Master & A Hound—Gregory Alan Isakov
#365Songs: November 19th
I’m drawn to abandoned places. Ghost towns, desert art installations, boarded up old factories. Those places that once thrived but are now long forgotten. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a place mostly abandoned, in a Cleveland that had dropped the bulk of its population by the time I was a kid. Now, even the amusement park and Sea World a short drive away from where I grew up is weeded over, reclaimed by nature. Old rides sinking into time, echoes of laughter and joy long gone.
And the carnival that would roll into town once a year with janky rides and rigged games monitored by sketchy families more likely to rob you than award a prize. The way they’d transform an empty field into a vibrant celebration before leaving it abandoned once more, worse for wear, a few days later.
Where were you when I was still kind
Just a water treader
Waiting on the line
Just a dry gin drinker
Master and a hound
Turned a circus swinger
I’ve been drifting towards childhood lately, the most dire of the abandoned places. Friends and family lost to time, politics, life’s harsh realities. Those old streets barely changed, new generations with the same shared surnames. How similar lifestyles, socioeconomic statuses, and built-up rage trickled down through time, from Sr. to Jr. and straight into the voting booth. That feeling of grief when I was there this summer, eating a bowl of pasta in the same restaurant I worked at 35 years ago, and I was the only thing that had changed in all that time.
Oh, but the MAGA hats, the Trump signs, the resentment towards change of any kind.
How I wandered the cemetery with my kid in search of my Mom’s grave, listening for the wind to whisper directions to a location I hadn’t seen since the day we threw soil upon a wooden box. The way I sighed but didn’t cry, watching as he traced a finger across the etched name he’ll recognize but never understand.
Look, he’s coming down…
Down
Can you shake it up
Just once for me
Your little globe just so we can see
The snow blowing round your hands
Live long enough the losses build up around you, friends gone too young. The way we come to terms with how the world never quite resettles after the loss of a parent, even a complicated one — especially a complicated one.
To know grief is to understand that it’s omnipresent, underneath everything, waiting to find it’s way back to you. In a new form. For so long I thought I understood it, mastered it even, went so far as to fancy myself a voice of wisdom, shared through sound bytes and short essays to the newest members of the club. Oh, how I was wrong, how much I misunderstood that grief can never be understood by anyone.
And the wing-nut turned
The song that we both know
Sent us flying round the carnival
You can throw all your lucky coins on me
On me
A few years ago, I went to an eco grief dinner party, an experimental event designed by two ladies who had been operating a similar concept for younger adults like myself who’d lost a parent too soon. I was, without question, the least qualified “expert” in a room filled with geologists, mycologists, psychologists, and me, the lone writer and storyteller. Over the course of a long evening sharing our collective losses, and what brought us there as grief-knowers and truth-seekers, we shared our deepest fears for the future, what will be lost and how to prepare for an unknowable, unlivable world. We drank and we ate and we smoked the earth even as we grieved it, and it felt just like the gathering after a funeral — a family for one night only and lost forever afterwards, together in only in that moment over an imagined and collective loss.
The one, and perhaps only, knowable fact about grief is that it compounds over time. Every new loss begets all the losses that came before it, an aggregation of all the pain and suffering over a life lived. When a dog dies it’s as if my friends Paul and Tom died again too, as if I’m back in that old cemetery tossing flowers and soil upon my poor mother’s grave, and in those moments I can even picture all the losses that have yet to come.
So here I am. Waiting for you, friend, to join me in our newest loss. The death of a broken yet once hopeful country, where at least in our freest moments we could still dream together of a place where anything is possible for anyone — even if that was never true, it was still a stated promise, a fleeting hope. Join me, friend, in preparing for all that we’ll need to mourn together. Stand strong with me and build a wall around those more in danger than us. Pay attention, make art, speak truth.
Please, wake up. WAKE UP. Swing with me through the chaos. Let’s wander together through our inevitable grief, let’s mourn this abandoned circus together before we carry on to wherever we go from here.
~
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