The Life Not Taken
Saturday, April 5th, 2008Streaked into Ashland under a bright sky in Jeremy’s cobalt blue Miata, top down, icy wind in my hair, sun splashing on snow-patched mountains and flowering trees. It was, as Seth says, “one of those moments you know you will remember for the rest of your life.” Jeremy is dashing. Think Peter O’Toole with a compact muscular body, a tidy white beard, sharp cheekbones and flashing vividly blue eyes. When we left Portland it was raining. We met hail and sleet and later clear sunny skies, we got acquainted and talked about books and art and music and Bob, and forty miles north of Ashland we put the top down. Ashland is a perfect little artsy hippie town, Victorian clapboard houses with clumsily-painted murals of happy hippie scenes on the garages, homemade sculptures in the yards among the daffodils, pretty little stained glass decorations hanging in windows. The town centers on the three theatres; the weather is below freezing at night but up to the mid-fifties (F) in the daytime. The production of August Wilson’s Fences was just right: well-acted and tenderly staged. God, what a powerful script. And I have been thinking since I got here of the life not taken: it’s as though I can see a ghost-image of myself in that other life, the one I dreamed of, visualized, and hoped for but didn’t get. [read on]
Kendall