Silver Plane

Maybe it was Jo Stafford's voice on those summer nights, singing from the open doors of VFW Post 6776, "Fly the ocean in a silver plane, see the ocean when it's wet with rain," wafting through our bedroom window next door in those anxious and mysteriously heart-filling times, maybe it was those words that got me started, flew me this far - or maybe that secret is deep in the genes, of putting a foot down and not keeping it there for a lifetime - but whence ever it came, at some point the yearning to travel began to speak in me--

And now, here on an autumn mountainside in Japan, out on the deck with a glass of wine after a day of turning the garden and splitting some firewood I've just listened to that song again - thanks to you, Mick - for the first time in more than 50 years, and felt that same sensation, a deep recollection of that early yearning, right here in my own present life on the other side of the world, in a bamboo jungle wet with rain--

Maybe the song, maybe the simply genetic desire to wander, to not stay in place-- but I marvel now at how that tune evokes exactly what it did then, when the silver plane flew only in a song - as though the past were truly present - Those nights when mystic wings would over and over fly across the air and into my unlived heart, though no one we knew was going anywhere-- I would-- I would go somewhere, on a silver plane.