Keeping the Code

Check her out. A beauty, ain’t she?

Though we don’t crank that handle nearly often enough, our living room has been a more beautiful place thanks to the presence of this death-defying time machine. Oh? Just looks like a no-tech antique to you? Well, turn the handle and set a needle in the grooves of one of these babies, and you’ve got yourself a room full of people from the past, their voices and talent captured in one magical moment, for which they practiced all their lives. Their bodies are soil but their love, their passion, is ours forever.

Except, we are not forever. We are soil-bound too.

The more I live through that reality, and face what it means, the more my mind’s eye is drawn to those things about us that remain with others, which are passed on, and reverberate after our exit from this mortal stage.

A good friend died yesterday. This is where I am supposed to talk about her in the past tense. She was this, she was that, but some people live with a force that outlasts them in my mind. She still is more brilliant, beautiful, unique, and fun than any words can describe. She brought those things to every interaction with such force, they could never vanish as easily as a human body succumbs to aggressive cancer.

Death makes me stubborn, it turns out. I feel determined not to let go, to crank the handle and listen to the breath and lightning fast fingers of ghosts, and delight in the fact that their song got another printing, in my head and heart.

There is something, for our intents and purposes, that is permanent. A code. We pass it along, for better or worse, to everyone around us, some of whom will outlive us. Like an analog data storage spiral of notches and grooves pressed into fresh vinyl. The code lives on and on and on.

When someone I love dies, my thoughts search for their influence on the code of my life. The parts of them that live on in me, and which I hope to leave with the impressionable around me.

With Julie, I don’t have to look far. The Backyard University ethos comes from basic tenets I learned in the same years I became friends with her. Notions like being adventurous, driven, inclusive, kind to animals and people, willing to embrace the edges that come with looking at all of life’s jagged sparkly beauty and ugliness: these have been important to me over the same period of time I have been friends with her.  Either I learned it from her, or felt reinforced by how well she embodied those values. One way or the other, that is her code in me. It’s what she made that I can carry and pass on.

If you get to live many years, you will say many good-byes, some of which will leave your heart a little broken forever. Here’s what is unexpected: you wouldn’t have it any other way.

You wouldn’t trade that rough lace for a smooth uninterrupted heart that was never impressed upon; not in a million years. You find a needle to play those rifts and crags left behind by the love and loss, a way to sing to the beautiful pattern dug into you.

You might find it is your favorite song.