Conversation out a truck window

I can see his truck approaching me along the one flat stretch of the dirt road. Even in the distance I know it’s Marcel’s because of the one missing headlight, the cracked window shield and “Ron Paul for President” bumper sticker. I am taking Eloise for a walk up Buckshot Creek Road, hoping not to encounter any chatty neighbors, but I have that sinking feeling that a long, time-consuming encounter is going to be unavoidable this morning.

Up here on the north coast most conversations are held out the window of a flatbed truck, and I just know my neighbor Marcel Proost is going to pull over for a chat. He brakes, switches off the engine, rolls down the window and sizes me up with a big grin. I’m uncomfortable, of course, having been involved last week in busting him for pot growing. But he allows that he bears me no ill will. “It’s the elasticity of my good nature,” he says. “Furthermore, I know what the judge has been smoking. I sold it to him!”

I see he’s got his favorite pit bull, Jean Paul Sartre, on the passenger seat.

“Hey, listen here. You recognize that?” I hear what sounds like classical music coming from the tape deck on his dashboard. “Marcel, I thought you were a Credence Clearwater kinda guy,” I say. “I am, but listen to this. You’re a big time composer of classical music, ain’t you? You can’t tell me what this is?”

I listen carefully but the music is unfamiliar. “Sounds French. Too early for Debussy. Maybe Fauré? Chausson? César Franck?” That’s as close as I can come.

Marcel grins again. I can see that he’s not had the benefit of dental hygiene since 1970. His teeth are stained from years of chewing tobacco. He is savoring his amusement at my expense, the local yokel who’s stumped his artsy fartsy neighbor.

“It’s the Vinteuil sonata. You mean you don’t know it?” I allow as I’d quite frankly never heard of Vinteuil. “Come on!” he taunts me. “It’s the piece Odette de Crécy plays to tweak Swann’s memory. You know… “letting her fingers wander over the keyboard with that wistfulness of which her eyes were so full, and her heart so empty?”

I’m thinking that Proost is pulling my leg here. I see that Jean Paul Sartre has just noticed Eloise outside the truck and is getting agitated.

“Well, John, you are listening to it right here for the first time. After I drive off you’re gonna think that not a note of it stayed with you. Even you, a big ass musician, won’t be able to recall much of anything. And you’ll think it didn’t make any impression on you. But if I see you next week and play it for you again, you’ll realize you recognize it. You’ll realize that, although you THOUGHT you’d taken in nothing on first hearing, in fact you had.”

He grins and purses his lips, ejecting a perfectly aimed projectile of brown tobacco juice out onto the road.

“If you had really distinguished nothing in it on first hearing, as you thought, then the second or the third would also be first times. And there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion.”

He reaches down and turns the ignition key. I can see this is going to be a gratefully short conversation. Get him going on Saint Augustine or John Maynard Keynes and you’ve lost half the morning.

“What is missing the first time you hear it is probably not understanding but memory,” he says, giving me a knowing chuckle.

“Anyway, gotta go. There’s a tree fell over onto the PG&E line up by the vineyard. They asked me to come buck it up and get it outta there. Take care.”

Jean Paul Sartre looks wistfully at Eloise as the truck lurches to a start and disappears down the road.