Tag: thankful

Twenty Years

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We got into St. Thomas at seven this morning and walked off not knowing what to expect.

It’s a small island and it feels smaller — tucked away, unhurried. People wanted our business but nobody put anything in our faces about it. We rode a gondola up to a lookout and stood there a while looking at the whole thing at once, then worked our way through shops up in the hills, including one where everything sold funds craftsmen paying for their own training.

What I noticed most was how the place sounded.

A woman from somewhere in the Northeast — not Boston but in that family, and I asked, because I wanted to know. Jamaicans. A man from the Dominican Republic. Several people from Japan. Forty thousand people live on that island and I heard a good spread of the world before lunch.

I love that. I have always loved that. Hearing where somebody’s from before they tell you is one of my favorite things about being anywhere.

We bought a few things from a woman running a shop, and she had an accent I couldn’t place except that it was European.

So I asked. She said Russia.

I told her I thought her accent was beautiful.

She told me she’d been in the United States for more than twenty years. And then she said that if there were an amount of money she could pay to be rid of it, she would pay it — and she put a word in front of “accent” that I’m not going to print.

Twenty years. Still carrying it, still hating it, and apparently not for the first time that day.

I tried to tell her what I actually meant. That I love hearing how people sound, that I love hearing what they think, that it had been the best part of my morning.

And then — I want to be honest about this, because it’s the part I keep turning over — I slipped into a bit of a Russian accent myself and told her that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.

I meant it warmly. I have replayed it several times since and I don’t know how it landed. I hope I didn’t hurt her.

If I’d had longer, and if she’d wanted to hear it, here’s what I’d have said.

That accent isn’t a report on what she is. It’s a record of where she came from, and of every decision that took her from there to a shop on a small island a long way away. She chose a new country. She built something in it. All of that is in how she talks.

It ought to remind her of the distance she covered. Not of whatever she was trying to get away from.

That’s what I think, anyway. I got a receipt and a bag and about ninety seconds, and I don’t know the first thing about her life.

We had tacos at a little place on the island and they were excellent. Good morning, good island, and I’d go back tomorrow.

But I can’t get past that conversation.

I paid her a compliment in the only currency I had, and she couldn’t take it, because for twenty years the sound of her own voice has been something people rendered a judgment on.

Passenger

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I love watching people, and a ship is about the best place I’ve found to do it.

Everybody converges. Nationalities I couldn’t place, accents I can’t identify, families three generations deep at one table. Old people moving slow and full of life. Kids running where they shouldn’t. Somebody loud at the bar who wants the whole deck in on the joke, and somebody else at the rail by himself who clearly does not.

And once you sit with it a while the differences stop being the interesting part, because everybody out here wants the same four or five things. Their people around them. Something good to eat. A game to play. A stretch of time where nothing is difficult.

That’s it. That’s the whole list, and it’s the same list in every language on this boat.

What I can’t stop doing is wondering about the faces.

Is this just a vacation, or is somebody escaping something? Is that man dreading the flight home, or is he going back to a life he genuinely likes? Did this cost them nothing or did it cost them a year of saving?

I’ll never know any of it. I’ll pass four thousand people this week and I won’t learn one story.

Which turned the question back on me, sitting there.

What am I in all of this? A man who loves his family. A man who’s been given considerably more than he’s earned and knows it.

And a man who is finally, actually relaxing — for the first time in a long time. I’ve been on the clock for months. Longer than months. There’s been a thing to achieve every single day for most of this year and a good part of the years before it.

Out here I’ve found rest just looking at the water. The size of it. A thing I did not make and cannot influence in any direction, doing what it’s done for a very long time without any input from me.

The other piece of it is that I’m a passenger.

I’m not driving this. I don’t know the route. Somebody far more qualified than me is getting us from one place to the next, and other people are cooking, and other people are running the whole apparatus, and my job is to be aboard.

I’m not built for that. I have spent this entire year building systems so that I’m the one holding the thing together. And here I am with no responsibility for any of it, breathing all the way down for the first time in a while.

It turns out I can do it. That’s useful information about myself that I did not have last week.

I was saying most of this out loud into my phone when caught my attention, smiled, and told me good morning.

So I’m not really watching them. I’m one of the faces.

Four thousand stories under one roof, and I don’t know a single one of them. But the God who made me and loves me did exactly the same for every person on this ship.

That’ll do for a Monday.

Twenty for Twenty

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My son and I went to music trivia tonight. Country music.

We went twenty for twenty. Every song, every artist, plus the bonus question at the end. Perfect score.

I walked out of there feeling pretty good about my ear.

Then I did the math on the way back and had to admit something. Of those twenty, I got three he didn’t get. He got the other seventeen.

He’s eighteen years old and he knows my music as well as I do.

Not music from his life. Music from mine — the stuff that was playing in the truck and the kitchen and the garage for the whole time he was growing up, absorbed without either of us noticing it was happening.

Which is the part I’ve been turning over since. If he picked that up off me that easily, he picked up other things the same way. Some of it good. Some of it probably not. I’ve been in the room the entire time and I don’t get to choose which parts landed.

Here’s what I can see from where I’m sitting.

He loves ferociously. He takes care of his mother the way he’s seen me do it. I showed him how to treat a lady and he does it. He’s devoted to this family, and he is a good friend to his friends — the kind who shows up, not the kind who means well.

He’s also more creative than I am, and I say that without any complicated feeling about it. The things he makes with his hands, the way he comes at a problem sideways from an angle I didn’t see — that’s not from me. Some of it’s his mother. Most of it is just him.

And this morning, on vacation, with nothing on the schedule and every excuse in the world, I looked over and he was reading his Bible.

Nobody asked him to. Nobody was watching except me, and he didn’t know I was.

His mother and I taught him that faith. It isn’t ours anymore. He’s got his own, and he keeps it whether or not there’s anyone around to see him do it.

I’m hopeful he’s been watching us all these years. I’m a little afraid of it too, for the obvious reason.

But he was sitting there this morning with a Bible open, and tonight he carried us both through seventeen questions I had no business getting.

I don’t brag on him often enough. Being away from home for a week has been a good reminder.

The Wall

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Christmas of 1997 I asked my parents for a guitar, and they got me one.

I was halfway through my sophomore year, home for the break. I opened the box and I was genuinely thrilled — right up until I got my hands on the neck. It was a beginner’s three-quarter model, and my hands are not small hands.

I remember working very hard at not seeming ungrateful. Dad, this is awesome, I said, I just — I can’t get my fingers where they go.

He said, well, how about we take it back and see what we can find.

My uncle ran a music store in Duncan. We drove it over, got the money back, and he put a Jasmine in my hands — Takamine’s beginner line, full size, light face and darker wood on the sides. Pretty guitar.

Next year I’ll have had it thirty years. It hangs on the wall right inside my office door and I tuned it up this week and it still sounds right. I’ve written twenty or twenty-five songs on it.

I never got any good in the way people mean when they say good.

I started a guitar class in college and it didn’t take, mostly because it was aimed at lead playing and I didn’t want to play lead. I wasn’t trying to be Stevie Ray Vaughan. I wanted to play rhythm, sing, and write my own things, and for that you need chords and patterns and a feel for it, which I taught myself over about three decades.

What stuck wasn’t skill. It was the instrument.

We used to run a booth in an antiques mall, which meant a lot of Saturdays at estate sales looking for things to resell. Some of it we sold. Some of it stayed.

I don’t remember whose house it was. I’ve been to too many. But I walked in and there was a guitar sitting in a hard case, and normally I look right past guitars at these things — the classicals with the dead nylon strings, the corroded wire, the wood that’s been dry in a closet for twenty years.

This one was clean. Solid. Still roughly in tune, which tells you something about whoever had it. I picked it up and it was playable right there in a stranger’s house.

Seventy-five dollars. It’s a Ventura — designed in the States, built in Japan, and the name doesn’t exist anymore as far as I can tell. From what I’ve been able to piece together it was made before I was born.

It hangs next to the Jasmine. Those two are the featured wall in my office, and the Ventura is the one I actually reach for. Lightest strings of anything I own, so it doesn’t hurt my fingers, and the tone on it is rich in a way I didn’t pay for.

Somebody kept that guitar in shape for fifty years and then it came to my house.

I collect a few other things.

Six guitars. Thirty-some pipes, including a Gandalf one my wife gave me one Christmas, because I’ve always loved the stories about C.S. Lewis being absent-minded enough to set his own jacket pocket on fire. A couple hundred records — Bob Seger’s on the player right now. Comic books from years ago, up on a shelf. Cast iron, eight pans in the oven and another twenty-five out in the garage I haven’t gotten to since we moved. Cookbooks, for a project I haven’t started.

And books. Enough books that my wife has, over the years, gently suggested some of them could go. I rearranged them until they fit instead, which she let me get away with.

On our twentieth anniversary we were in Fredericksburg, Texas, and found a charity thrift store with a complete set of the Harvard Classics — the five-foot shelf, early 1900s, all of it. Twenty-five dollars. They sit on top of the china cabinet in my office.

Here’s the honest part about the books, and it took me a while to say it out loud. I’ve read maybe half of them. The rest I know about. I’ve read summaries, I could tell you the argument, I keep them where I can see them.

That’s knowledge near me rather than in me, and I know the difference.

There’s one more thing on my walls and I didn’t acquire any of it.

My son paints and draws. I’ve got eight of his pieces hanging in this office — I can see all eight from where I’m sitting. Drawings and oils.

I’ve told him I’m his collector. That’s the word I use for it, and I meant it as a joke the first time, and then I kept saying it.

Everything else in this room I went and found. Estate sales, thrift stores, a music store in Duncan in 1997. All of it was finished before it got here — somebody else built the guitar, somebody else bound the books, somebody else played the Ventura for fifty years, and I’m the one who came along afterward and put it on a wall.

His are the only ones where the collection isn’t done yet.

A Grown Man On The Phone

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My voice dropped when I was thirteen and it dropped all the way.

There was a girl named Misty I’d met at camp. Louisiana, thick bayou accent, and we were friends — not dating, nothing like that, just a long-distance friend I thought was about the coolest person I knew. I called her house one night and her father picked up.

Hello sir, may I speak to Misty please.

She got on the line and the first thing she said was, you just freaked my daddy out. I asked why. She said, my daddy wants to know why there’s a grown man on the phone for me.

I was thirteen. I weighed about a buck fifty. And there was no version of me that could have gotten on that phone and convinced that man otherwise, because everything he needed to know had already happened in seven words.

The size came later.

I was six foot and a hundred and ninety pounds when I graduated high school. Slim, decent shape. Then I went to a summer arts institute that year, caught poison ivy, and got put on prednisone at the clinic.

Prednisone at a camp with three meals a day and all you care to eat. I gained twenty pounds in two weeks. By the end of that summer I was two-twenty, some of it water, some of it a late growth spurt, and some of it just the thing my family does.

Because we are not small people. I had a cousin, gone now, who was a mountain of a man — my dad watched him pick a car engine up off the ground with the headers still on it and set it in a truck bed by himself. His little brother is built the same way. My dad is thick through the chest and shoulders and always has been.

I’m six foot and built like a barrel. Forty pounds down would put me in the best shape of my life, and I would still not look like a man you’d want to startle in a parking lot.

Add a resting face that reads as annoyed when I’m thinking about nothing at all.

So this is the arrangement.

Nobody messes with me. That’s not nothing — I’ve walked through my whole adult life without ever once having to worry about a situation getting physical, and I know exactly what that’s worth and that not everybody gets it.

The cost is that the friendly part of me has a longer trip to make than it does for most people. I have to work to get it out where somebody can see it. There’s a distance to close before anyone finds out I’m not what the packaging says, and it’s on me to close it, every time, with everyone.

The stupid part is that I am the friendly one. That’s not a strategy or a thing I put on. It’s who I actually am, and I have to prove it for a living.

In 2022 I played Maurice in Beauty and the Beast.

The director told me later why he cast me. The young man playing the Beast was six-two and around three-fifty, and he wanted Belle to have been raised by a large, strong father — so that standing up to something enormous would be the most natural thing in the world for her. My size wasn’t incidental to the part. It was the reason for the part.

Somewhere in the run, one of the dancers rolled her ankle badly. She ended up sitting on the stairs outside the stage door with a half circle of people around her, everybody looking at everybody else, nobody moving.

I said hang on. Then I picked her up and carried her down two flights of stairs to where somebody could look at her.

That’s the other half of the arrangement, and it doesn’t come up nearly as often as the parking lot version.

I’ve thought about what I did with all that.

I sang bass. I joined Toastmasters and stayed thirteen years. I’ve spent most of my adult life in front of rooms, and the thing I’ve cared most about the whole time is communicating well.

A guy could look at that and call it compensation, and maybe some of it is. But I think it’s simpler. I got handed an instrument that arrives before I do and says something about me that isn’t true. So I learned to use it on purpose.

My son and I lift together, three nights a week.

Forty-seven years old and I am stronger right now than I have ever been in my life. That’s part of why I’m as thick as I am, and I’ve made peace with the trade.

He’s eighteen and he’s catching me. That’s the whole point of it.

Actually he is 6’2”. He already passed me.