Hah!
Old blogs never die, but just come back to haunt us later on, long after we thought they were gone.
Accidentally coming across the last old entry, the one about death, it seems to be popping up all around again; the latest is the death of a brother-in-law. But it brings up an old story, one long forgotten but strongly embedded in the past.
Doug and I were driving around in Oak Hill back in 1972, for a reason that has since been forgotten. At the old roadside park just north of the Y intersection there a bus was parked that had "Tarot Readings" written on the side of it. We were into the tarot at that time, the times being what they were, so we stopped to see what was what.
The owner of the bus was indeed a tarot reader, one who made his living by moving around the country in this bus doing readings for whoever chose to come there. He didn't charge money for his readings, but he did accept donations from whoever he did the readings for, and he said that his most popular customers were politicians, especially around convention times, and claimed that even John Kennedy had once had him do a reading for him.
Well, this fellow was stopped at this roadside park because he needed to do some work on his bus, which was stranded there until he get the parts he needed. So Doug and I went ahead and took him into town to the nearest parts store in South Austin, and he offered to do a reading for us in exchange afterward.
I don't recall what Doug's reading was, only that mine was culminated by the Death card being covered by the Love card and involved living to be seventy years old. But it several months later that Doug recalled for me that there was a warning about water. This claim was brought up again in the wake of one the more traumatic events of my late high school days.
Johnny Longhair (at least that's what we always called him), Lee Adams and I had gone to a concert at the Municipal Colosseum, high on speed from a bag of pills we'd bought. Still flying high the next day, we decided it would be a good idea to go swimming at a pond off of Parker Lane, in what is now Mabel Davis Park but at the time was just one of the many bits of open land around a much less developed South Austin.
After swimming around for quite some time, it seemed time to go home, but Johnny was no where to be seen. Since he'd last been seen swimming there with us, we began diving around to try to find him, fearful that he may have drowned. Eventually it became that something was seriously wrong, and we called the authorities, who sent out a scuba team to search the pond, where they soon his body. His hair had become entangled in some underwater obstacle, right there in an area that I knew I had been diving in early during our frantic searches. It was my first real lesson in how the mind can be tricked into not seeing what it really doesn't want to see.
What I can never forget is going over to his family's house that night and having to tell his family the awful truth, a task that somehow seems to have fallen upon my shoulders. His funeral was the first our newly found adult lives, and it was not to be the last.
It was in the following days, sitting around in a marijuana hazed shack behind a friend's house, that Doug began to remind me that this was what the tarot reading had been warning me against. I don't know how true this was, but Johnny's death weighed on me for many years to come, and having been a person who'd loved to swim from an early age it never again quite appealed to me in the same way, and always left me wary.
This wariness was reinforced several years later when I was swimming in the river at Pedernales River State Park. There is a section of the river that that narrows into a fast running channels cut into the limestone with before dropping to deep and swirling eddies. I got caught in one of these eddies, unable to to find which way was up and fast running out of breath trying to escape. I remember very clearly thinking "so this is how it ends," and surprised at how the thought of suddenly dying was not quite as fearful as I'd always thought it might be, as well as at how my life was not flashing before me eyes as I'd always heard but instead focused into a very radiant moment of clarity.
It will be no surprise to the reader the reader that I didn't die, though not quite as much as it was to me at the moment when I suddenly popped up into the open air again.
Time passed, as time has a way of doing, and many decades later I became a registered nurse working in an intensive care unit, where intimate brushes with death and dying became a regular part of my career. Since then I've thought many times about this part of my professional life, which I've come to be quite good at and love as a service to my fellow human beings, an odd juxtaposition which in so many ways finds a reflection in that Death card covered by the Love card.
But this odd adventure with Doug from 1972 didn't end there, but rather some four decades later, while I was working that ICU. I'd gone into a different unit to get some equipment when I heard a familiar voice speaking in Spanish to a housekeeper. I peeked in the door, seeing much to our mutual surprise that it was Doug, who I knew had learned Spanish from many years living in Mexico with his mother.
Doug and I hadn't seen each other in over a decade, and there was much to talk over about how our paths had taken such different paths to have converged together again in his hospital room. By that time he was homeless, living in a vacant lot off of Congress Avenue called Penn Hill, which he claimed had once been owned by his grandparents in the previous century. Doug had fallen upon hard times, made harder by a penchant for drugs and alcohol that had begun to ravage his body as well as his life. We visited many times while he was still in the hospital, and on that first day we saw each other there I was also able to bring up a mutual friend, James, with whom we'd shared many mutual adventures back in the seventies, many of them of an esoteric and magickal nature, often fueled by psychedelic excursions. James had moved to Canada late in the twentieth century and lived there in Vancouver, only rarely able to come down to visit, so the timing of this coincidence made it clear that it was instead a sychronicity of considerable significance.
Once Doug was well enough to get out of the hospital, I picked him up, and we joked about how oddly like going to fill his prescriptions afterward was like the old days when we'd go around scoring drugs. It was cold out, and I even gave him a jacket to help out. Over the next week I went to go visit him on Penn Hill, where he'd once again fallen into the role of an older and wiser teacher, gathering together other homeless souls who would harvest scrap electronics boards for whatever precious metals might be salvageable for a few dollars. That was the last time I saw Doug alive.
The last time I saw Doug he was back in the hospital, but this time he was in our intensive care unit and actively dying. He wasn't my patient and, once again, I just happened by and recognized him there, this time covered in blood from ruptured esophageal varices and in the final throes of a very messy death from end stage alcoholism.
He died, but it wasn't until the next day when I got to work that I found out just how much he'd already died to his previous life. He had not left any contact information, and no one knew how to contact any family members. It took me a phone calls but finally I was able to reach his wife, who he had abandoned, along with his two children, years ago. Her grief was mingled with a great deal of anger, some of which seemed to be mixed with old resentments over a failed affair we'd had years before during one of Doug's trips to Mexico with his mother. But we eventually got the word out to other family members and friends as well, so Doug was at least able to not leave the world completely forgotten and abandoned.
