Mornings the past couple years have gone like this: wake in the dark, wander downstairs to boil water for coffee. In the clement seasons, light a small bundle of sage or a twist of sweetgrass and take it out to the porch, listen to the birds and the long sigh of the river going over the falls in town. In the cold months, walk out into the predawn with an axe, come back in and make a fire, the stove ticking and popping as it heats. Read a couple poems, drink the coffee, fish out the device and see who got up first, me or Bill.

– Morning Bill. How goes?

– morning captain, hope your coffee is just right about now. didnt sleep a drop last night… mind felt like one of those old wheels with photo cards in them changing randomly to bits of my life… it was pleasurable tho i’m exhausted now. likely have a second sleep and a nap. i’m so happy to have the bed in front of the wood stove and watch the flames and embers... so ancient and ingrained. chilly and brisk here but i promised i would see more outdoors today so i might get the bird feeders hanging as i think the bears are fixing to nap now. hope the sun crawls up bright over your woodpile and all of you.

– Same here, long tossing night for some reason. Such a sunrise this morning, really lovely. Fire going, cold daylight. Joe Hutto makes a grand point that music, like math, was not invented by humans but discovered by humans, a preexisting series of relationships, a sort of architecture of the physical world. We resonate.

– lettuce play.

We had always been in close touch, but after Bill was diagnosed we developed this other pattern, checking in every morning, and sometimes through the course of the day. Mostly just the weather, outside and inside. He was dying, and though eventually this was clear to both of us, we didn’t talk much about it until recently. Then we had to figure out what it meant, and what language might describe it. That’s what we did with everything.

Steinbeck said about he and Ed Ricketts that their thinking got so bound up together that it became impossible to identify or separate a strand of original thought. Together they located true things that would have been beyond either one alone. Everything was the synthesis of their long talk, and there were no borders, and no horizons. What a beautiful conception of friendship.

Bill and I started our long talk thirteen years ago in the driveway of a recording studio in the Vermont woods, smoking in the spring sun, rattling off the writers and books of the mountain west that we loved, and talking about the places both there, and back home in the midwest, that were home ground.

So I knew Bill just about a third of my life, and always that’s how it felt to have his generous and radiant company: like standing in the sun on a dry spring day, and the green world alive with possibility. He showed up when I needed him — when I was about ready to give up on music — and he took me gently by the arm and walked me back into my life, and my work.

These last few mornings I wake up and make the coffee and build the fire and I want to tell him that it’s cold and windy, or how the light came up the far hill. I want to ask how his sleep was, and what dreams came. I want him to tell me how his heart is. But he’s gone.

*********

If that was end of the story, we would have to weep until there were no tears left to cry, but of course it doesn’t end there. The sun comes up, the world arrives in daily increments, and we have our work cut out for us. That work is our debt to the world: to consider and to reify the love and kindness given us, and carry it on ahead for everyone.

Billy Conway wasn’t a saint. He was a complex and clear-eyed human who cultivated simplicity and kindness, and resisted cynicism as a form of weakness. His virtues were the more striking not because they came easy, but because they didn't. He didn’t always like himself, and he was skeptical of anyone who lacked what he termed the decency for self-loathing. He had seen the country and the music he loved each devolve into a racket, a dark burlesque of things he held dear, but it wasn’t in him to quit believing. His Grandma used to tell him, “when you feel bad, that’s when you do something for someone else.” And that’s the bargain he made into a life.

As he lay dying a few nights ago, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the sounds of laughter and talk filter in from the kitchen, one of the last things Bill said was, “It’s so beautiful...”

He was right.

Can You Show Me a Dream