A Bridge To Somewhere
Guest post
“Musical words summer” continues after the previous post by Sarah. This time, a post by Howard.
A Bridge to Somewhere
–by Howard Coward (2026)
The events, the memories, ring when I hit them, kind of like piano keys. An instructor’s tale, a song sung with gusto. Bridges, women, dying, fishing. Betraying. Building things then watching them fall. Jon’s voice. They’re separate but they’re not. I’ve tried often but I can’t fit them all into a pleasing framework. But if I use both hands and stretch my fingers wide and hit them all at the same time the chord works. I’m not sure yet if it’s a major or a minor, but here goes.
Abel, my wise and wry instructor, told a story while teaching us to become picture framers. He was visiting a friend’s frame shop one day. The friend had accepted for museum-grade framing a lion’s head made entirely from butterfly wings. The piece had been brought in by a missionary, the artist likely some indigenous and vanished visionary who’d spent years in the rainforest collecting the delicate wings of those portable rainbows until he or she could lay out and fashion the head of a lion. What kind of alchemy is that, and what kind of treasure had landed in this framer’s hands? My mind reeled at the idea of it. Had the piece been purchased? Was it a gift? Had it been pilfered or bartered for with souls? Those answers weren’t in the story, and those questions weren’t even a part of it. The story was the art piece itself: the most fierce, fashioned from the most frail. To be protected now for future generations by a master picture framer. As my instructor watched his talented friend lay the plexiglass, called for by museum standards instead of glass, when the framer laid the plex down over the lion the butterfly wings flew a final time and rose from the face of the lion to adhere to the surface of the plexiglass. Neither framer had thought to account for the effect of plexiglass’s static charge on the unique medium of butterfly wings.
“Always buy business insurance” was the moral of the story as Abel told it, but the lesson I took away is to leave some things as they are. Some stuff isn’t meant to be removed from its environs. If you want a lion’s head made from butterfly wings, buy yourself a plane ticket and a pair of jungle shorts and some good boots and some bug spray. And a net. Go spend your own years in the rainforest and see how important a lion’s head made from butterfly wings becomes to you then.
Jon and I were hitting it hard one afternoon driving across the bridge to pick up some building materials in town. Insulation maybe, or hurricane straps, or another lumber run. That part’s lost to time. But I had a Jim Lauderdale CD on the front seat and Jon shoved it in, and before we knew it we were both singing along with a song we’d each heard a dozen times but didn’t even know we knew. That’s the magic of a good song. It slips in your head in the cracks between important stuff and before you know it, you know it.
Jon’s not much of a vocalist. I’m not either but compared to Jon I’m Billy Joel. We had the windows down and the sun was overhead and the bay was sparkling like a fish on both sides of the bridge and no one cared who carried which tune. We both realized at the same time that we knew the words and that doubled our volume immediately.
“That’s not the way it works, that’s not the way it is.
Someone who never hurts, that’s not the way it works.”
I think that’s the first time I noticed Lauderdale’s song-smithing skills, his song structure and his melodic weaves. It’s not easy to pack a whole lyric unnoticed into a head as dense as mine or Jon’s. You have to do the complete package of melody and rhythm and production. You have to make it a piece a person can lock on to without working at it. And you have to lay on lyrics that fit. All that’s hard enough, and I know damn good singers spend their whole careers just working at that part of it. But the hardest part to me, the part that got me and Jon that day on the bridge was the meaning in that single line. We both understood at the same time that we knew an important thing, knew it together, and Jim Lauderdale had managed to turn it into something that made us feel good instead of punky. Yeah sure, life’s a bitch and then you die, but who cares? Surely not us.
“Someone who never hurts, that’s not the way it works.”
No matter how much pain and truth Jim meant to pack in to the song, neither Jon nor I were having it on that day. The breeze through the truck windows still had some north wind in it, the gulf air was full of salt, and the mainland was still a whole song away. We drove and we sang and Jim tried to make us morose but it didn’t work.
We built a house on an island that spring and summer. Work and play were not separate things. We found romance, we made friends. We threw large parties and used bundles of drywall and stacks of lumber and ladders for furniture. We drank beer and threw our empties into the bonfire of our scraps. We built legends of ourselves by being who we were. We worked and we fished and we drank and we slept in whatever rhythm struck us as correct. I took as much pleasure from sinking a row of screws into a sheet of drywall as I did in dropping a silver-blue Fat Rap into a tangle of mangrove roots. Jon whooped his approval at either effort. The butterflies of happiness fluttered about our heads every day. We came to expect it. I couldn’t have done any of it without Jon and he couldn’t have done any of it without me. Life was a thing to be caught and held and set free again.
“Easy answers to the hardest problems
Peace comes quickly
Justice will prevail”
After the house was built and we’d moved on to escapades on a different coast, my friend Rascal asked me what I thought about the idea of her going off with Jon to his cabin for a weekend, to the cabin in the mountains he’d built with his own hands. I thought about it. I had recently introduced them to each other. I thought about frail, iridescent Rascal, about her adventurous ways. I thought about fierce Jon, about his roaring passion for Love. I told her I trusted Jon. And I told her that Jon was a strong-willed guy and that they’d be pretty much isolated for a few days and asked was she ready for that.
“You’re supposed to have my back,” he said to me on the phone after Rascal had changed her mind and said she was flying back home as originally planned. “What the fuck are friends for if they don’t have your back?”
I had misjudged Rascal. I’d thought we were talking in confidence. If I’d known she was going to repeat my words to Jon I possibly would have chosen different ones, but that’s not the way it worked out. Rascal didn’t go to his cabin and Jon felt I’d broken a trust. And Rascal, in hindsight a minor character in my life, disappeared leaving me holding broken halves of a friendship I had never taken for granted.
In time the wound healed in the jagged way nature binds common elements. It held but the scar was there. We still had our building projects and our fishing trips and our commitments. Other passions flared and caught, flared and died. We swung hammers and we slung fishing lures and we had our bicoastal dart tournaments with Cynical Bob and Laughing Diane and the rest. In hindsight I’m sure Jon would have behaved himself where Rascal is concerned; he’s an honorable man. But I’d seen him love. I’d seen the damage love can do to a rational mind.
We never talked about it. He stood his ground and I stood mine. The respect was still there but so too was the chasm, an understanding that the “me” we each thought we were together had become a separate thing, not some shared understanding.
“If they tell you it’s got to be their way,
You can’t make up a mind of your own.
That’s not the way it works, that’s not the way it is.
Someone who never hurts, that’s not the way it works”
We worked together less as years passed, made less casts. I took on a wife and a child and days picked up a different rhythm: less rock, more blues. Jon had a knee replacement. He called one September. “I can dance again! Look. Out. Ladies.” I wanted badly to join him but my dancing days were somewhere else then, behind me or in front of me; I couldn’t reckon which.
He called again in February. All business.
“My oncologist told me I gotta go get all my dental work taken care of first. Then they’re gonna start these treatments and we oughta have this shit knocked out by the end of April.”
I flew out to Orange County, John Wayne Airport, to see him in June. He was able still to drive his truck. We hopped on the 405, a concrete river lifting us high above the strip malls and the car dealerships, rows of new cars shimmering like fish scales below us. He exited and pulled into a Subway Sandwich Shop. We walked in and he didn’t speak but pointed carefully to each item, nodding enthusiastically, eyes sparkling at the young sandwich chef as she indulged this odd ordering ritual, this large man with the huge hands and the thinning frame and the cerulean blue eyes. Essence of Jon, desiccated Jon, speaking with his hands now and those eyes. She made his sandwich and he was pleased. He paid and we got back in his truck. “Perfect,” he said. Then he handed it to me. “Eat it,” he managed to say with his damaged tongue. “For me. Cause I can’t.”
The treatments weren’t stopping the tumors but they had stopped his ability to put food in his body through his mouth. Then they stopped his ability to use his mouth altogether. He could no longer talk. His short sentences at the sandwich shop were some of the last I ever heard my loquacious friend Jon speak.
Easy answers to the hardest problems
Peace comes quickly, justice will prevail
That’s not the way it works, that’s not the way it is
Someone who never hurts, that’s not the way it works
Everything we’d done together, all the conversations we’d had about Buddha and Jesus, eternity versus infinity, and the desert and the mountain, and the Gulf and the Pacific, DeWalt and Makita, and what was the best part of a woman and the houses we’d built, the problems we’d created for ourselves then worked our way out of, the bad advice we’d each given the other … they all lay between us in his little house in Huntington Beach unspoken, a running river with no bridge from where I sat, living, to where he lay, dying. I always felt that he still remembered my betrayal. I always thought I could see it in his eyes even when they were closed.
I was back on the gulf coast with my own broken family when he passed, in August. His sister called, hysterical. “Jon’s dead!” As if it were a surprise. Bob was also gone from us by then but I called Diane and asked her to tell Emily. Diane said she thought I should be the one to tell Emily because Emily always spoke of Jon and me together in the same sentences with her dad. She handed the phone to Emily and when I told her, she dropped the receiver and made screams only a child makes and when no one came back on the line I hung up, feeling, finally, the line breaking between our separate coasts.
He was the kind of man who didn’t make friends easily because his standards were high. I was always honored and a bit mystified to stand by his side and years passed before I realized how rare our time together was. For both of us.
The chorus of Jim Lauderdale’s song says,
Keep your spirits
Pointed toward the heavens
You’ll know better
When you get back home
The last time around he sings the “You’ll” word as “We’ll”:
We’ll know better when we get back home
That’s not the way it is. That’s not the way it works. Someone who never hurts? That’s not the way it works. We’ll know better. When We get back home. Together.
In my thinking again on his song I’ve realized that Lauderdale’s genius here lies in laying down the imperfect rhyme structure. That’s the hook. A hitch, a misstep, is what lends the order and the beauty to the rest of it. A tawny flash of wing or mane through the shadows and light, cerulean blue inside a truck on a bridge.
The last bridge in this picture, the last note in the chord, is Lauderdale’s: the song’s own bridge. A song bridge is that non sequitur where the writer can toss in a musical aside, a second thought about where the song is headed. I’ll lay out the words in order and you can find it, or better yet just listen to the song. With luck the bridge will stick with you like it has stuck with me.
That’s Not The Way It Works –written by Jim Lauderdale
If they tell you it’s got to be their way
You can’t make up a mind of your own
That’s not the way it works
That’s not the way it is
Someone who never hurts
That’s not the way it works
Keep your spirit pointed toward the heavens
You’ll know better when you get back home
Easy answers to the hardest problems
Peace comes quickly, justice will prevail
That’s not the way it works
That’s not the way it is
Someone who never hurts
That’s not the way it works
Keep your spirit pointed toward the heavens
You’ll know better when you get back home
You might notice things you’ve never seen
Not to mention all that’s in between
Keep your spirit pointed toward the heavens
You’ll know better when you get back home
Keep your spirit pointed toward the heavens
We’ll know better when we get back home
La la la la la la
La la la la la la