(DEWEES ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA, 8/25/05)

I still hadn’t showered since the night before when I stayed in a crowded Charleston hostel.  The wings of Katrina had washed saltwater and piles of sand onto the city’s streets, with fingers of sand reaching out onto the steaming, overgrown sidewalks.  The hurricane itself was still far away and secretly bound for a part of the country that no one, at least no one I met there in Charleston, had expected.  Indeed, everyone from Jane to the ferryman had prepped me for an island evacuation and a cancelled concert.  The ferry out to Dewees Island had swayed in the rough bay, and a thick ceiling of clouds covered the sky.  I kept my eyes from the sea, and instead gazed at a picture of myself with a piece of paper tacked beneath it explaining that I was a pianist who would play a concert in the island’s meeting house, but nothing more.  Nothing about the tour or the music.

——-

“I’m gonna go clean up,” I announced.

Jane laid down her knife purposefully and looked at me from across the kitchen, bringing her hands to her hips.  “Okay, Adam.  From now on I want you to not tell me about what you’re doing, what you’re about to do, or anything like that at all!  Don’t do it again while you’re here.”

“Okay.  But I jus—”

“No!  Just go and do what you want to do!”  One hand left her side and motioned me away.  “Whatever it is, go do it.  Just don’t tell me.”

I retreated to my room upstairs.  It had a king-size bed with billowing white comforters and a private veranda looking out on some of the saltwater marshes that meandered through the island. 

In the distance, there were egrets marching through the water, and by my bed was a bookshelf stocked with the likes of Flaubert and Joyce. 

——-

(8/26/05)

[After the concert,] Jane drove us back to the house [in her golf cart,] but slowly this time.  Slower than ever.  The rain had finally stopped, and [people were saying that] Katrina had started heading toward the Gulf Coast, much to everyone’s surprise.  I sold maybe ten CDs and got a couple references from audience members to friends in other states who might help me book some concerts.  

Eventually Jane spoke, her tone grave and her eyes focused on the narrow dirt road ahead.  “I know what you will do,” she said.  “I don’t think you’re aware of it yet, but you’re going to do it.”  She nodded her head definitively.  “You will write something.”

“Okay.” 

“Something massive.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious,” she scolded.  “You will compose something very big, very important.  People will use it for all sorts of things.”

“Well, I’m flatt—”

“I’m not trying to flatter you,” she snapped.  “I’m telling you what will happen.”

“Okay.” 

We drove in silence.  She’d stopped dodging the puddles.  Now we barreled through them. 

“I know perfectly well what you’re doing, Adam.  Yes, you play the piano and that’s what you do for a living to get yourself out there.  But you do a lot of other things, too.  See,” she continued, “I’m the same way.  I do certain things for a living, and then I do certain things because I’m passionate about them.  Carrol and I started a foundation a few years ago in memory of our son [to help] schools in depreciated communities.  Of course, it’s still in its beginnings, but it’s working.  We all do things to stay creative and relevant — relevant to ourselves, even — and from time to time other people notice.  I noticed you.”

“Part of me fears that none of [what I’m doing] is relevant,” I said. 

“Well, you’re just being dramatic.  And that’s natural.  It’s fine.  Just don’t get caught up in it.  You’ll know what you need to do when you need to do it.  Just keep playing the hand you have, and know that that hand is always changing.  The world is constantly dealing you different cards.  Your job is simply to keep playing.  You have to.  The only important thing is that you never, ever quit the game.  I know how you think.  You think that one thing always leads to the other, or that this will lead to that, and you always want to make the right decisions to make sure the right things happen.  But look, you could leave our house tomorrow, fall and break your leg on the dock, and then you’d blame your tour for breaking your leg.  Or you could meet an agent on the ferry and get famous, and then you’d think, ‘Ah, the tour!’  We all create all these convenient sequences of events to explain our lives, but then we’re shocked when life reminds us that it doesn’t really work that way.”

I wanted to ask Jane how her son had died, how old he was, when it happened, and so on, but I never did.  Instead, once we arrived at home we changed into our pajamas and munched on leftovers in the darkened kitchen, with me telling stories about my own mother who, in the past few days, was reporting to me over the phone that dead birds were appearing each morning on the porch, always in the same wooden chair.  Mom wanted to believe that the birds were simply flying into the house and landing there, but the idea that every morning a different bird would hit the same place on the house and land on the same spot in the same chair — well, it all seemed too weird.  Mom was officially spooked.  Someone, or something, she figured, was putting them there.  I told Jane all of this and she could barely breathe through her laughter.

“And so I told her to ‘Move the chair, MOM!  Then you’ll know whether it’s a ghost or not!”’  We cackled more, wheezing and slapping our knees until the laughter finally subsided into an ebb and flow of exhausted, contented sighs.  Jane’s eyes drifted into a more sentimental place, a more personal place. 

“Your mom just wants you home,” she said.  “Moms love their sons.”