He’s a Magic Man

Once upon a time back in my semi-wild youth, I was trying hard not to be head over heels for a completely unsuitable person. My practical side was overwhelmed, my dreamer side madly in love. I knew to the bottom of my soul that he would turn my world inside out and leave me in pieces, and I couldn’t care. The only thing–don’t I know it!–that saved me was that he didn’t return my feelings. We were good friends, but he was shallow and I wasn’t pretty. I know this was the main reason because he told me so.

He was a hippy thirty years late. Vegetarian, handsome, free-spirited. Blunt and funny and joyous. He wrote poetry that flowed and sang on its own but didn’t seem to mean anything. He believed in free love and free food and freedom from clothes. He drifted from friend to friend, crashing a week on this friend’s floor, sleeping a month in that friend’s bed, and eventually he landed with me for a while.

He took my cat for walks outside, holding onto his tail. He relocated the black widow spider in my storage shed. He used the old pogo stick that was there when I moved in. He used it naked.

Yes, I’m a writer, but I can’t adequately describe that event so I won’t try.

He had a voice that could banish reason in seconds. With him I climbed fences to trespass at two in the morning. With him I got lost on the mountain and found my way back hours late for work, limping, sunburned, and laughing. With him, I tripped the one and only time I tried LSD. Because of him, and especially that voice, I spent more than I should, slept less than I should, and I was up for any adventure that wild man came up with.

Eventually, of course, he wandered on. Free spirits can’t be chained and all that. I counted myself lucky to have enjoyed him–and to still have my job and apartment and all after several irresponsible months–and we stayed friends though we rarely saw each other. The years passed and we drifted farther apart, always with affection.

Yesterday I went to lunch at a great restaurant, and the bus boy had his voice. Also his smile, his eyebrows, and a lot of his mannerisms. For all I know my free-loving friend could be the bus boy’s father. Free love produces children as much if not more than other types, after all.

It doesn’t matter, really. What mattered to me was that a young man with a magical voice took me back in time twenty years, and I very much enjoyed the journey.

A few years back my friend found me on Facebook; sometimes he messages me to say he’s in town and he’d like to get together. I’m wary–he may never have known the effect he had on me, but I still remember. I don’t meet him.

Maybe next time I will.