Meeting Martin Rochford

The Piper's Inn
 Killaloe 1982

He was waiting beside the road. We swerved to pick him up, rain pelting the car windshield. Martin Rochford burst into the back seat, escaping the lashing wet, and drew the door closed with a smart tug. We made our tentative way along the narrow road, Martin clutching the padded back of the front seat with a meaty hand while he called out directions in his throaty Clare voice. Finally we saw the pub lights swimming up ahead.

Through the amber of a pint, I watched the men as they unpacked their instruments, crammed empty cases under table and chairs. They tuned up, rosined bows, adjusted flutes, settled their drinks on the table. Pat wrestled his pipes into place, a complicated process. Quiet chat prevailed. I held my fiddle on my lap with bow resting on my shoulder. After three years playing I hadn’t the ability to keep up in a session, but could join an occasional tune I knew well.

The music began in a rush, driven by a strident banjo. It was a flying but welcome din. Tune after tune erupted. Like me, Martin sat listening, fiddle at rest. The scent of his wet overcoat was an essential part of him, as were his abstracted gaze and the way his eyes rode above his cheeks in two pale crescents. His head was tilted. Strands of white hair escaped his wool cap. Fraught with static electricity, they seemed alive. 

“Give us a tune, Martin,” someone called out.

“My tunes are all gone,” he answered, shrugging. He shook his head.

"Go on. Give us a tune. You will now.”

After an eloquent pause, Martin tucked his fiddle under his chin and lifted his bow. He played alone and I knew why as the tune progressed: no one would want to intrude on such music. I closed my eyes and heard a small owl’s cry in twilit woods, a prayer sung by a silver dragonfly, the funeral lament for a toadstool. I saw spinning motes of light on lake water. The notes turned and twisted, rose and fell. Like rain and wind, they soaked into places in my heart I most conceal, undoing wounds till they oozed colors and tears.

Kevin, a fiddler, leaned close. “He’s playing those fairy tunes,” he whispered.  

(Photo and prose copyright Cathy Larson Sky 2013)

FIREFLY

In the wee hours of a June wedding celebration, I watched dancing lights in the thick darkness by a river: fiber-optic strands cradled in the palms of little girls who jumped and twirled to the music. Deep in the rains of early July, after fighting sleeplessness one moonless night with a meditation CD that urges me to visualize the benevolent presence of loved ones, I opened my eyes to see a green gold light on the ceiling directly above my head, flashing. It was a firefly, speaking – reassuringly, it seemed -- in its native Morse code. These two events were prequels to a coming change. 

I was in an outdoor restaurant when a gnat flew into my right eye with that familiar bap I get when it happens. Summer gnats love my eyes. “Pat,” I told my husband, “You’re going to have to operate with a Q tip when we get home.” But there was no bug this time, though I kept seeing brown things that looked like insect carcasses sailing through my vision. Then I began experiencing flashes of light in the corner of the eye, followed by the descent of a dark thing, like a wing. Later I started calling the wing thing a record needle, coming down.

The eye doctor labeled these new sensations Flashers and Floaters. If someone told me when I was 20 that at 64 my life would fill with Flashers and Floaters, what would I have expected?  Raincoat clad people exposing themselves at sports events, maybe, or inner tubes for floating in pools on lazy afternoons.

The doctor showed me how the vitreous humor, in its tidy sac, turns from gel to liquid and then begins to separate from the lining of the inner eye. The brown insect legs I saw were blood from this tearing away; the flashes were distress signals from the optic nerve. Looking at the diagram of the perky round vitreous that resembled a younger me’s breast, I wondered irrationally if I was going to need a sports bra for my morphing eyeball. Was it going to start sagging out of the eye socket, like a Spielberg special effect from Raiders of the Lost Ark?

No, said the doc. Imagine a beach ball filled with gel. The gel liquefies, but it is still the same volume. The internet told me to imagine a piece of Jell-O that is left out of the fridge and starts to pull away from the dish. Both images disturb. I was assured that separation of the humor is normal for older people. (More women than men, statistically.) A fellow writer said, “Oh yeah, I call them (the floaters) my family. Some mornings I wake up and tell my husband we have many new family members.”

Within ten days the tearing away was complete. The eye doctor was satisfied that the retina had not detached during the process, in which case I would have had to have immediate laser surgery to save my eyesight. That was good news.

One night last week a firefly, resting on the screen door, flashed me. My eye flashed back, and the wing/record player needle descended. The firefly and I repeated the communication a couple of times. I’ve always secretly believed I could learn to talk to the animals. I didn’t know it would be like this, quite. I return to a prayer that rises during meditation: Let me see things through the eyes of spirit. Will I see more clearly through a liquid than a gel? Firefly, the world is full of mystery.

THE BEE IS DRUNK

The bee is drunk;

he gorges himself on the pollen-spattered flowers. I watch his boozy progress from blossom to blossom. He feeds, rolls over, drops, and feeds again. A lush, kissing all the girls. Mmmmm, he says. Mmmmm.

I am dizzy with green sweetness and sun, the scent of  wild roses. Light touches their innocent faces. The sky peers between limbs and leaves to witness such tenderness.

                           

The twisted bittersweet vine has lost its malice, softened into rare sculpture by the flood of stirring leaves. Small flying insects: ectoplasm on the wing. Above the stream bed, a cloud of blithe gnats circles a rhododendron branch.

                                

Remember this:

Remember the thorny bow of the blackberry vine, its pink buds and moon-white blossoms.

 Remember the cool of the shaded path, the promise of arrival.


copyright cathy larson sky May 30, 2013