> now tell me yours. > > Mags I was a freshman and Wendy was a senior, but we hit it off famously and became fast friends at college in Northern California during the early 80s. She was brilliant, funny, well-read and a talented photographer. A renaissance woman if ever I knew one. I revered and admired her and she knew it. Kindly, she was nurturing and gentle with my love.
Going to her room was like visiting a sage in her study, but with a bohemian twist. She had an exquisite album collection and a plethora of delightful toys and whatnot that she took pleasure in entertaining me with: her Pez dispenser collection, a small but distinguished little library, smooth wooden boxes of all shapes and sizes containing earthly delights, some decorated with tiger's eye, amethyst or mother of pearl. One night she might show me some of her candid photographs of children in El Salvador, on another she'd read me letters she had written to lovers who had broken her heart, on yet another she would light candles and incense and read to me from Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin or Hermann Hesse. I remember coming to see her one time and she opened the door, looked at me with mock seriousness and said: "One question, mister. Water colors or finger paints?" I laughed, but I still have the water color canvas we collaborated on that evening. Sometimes she'd produce one of the wooden boxes from behind a tapestry with a glint in her eye, as if something wonderful was about to happen. She's open the box and say "smell this" and, depending on her mood, or the alignment of the stars, I might be smelling sinsimilla, saffron, myrrh or some rare aromatic potpourri. Things my olfactory sense had never experienced before. Fragrances that imprint themselves on your mind and are ever associated with a time, place or person. In some cases all three. One night she said "Close your eyes, open your mouth and stick out your tongue." She gently placed an exotic raspberry tasting candy directly on my taste buds. A tingle ran from my head, down my spine and twinkled my toes. I said,"Ummm." . She just smiled. She had gotten them in France, she said, then added matter-of-factly "they're magic." Before I could ask her what she meant by that, she took my hand and said "Come on, it's raining, let's take a walk." We walked arm and arm around campus in the drizzle, she pointed out that the eucalyptus trees were breathing and I'd be damned if they didn't appear to be. We found ourselves at a garden where there were a number of Rodin sculptures and she told me sad stories about of the subjects of each one as I marveled at their beauty and ran my hands across their wet smoothness. I was getting emotional and my sensory perceptions were oddly heightened, but all in a good way. We made our way back to the dorm, jumping in puddles along the way, singing "I Love to Walk in the Rain" from a Shirley Temple movie we had both seen independently, and we laughed till we cried at the fact that we both remembered the lyrics so well. Wendy's room was toasty warm upon our return, somehow. She lit candles all around the room and incense, too. She had one of those little red kettles that you plug in to heat water and made chamomile tea that we drank from oversized, hand-painted ceramic mugs while kicking back on her futon. She turned to me suddenly, like she had just had an epiphany, and just looked at me, eye to eye for what seemed like a long time. She was smiling mysteriously, like the Mona Lisa or Buddha, and seemed to be sort of sizing me up to see if I was worthy of what she was contemplating. Finally, she got up and went over the wooden crates that housed her album collection, alphabetically. She found what she was looking for, then carefully reached in with her fingertips and slid the record out of its protective sleeve. In the candlelight I could only make out a dark album cover with a blurry blue figure of a woman's face on the cover. She was handling the disc like some kind of precious heirloom though, holding it between her palms only along the edges. She put it on the turntable and cleaned it with one of those velvet swab things after putting a few drops of something in a red plastic bottle on it. She gingerly dropped the needle on the record than hurried back to be by my side. She held my hand with both of hers. The beauty of the sounds that came out of her speakers astounded me. I listened closely to the lyrics of the first song and was profoundly moved, almost to tears, like I had been while experiencing the Rodin sculptures. I was absorbed and enthralled, and was hearing music that had a visceral, emotional effect on me like no music ever had before, like I felt when smelling Wendy's myrrh. I sat rapt for the whole album side, then begged to hear the other. Wendy must've seen the amazement and wonder written on my face after the last lingering note of "The Last Time I Saw Richard" and pre-empted my inevitable questions. Joni Mitchell, she said. Blue. -Julius
