide. A poetic exit.
     Crazy Sean grew up jumping off of bridges in Philadelphia and whatnot. He timed his jump with a rock but just messed up somewhere. Instead of hitting the water in the nice pencil, he broke the base of his back. Crazy Sean was also young blacksmith strong so he managed to swim/float enough with just his upper body for a boat to be able to pick him up a few miles downstream. I heard the story but didn't see him again until years later for a reunion show. It was a big deal for him for he had to travel some hard times to make it through.
     That weekend, there was a music and culture festival put on by the Center for Southern Folklore. The Museum had a booth there and so we had all the passes we needed. There was all kinds of great music and tasty fried food and people enjoying being human. Good times. My dad handed me some cash and said to make sure Sean had fun and headed off to do some work. I was in high school, I think. We wandered around, he was all over the place in his wheelchair and just grooving along having the grandest of times. I am very unsure with responsibility but we got some beer, he gave me one. He said later he figured he was supposed to be watching me but who knows.  He had a bunch of beer and I just took my sweet time with one. The music was great was we wandered around Main Street. Little Milton came on and a party broke out in the middle of a big party. Everyone was dancing and grooving and no one more than Sean. He popped and spun his wheel chair around and up and down in a uniquely beautiful shimmy to the music. Everyone smiled at the dude in the wheel chair just making us jealous he could move like that. It was a blast and then he flipped his chair on the side, unlocked a wheel and tossed it toward a pretty blonde lady. Promptly, people looked and a big dude with thick arms and skinny legs walked over puffing up about his woman, itching to get in a fight. Sean taunted him back and I got really nervous.  He wad big and I was a really shy, weird, with the worst skin teenager. The dude looked down at Sean and got really confused. I had to have gotten the wheel back and then we found a cab. It was the prudent idea.
     "I like doing that shit to people, like what the hell am I going to do, paralyzed in wheelchair with no wheel." He told me as I moved his pillow to the cab seat. 

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