We stood on the bridges by the restored boathouses and watched the rain pelt the lake, the drops punching temporary craters into the surface and ejecting little silvery moons. It was cool, wet and wonderful, and the park was also surprisingly alive with people for such a dark day. White Rock Lake once was primarily mine. In the 80's the south end was all but abandoned. The Art Deco boat houses constructed by the city of Dallas in 1930 were by then empty shells of graffiti-covered concrete. I used to walk through them early in the morning and watch the gold-lit black-tagged white walls ripple inverted as reflections in the boat bays, everything gleaming with light dancing. I spent many days and evenings here. If the DMA was my second home, then living most of my Dallas years in apartments, White Rock Lake became my backyard.
This day Marci and I entered the park at northwest edge, prior to the start of the heavy rain, and there we found lily pads jeweled with water drops floating just off a shoreline daggered with sharp, bent grasses inverted black against a heavy sky. Mirrored life is sometimes intensified by the distortion of the medium: colors darkened, details sharpened, unneeded clutter cut ruthlessly away. The mind, too, can be a mirror that way.
Other times, memory softens things--blurs everything out in smudges, which makes writing about ones past so unpredictable. How do I get my mind where it needs to be to really see what it needs to see on this morning when my head is stuffy, my ears are clogged, my eyes are gooped-over, and my brain feels like it is wrapped in cold spaghetti?
Look into the mirror, look into the mirror. What do you see?
Gold. I see liquid gold gently slapping the sunlit edge of the dock post. It is sunset. My friends and I are on the east side, near the sailing club. It is sunset and the water blazes. Who's there? Phil, for sure. I think I see Lucy, wearing shorts, gold glazing her skin, her head tilted down, her denim cap shadowing her glasses, the sunlight picking up strands of her long dark hair and coloring them bronze. Marsh is there now, wearing a frayed, faded blue denim vest over a white U2 Joshua Tree t-shirt. He stands straight and angular against the sun. Phil sits on one of dock posts, slightly slouched over, long shaggy bangs in his eyes. He's smiling. What about, I'm not sure. I can't quite get where I need to be. Where am I? Was Jim there? Andrea? All I see is the intense sunlight. Ripples and waves of yellow, orange and red. Dancing, sparking light--a flick, a fleck, a flake.
Across the road is a couple of pick-up trucks, loud music, people drinking. The northeast side was like that then. The south-side was abandoned, the graffiti covered vacant pump station rising dirty and industrial-looking above the long, earthen dam, a deep-wooded swamp below. The northwest side had preppy joggers, people on bikes, below extravagant homes that sat way back on the hillside. And the northeast side had the rednecks. We usually avoided that side. I preferred the abandoned boathouses and dam, felt mildly comfortable among the rich, but totally out of place among the pick-ups, sweaty guys without shirts wearing dark sun glasses, and giggling girls wearing daisy-dukes, Lynyrd Skynyrd on the truck stereo screaming anthems to Alabama and wishing Neil Young would die.
Still, there we are on a dock over a lake of fire, as close as one can be visually to heaven and still be alive, while across the street, no doubt, someone is bent over, vomiting into the bushes. Each one of us, I guess, seeks transcendence in their own way. Later, I would try the alcohol route too. But on that dock, on that day, it was simply enough to be witness to the glory of the world around me.
Glory has many colors. Sometimes it is colored steely gray. The day with Marci was visually just as marvelous--long stretches of granite water stretched out before us. And although that golden day long ago made me smile, I knew it couldn't compare with what I was experiencing with my spouse of twenty-one years. When you live with someone that long there is a quiet comfort of just standing next to each other in the pouring rain, an ease--no need to be anything other than yourself. I'm not quite sure what keeps us together, but whatever it is, it is grand. No lake of fire--no matter how spectacular--can replace even a simple evening of watching TV together.
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