The Poem

The poem that brought us together

“Some things that happened for the first time, seem to be happening again.

And so, it seems we’ve met before, and laughed before and loved before,

but who knows where or when?”

Rodgers and Hart, 1937

I didn’t see it coming, but HE did. He predicted it, without knowing that the prediction was about him. It was 10 years ago, and it came in a birthday poem he wrote for me.

One of the beautiful things about this life is that the mystical and the magical do happen. They usually happen to me when I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, or doing exactly what I was meant to do. One of those moments happened to me when the millenium was new, and no one knew what that would bring.

Karen and Eric Blumberg came into my life in 2000, when they were new to Sioux City, having arrived from their home in Austin, Texas. From what he tells me now, when his long time station in Austin, where he was a talk show host, changed their format, he found himself looking for another place to land. So, improbably perhaps, they landed here. I met Karen first, and we immediately connected. Karen was unforgettable, fiery, passionate, and intense, as well as warm and nurturing to those she loved, and she loved me, as I did her. Eric was more difficult to get to know, or at least that’s what he projected. He was tough on the air, and seemed tough in life, with a New Yorker’s bit of attitude and a formidable intellect that could intimidate He kept people at a distance, but because I’m good at lightening up tough characters, he and I developed a friendship as well. I was with my ex husband Steve at the time, and the four of us began spending a lot of time together. We were all right brained people in a left brained world and found much to like about each other, as well as finding much to learn.

Karen was a poet, and a good one. What I didn’t know was that Eric was a poet as well, but hadn’t written anything for years. When I found that out, I asked to see his work. It was stunning. I think it was May or June and I challenged him to write me a poem for my July 3rd birthday. he took the challenge, but I didn’t hold out much hope that he would deliver. But he did. One day, my phone rang and he told me he’d finished my poem. I was surprised he’d made the effort to call, as Eric’s social calls were pretty non existent. The telephone, for Eric, was a tool. It’s how he got his interviews, tracked down stories, and communicated with his listeners in that amazing radio voice he has, but away from work, I sensed, correctly, that he used it sparingly. We met and he showed it to me, typed up and put into a letter sized birthday card with otherwordly fairy creatures on the front. Being Eric, he didn’t sign it…it just said, “May your heart always be young and your dreams live forever”.

Still a bit surprised by this mystical card and its message, I got to the poem. The title was simply, “To Cindy”. It began:  Silence covered the landscape, a misty shroud of unfulfilled expectations. Is he talking about me?, I thought. It went on to describe a woman who is aging, is trapped in a tower of her own making, and hopes to find love before what looks she has go completely to rack and ruin…“My beauty needs recognition as the forest cold closes in”. Yes, indeed, he’s talking about me. How does he know all this, we aren’t that close, really…but it seems, he did, and on some level that didn’t come from conscious knowledge, but a deeper, more intuitive place. He sensed that I wasn’t as happy as I seemed and he put it into these beautiful words.

It went on…”Suddenly, the horse drawn hope…” there was a graying man heading towards the tower…some hope, I think, someone coming, damn, this is getting good. It was as if he was projecting his wish for me, and saying “I get it, I know where you are, but here’s what I hope for you as your friend. Don’t give up.” His “prediction” wasn’t conscious at all, it was simply his wish. He was someone who recognized my quiet pain, and wanted to write a better future for me into existence. Little did he know that he called it and called it right.

Years went by, and in 2003, after 5 years with the radio station, he was summarily fired for expressing his anti war views on the air. That seemed to happen to a lot of journalists in those days. He and Karen eventually returned to Austin, and she and I stayed in touch. She called one day, in early 2006, and in a heart stopping moment, told me she was seriously ill. She was gone by April. I felt so lucky to have gone down to see her, to close the chapter and to bless a great friendship. I kept in touch, as she had asked, with her daughters, but Eric kind of faded out of all our lives. I would think of him now and then, and hoped he was all right. I attempted a connection once, but heard nothing back. He was being Eric, the part of him I didn’t like, and as I came to find out, he didn’t like either.

In 2009, after a break up with Steve, I was cleaning out my home office and I ran across an old piece Eric had written about my late father a week or two after he died. In Eric’s way, he’d seen things in my father that I had seen, and expressed them perfectly, as he usually does most things. It reminded me of the poem he’d written, the one about my future, and I looked all over the house to see if I still had it. Being suddenly single, I wondered, at this late stage, would his poem come to life….was there someone around the corner that I didn’t see yet? I finally found it in the strangest place. It had been in a end table drawer, on the bottom of a pile of papers I’d saved, for at least seven years. A day or so later, a friend of mine told me she was going to Austin for a wedding, and I thought she might want to look up Karen’s family. When reminders of the past pile up, or I run across something a number of times, it usually means something to me. I followed the signs.

I found him, still in Austin, now working in the mental health field happily for 5 years, living with the oldest daughter. We talked for a long time, longer than I’d imagined. I had a lot to say, as I usually do, and he was still a great interviewer. He still got me, even though I hadn’t totally figured him out. Somewhat impulsively, I invited him to visit, and even more impulsively, he booked a ticket the next day. He stayed for 5 days, came back, stayed for 10, and came back in 2009 and stayed forever. And… there you have it.

We were old enough, and smart enough, to know very quickly that it was right. We talked about the poem, which he said was simply his wish for me back then, not knowing that the aging ”horse drawn hope” was himself.

One night, shortly before we were married in 2011, I told Eric about a sign I’d been having for years, that I had decided was my good luck sign, and particularly the sign that a great love was someday coming. The sign was… a pink car, not something you see too often. It came out of a near accident in London, where a man in a pink cab shouted out to me to “take care”. I told him that a few weeks before he came to visit, I’d seen a pink car and thought….hmmm. He thought that was interesting but asked if I hadn’t seen another pink car the day he arrived here on his first visit, the first time we’d seen each other in 3 years. I told him I hadn’t. He said, “Yes, you did, I was wearing it”. He went to the closet and pulled out an old jacket he’d had forever, and the one he wore the day he got here. It was a black denim jacket, well worn, and I’d seen him wear it. I’d never noticed the back of it, which said, “The Geezinslaw Brothers” ( a band he’d played with), “Shiny nineties world tour.”

And under that, was a car. It was pink. He always was more observant than I am.