________________________
I opened the door of the apartment to find a tall cardboard
box on the top step. Reaching over the top of it with his hand holding the
electronic signature pad was the man in brown. "Package for Patrick
Dixon," he said. "Sign here."
Surprised, I took the pad, signed it and gave it back.
"Have a Merry Christmas," he said, and walked back down the sidewalk
to his truck. It pulled away as I read the return address, from Mike Dixon in Maryland. No mistake, then. My brother, the woodworker, the
musician, eight years older than I, and the one who had shown up unannounced with
his wife Alice on our doorstep in Olympia a year ago to help my family get
settled three days after we moved here from Alaska, had sent this package. I
picked it up and carried it into the dim living room of our cheap rental
duplex.
"Who was that?" asked Veronica.
"UPS. A package from Mike." I walked into the
kitchen and grabbed a paring knife out of the laminated wooden knife block Mike
made us years ago.
"Your brother?"
"Yeah."
"What is it?"
"No idea."
"Well open it and find out." She came into the
living room, wiping her hands with a towel.
Of all my siblings, it's ironic that I feel closest to the
one who tortured me the most while growing up. Mike sat on my six-year-old
chest as a fourteen-year-old and dangled spit in my face and sprinkled handfuls
of grass in my eyes and mouth; Mike would play "Patrick is a fat
boy," on his guitar just to make me angry whenever the family was gathered
around to hear him play; Mike was the one who held the lazy-Susan with his
thumb when we were eating dinner one night with mom and dad and I was trying to
turn it. When I pulled harder, he let go and the pitcher of milk flew onto
dad's plate, spilling in his lap. I was the one who got sent to my room without
dinner. Yet it was Mike who loaned us the last $2,000 we needed to seal the
deal on our fishing permit when we bought in twenty years ago. It was Mike who decided
to come to Alaska and be with me after our mom died, and I couldn't afford to go
to the funeral.
I ran the knife along the seam of the cardboard, cut open the
top and peered in. A round, black shape was there, made of some sort of vinyl.
I put the box on its side and pulled out a guitar case. "Oh, my God,"
I breathed. "It's a guitar!" Mike had been promising to make me a
guitar for two years, ever since he'd converted his wooden cutting board and
humidor business into hand-making custom guitars. An accomplished musician, he worked
with wood for most of his career, and nearing retirement decided to reinvent
himself as a custom guitar builder. I had jokingly been asking him, "Where
is my guitar?" every time we talked on the phone since.
What slid out of the case was not a guitar he had made, but
one of the several he had collected over the past couple of decades. Hand-built
to Mike’s specifications by a craftsman from Hawaii, it was a jumbo cutaway - a
guitar I had played and admired the last time we had visited in Maryland a few
years before. Inlay abalone doves on the neck, the box was polished bubinga
wood with more abalone along the edge of the top and down the center of the
back. It was a work of art.
For a brief moment I strummed the strings. The sound was deep
and warm, like diving into a tropical lagoon of resonance. It was too much. I
didn’t deserve this gift. Mike was an accomplished guitarist, while I fumbled
at it at best. Suddenly overwhelmed at what I held in my hands, I felt the
crush of what to me had been a year of bad decisions press down upon me. Nine months
ago we packed up the home we built in Alaska and moved to Washington for a job
at the local state college that hadn’t gone well. For 23 years I was proud to call
myself an Alaskan and a commercial fisherman. But last spring we sold the house,
the boat and permit, and I nose-dived into a different lagoon: one filled with
the cold water of depression and self-doubt. Our family was in crisis. More
than once I had gotten into my truck and driven off, intending never to return,
heading north, heading east, heading anywhere but here. And suddenly in my
hands was this thing of beauty and creativity, and I could neither accept it nor
give it back. To Veronica’s amazement, I slid it back into its case and clipped
the latches.
“Aren’t you going to play it?’
“Maybe later,” I answered, and for a short moment that
evening I did. When my twelve-year-old son Dylan went to bed, I pulled it out
and sat on his bed and played in the dark. In a letter I wrote to Mike three
months later, I described the experience:
I closed my eyes and played...and the music
filled the room. Full and deep, my fingers felt as if they were touching glass,
not wood and metal. Even my voice, my rhythm, my soul resonated in ways I never
felt before. I played the guitar far less than it played me.
Afterwards, even more besieged by my feelings, I put it back
in the case and avoided it. After the emotion of the moment faded, Veronica and
I talked it out in the dark of our bedroom and I did my best to explain my
feelings, but I’m sure I was less than honest – even with myself – and far from
articulate. Inside I continued to dance around the fire of my own self-immolation,
burning brightly against the darkness surrounding me, and the gift that my
brother sent me sat silent in its case in the corner.
*
By March the rains of that first winter in Olympia began to
ease. We bought a yellow house in a wooded neighborhood that promised to be a
better fit for us. As we prepared to move, my sixteen-year-old son Kessler was
packing boxes in the basement of the duplex. He picked up the box the guitar
had shipped in, and out fell a plastic bag with documents about the guitar in
it. There were picks, strings, the receipt and a letter. Kessler bounded up the
stairs and said, “Dad! Look what I
found!” waving the bag at me.
Indeed.
The letter is dated December 21, 1998. Winter solstice, the
darkest day of the year, at 3:00 am. In it, my brother describes the forces
that mysteriously wake us up in the middle of the night with their voices
echoing in our ears, telling us what we need to do. Somehow he knew how hard my
life had become, how the trough of my sea was threatening to drown me, and that
this, this gift was not a Christmas present – the timing just happened to be the same, he said – but was a
lifeline, a buoy for me to grab to pull myself up to the next crest. In pencil,
I still have his counsel:
Use it wisely. When in doubt about future
decisions concerning life’s crossroads – meditate with it. It’s like a wisdom
tonic if you use it appropriately. Strum it softly and it will speak back to
you... it is a magic wand which I can only loan you. I don’t really own it. I
just happened to possess it for awhile and then pass it on. Someday you do the
same.
After reading the letter for the first time, I walked into
the living room where the guitar had spent the first three months of its stay
with me, and it was halfway out of its case when I opened the lid. It seemed to
leap into my hands. Together we went outside and sat on the step in front of
the duplex I was happy to be leaving – the same step I stood on three months
earlier when it arrived – and we played. And as we played I began to understand
that life is full of changes. Some we control, some we don’t. Some we choose,
and sometimes those choices don’t work out as we intended. Some changes come to
us dressed in cardboard, yet contain gifts beyond measure. I still play – not
as often as I feel I should, but each time I do, I think of my brother Mike –
and how lucky I am to have him in my life.
