angels revisited
now playing: bryndle, "on the wind"
today i was looking through a stack of papers for a phone number and there was a copy of our mutual angels underneath a pile of faxes and copies of crap that i seldom look at...i held it up and stared at the picture on the cover, of jayda and dylan frozen in time on a late april afternoon in 1997. they were five and seven then, now they're twelve and fourteen...more years have passed since then than they had lived at that point in time.
i remember that day quite well...standing on the side of that road with our entourage - derek dorsey, my manager...steven wellner, my producer...and susan bulkin, the photographer...and jill and the kids. we spent about an hour taking pictures on that narrow, tree-lined drive, as jayda and dylan were completely into just being jayda and dylan.
earlier that month, i had said goodbye for what i thought would be the last time to a woman whom i'd considered my soulmate - thinking it was destiny intervening and telling me that she was not to be my focus, that my work was to be my focus, and making perfect sense of it all...she was supposed to be moving away, as it was the only logical way for things to happen. i was married...unhappily so, but married nonetheless...to someone who was emotionally unfulfilling, but it was the way things were, and i had my music and my children to think about...
that afternoon, as the sun was beginning to set, everyone drove out to reading to meet me and we all went to the spot i'd picked out for the pictures...it was perfect. i'd wanted to do it in the fall, but timing hadn't been kind to my wishes...as it was, the not-quite-bare-and-blooming trees that lined the waist-high brick walls were the perfect complement to the subjects of the pictures. jayda and dylan walked, hand in hand, towards susan as she snapped picture after picture of the kids.
the one that made the cover was the perfect shot...jayda was holding dylans' hand, and she caught the precise moment that they looked at each other in a way that would make the masters envious. jayda had lifted her opposite hand to her chest, and dylan was looking over and up at her...their faces shone in that picture, and it was the obvious choice for the cover, of the rolls and rolls of pictures that she took that afternoon.
i have a lot of things - pictures, home movies, souvenirs - that have frozen moments of their lives in time. i guess it's natural for parents to take these things out from time to time and gaze backward longingly at time thats' passed...and certainly, i probably have more of those kinds of artifacts than most. i've always been a nostagia buff, to be sure, and not just where the kids are concerned....certainly, no one who reads my rants here on a regular basis is shocked by this revelation.
today, though, finds me wondering if i'll look back on the present day with the same misty sentimentality...wishing dylan were still sitting silently on the sofa, playing game boy and watching comedy central and jayda upstairs in her room blasting that Godawful music she listens to...
somehow, i think i'll miss this too someday.
but today, i seem to find myself sitting at the kitchen table at 127 belvedere avenue with my inner circle, discussing my then-unreleased album and developing a strategy for conquering the world while the kids played in the living room floor with the TV on.
it was an emotionally tumultuous time...my heart and my head were in a lot of different places at once, and it seemed like everything and nothing was possible at the same time. i was making a lot of new friends, i was writing songs constantly, i was playing all the time and all over the place...and i was ripping the storm door off the front of the house in anger because i was locked out with my arms loaded with groceries. i was driving the blue ford van i bought from the maintenance guy at chiyoda, wedging two pennies underneath the tapes in the tape deck to keep them from dragging across the heads...
i was hungry. i still thought that there was no reason i couldn't be john gorka, and i was gonna be, one way or another, if it killed me.
and it seemed perfectly possible at the time.
today i was looking through a stack of papers for a phone number and there was a copy of our mutual angels underneath a pile of faxes and copies of crap that i seldom look at...i held it up and stared at the picture on the cover, of jayda and dylan frozen in time on a late april afternoon in 1997. they were five and seven then, now they're twelve and fourteen...more years have passed since then than they had lived at that point in time.
i remember that day quite well...standing on the side of that road with our entourage - derek dorsey, my manager...steven wellner, my producer...and susan bulkin, the photographer...and jill and the kids. we spent about an hour taking pictures on that narrow, tree-lined drive, as jayda and dylan were completely into just being jayda and dylan.
earlier that month, i had said goodbye for what i thought would be the last time to a woman whom i'd considered my soulmate - thinking it was destiny intervening and telling me that she was not to be my focus, that my work was to be my focus, and making perfect sense of it all...she was supposed to be moving away, as it was the only logical way for things to happen. i was married...unhappily so, but married nonetheless...to someone who was emotionally unfulfilling, but it was the way things were, and i had my music and my children to think about...
that afternoon, as the sun was beginning to set, everyone drove out to reading to meet me and we all went to the spot i'd picked out for the pictures...it was perfect. i'd wanted to do it in the fall, but timing hadn't been kind to my wishes...as it was, the not-quite-bare-and-blooming trees that lined the waist-high brick walls were the perfect complement to the subjects of the pictures. jayda and dylan walked, hand in hand, towards susan as she snapped picture after picture of the kids.
the one that made the cover was the perfect shot...jayda was holding dylans' hand, and she caught the precise moment that they looked at each other in a way that would make the masters envious. jayda had lifted her opposite hand to her chest, and dylan was looking over and up at her...their faces shone in that picture, and it was the obvious choice for the cover, of the rolls and rolls of pictures that she took that afternoon.
i have a lot of things - pictures, home movies, souvenirs - that have frozen moments of their lives in time. i guess it's natural for parents to take these things out from time to time and gaze backward longingly at time thats' passed...and certainly, i probably have more of those kinds of artifacts than most. i've always been a nostagia buff, to be sure, and not just where the kids are concerned....certainly, no one who reads my rants here on a regular basis is shocked by this revelation.
today, though, finds me wondering if i'll look back on the present day with the same misty sentimentality...wishing dylan were still sitting silently on the sofa, playing game boy and watching comedy central and jayda upstairs in her room blasting that Godawful music she listens to...
somehow, i think i'll miss this too someday.
but today, i seem to find myself sitting at the kitchen table at 127 belvedere avenue with my inner circle, discussing my then-unreleased album and developing a strategy for conquering the world while the kids played in the living room floor with the TV on.
it was an emotionally tumultuous time...my heart and my head were in a lot of different places at once, and it seemed like everything and nothing was possible at the same time. i was making a lot of new friends, i was writing songs constantly, i was playing all the time and all over the place...and i was ripping the storm door off the front of the house in anger because i was locked out with my arms loaded with groceries. i was driving the blue ford van i bought from the maintenance guy at chiyoda, wedging two pennies underneath the tapes in the tape deck to keep them from dragging across the heads...
i was hungry. i still thought that there was no reason i couldn't be john gorka, and i was gonna be, one way or another, if it killed me.
and it seemed perfectly possible at the time.
posted by tom at 16:42
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