The dark side of America's immigration history is revisited in 2010
The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it .
--Bob Dylan
I met Margo in a writing class in the Vanderbilt. She was writing her memoirs and I was writing mine. After a couple of false starts she finally came up to my room. A room that she had occupied for a year and then moved out of just prior to my moving in. She had taken a larger place in the Vanderbilt. I told her my apartment had good vibes, no doubt because of her. We drank red wine and talked of dreams and drawings and I played a recording of the Bob Dylan song, “Visions of Johanna” for her and told her that I thought of that song the first time I met her. And when the line came, “And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn,” she smiled and said, “ and did the visions keep you up past the dawn?” And I smiled back and picked up my wine glass and showed it to her and said, “ No. I had a little help getting to sleep.”
But this Johanna seemed as real as Dylan’s seemed illusory. It was dusk and the red sun was sinking behind the mountains and it was casting its magical glow across the city and the wine was working its magic too.
And “Visions of Johanna” played through one more time again and then there was silence, and she stood and looked out the window, her sleek silhouette dark against the sky, and told me that she could see and hear God in the silence and in the light. That that was her religion. She didn’t usually talk about it, she said.
And then she was gone and I sat in the darkening room and wondered if God was still in here with me, or had left with her or was fading in the night fall. Or if he or she or they together had anything to do with the good vibrations I could feel about the room. Only the refrigerator hummed now. She had told me that she could block out extraneous sounds. But it was all I could hear besides maybe a car or bus down on the street. I didn’t even believe in God. But there I sat listening for the sound of silence. It was not exactly sobering. I opened another bottle of wine and listened to an 18 wheeler creep down the narrow street outside my window and wondered, stupidly, “What would Jesus drive?”
But in the end, for me, it was just that vision of Johanna at the window that was all that remained.
More Vanderbilt Chronicles
Jessica and Geoff get married
See the YouTube Video
"White Like Me"
Larry L. Dill's essay on the dark side of America's immigration history revisited
Complete Site Index:
Navigating hundreds of pages of memoirs, intimate journal entries, essays, poems and photographs from over thirty years of Larry L. Dill's New Hope Journal
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2009,2010 by Larry L. Dill