A True Caribbean Tale
I’d been hanging out in the West Indies for the better part of two years, writing, painting, surfing, and hobnobbing my way through the expat culture of sunstruck American, British, and assorted South Americans that found the languid pace of the islands relaxing.
Now, alas, my funds were running low, and the time had come for my return to California. As a cost saving measure I conveniently managed to spare myself the price of a plane ticket by hopping a ride to Miami aboard my friend Dave McCann’s sleek new turboprop airplane.
Two days later we were lifting off in comfort in a Beechcraft King Air from Barbados’ Grantley Adams Airport. Once airborne I discovered there would be one quick stop on our flight to Miami, in the British Virgin Islands, one of my favorite places. No worries Mon!
It was well into midday when we put down at the tiny Beef Island airport, then took a bumpy Reggae music enhanced taxi ride to the Virgin Gorda residence of Dave’s business associate.
At the top of a ridiculously steep hill sat the sprawling luxury estate that was our destination. Once at the top I was mesmerized by the astounding view. The perfectly sculpted coastline rolled out before us like a primetime Technicolor advertisement for packaged holiday trips to paradise. The opulent tropical gardens were a riot of lush color, the tall palms nodding in the refreshing trade winds as if to offer their approval of nature’s astounding display.
After introductions to our congenial host and his wife, the pilot and the owner of this lavish hilltop hacienda retreated to chaise-lounges in a white tent-like poolside cabana to discuss their affairs. I was left sitting in a spacious living room enjoying an exotic imported cigarette and chatting up the attractive lady of the house, a charming young woman indeed.
After a few moments in this unfamiliar but relaxing place I began to notice in greater detail the rich and tasteful decor of the room, particularly what appeared to be a pair of original Matisse portraits. Who wouldn’t have noticed them?
Upon inquiring about the paintings, the woman gladly walked me across the room and into a long adjacent corridor, guiding me on a tour of their impressive art collection. Now this was a true privilege to see.
They were indeed real Matisse paintings, and there were also a pair of Degas, three Dali’s, and a large Marc Chagall.
We stood together, taking our time to view and discuss each of the paintings, and they were all breathtakingly impressive, but what finally stopped me in my tracks was an unusually ornate gold gilt frame showcasing a large piece of richly crafted calligraphic poetry.
The penmanship was exquisite, looking much like an illuminated manuscript from Fourteenth Century Firenze, only written in English. We both stood gazing in a reverent silence as I read the work, which now held my total attention.
By the tenth line it dawned on me that I was somehow familiar with the piece. The more I read the more familiar it seemed. By the last stanza, I realized I knew the author very well indeed. My surprised expression caught the notice of my hostess’s watchful eye.
“It’s quite special, isn’t it?” she exclaimed.
“Why yes. Very!” I replied. “Where did you get it... Who did this?”
“There’s a bit of a story attached to it, “she said. “Sadly enough, I don’t know who the author is.”
I turned to look at her, the fire in my eyes now shining brightly, and I said, “Well, I do. Would you like to meet him?”
She looked at me with an expression of mildly humorous disbelief.
“You’re kidding, of course…“
But with her gaze riveted on my face, she quickly realized that I was entirely serious.
“Would I ever! You don’t know what this poem means to me.”
‘Why don’t you tell me where it came from, and I’ll tell you who wrote it,” I replied, burning with my own curiosity about how she came to have this work of art.
“Agreed?”
And tell me she did, explaining that the antique frame originated from a friend who’d found it in the Amsterdam flea market, and that a pair of classical Italian restoration artists at the Met in New York City had done the calligraphy and the artwork at her request, and all from a poem she had found draped over the haphazard mess of a restaurant busboy’s tray, tossed in with the dirty dishes and silverware waiting to be washed.
Her face fell when I asked, “Did you find this poem in Ford’s Café at Victoria Cove in Laguna Beach, California, sometime in the late summer of 1976? Probably written on a paper placemat?”
After a stunned pause she narrowed her beautiful green eyes and blurted out, in a genuinely suspicious state of awestruck wonder, “How on earth could you possibly know that?...where I found this poem? How…?!?
I had spent years living as a prolific unknown pundit, scribbling and leaving inspired aphorisms, Buddhist sutras, and illustrated musings in my wake, written perhaps for no reason other than I was creatively compelled by some greater force to let my hand dance across any unmarked surface that presented itself.
This was a period when almost every restaurant in America put white paper placemats on their tables, a perfect canvas to scribble on while waiting for my order to arrive.
I may have left behind hundreds of poems on forgotten topics on an equal amount of tabletops, but this one I knew only too well, and I recognized it with no doubt of the time and place of it’s origins.
It was penned the week I separated from my then greatest paramour, the path to true love never seeming to run a straight course, particularly for the emotionally charged young artist that I was then. Ford’s Café was my regular stop off on the way home from surfing Salt Creek Beach. Good chili and great coffee. And java at Ford’s Cafe was still a dime a cup, unlimited refills included.
Now the site of the Laguna Nigel Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Salt Creek was then a pristine stretch of coastline, a virgin beach, sweeping Pacific surf thumping incessantly below steep yellow wildflower covered bluffs, a wild watermelon patch above, the entire coastline owned by two grumpy old codgers who ruled the place from a tilted driftwood shack and charged surfers the then exorbitant price of fifty cents to drive into their beach, thus inspiring us to trespass over the wilderness trails to avoid their sassy taunts and unwelcome tariffs.
It was a piece that had held a prominent place in my personal history and was the first page of one of my poetry chapbooks. I remembered the poem being dated September 1976. I knew the work in all certainty to be mine. I must have left a raw draft of it on a paper Ford’s Café placemat—shortly after dreaming it up while soothing my lovesick heart in the cool and comforting arms of the blue Pacific surf.
“How could I know that?” I said. “Simply because…I am the author of this poem!”
Frankly, I don’t know who was more shocked by this odd revelation, her or me. We both stood stock-still, frozen for an infinite moment by the sheer strangeness of our shared discovery.
“This is beyond belief,” she said, and took my hand and led me across the room to a long white linen sofa where we sat, still holding hands. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
She continued searching my eyes for some sign of a trick, for confirmation of the truth of my confident pronouncement. We just stared at each other until we both broke into ridiculous grins. It was true, and we both knew it.
“What do you say we…” She rose, moved to an elegant adjacent bar, and returned with a cold clear bottle of Christal champagne and two long-stemmed glasses.
“This is a special moment. Will you share a glass with me?”
Naturally, I accepted, opened the bottle for her, and carefully poured, filling our glasses with what had suddenly taken on the air of a ceremonial toast.
As I watched the tiny bubbles streaming up from the bottom of my tapered crystal flute, she began to unfurl the colorful details of how she came to have my poem, and the dramatic results of her first reading it. With an innocent sense of real intimacy this lovely woman told me a tale of how she had been a struggling waitress who at the time was dealing with the tragic loss of her first fiancé in a fatal car crash.
Despondent, repeatedly harangued by her boss, and drifting on the verge of an emotional implosion, she had found my poem sticking out from a pile of dirty dishes in a red plastic dish room tray. For no logical reason she set down the food order she was carrying, fished the crumpled paper out of the muck, smoothed it out and read the darn thing.
Finally, after rereading the coffee-stained thirty-line sonnet for the fifth time, she realized she was half sobbing, half laughing, while a flood of fat, sad tears streamed down her face. Embraced in something of an epiphany, she dashed into the dining room of the café shouting at the startled customers, demanding, pleading, to know who had written this poem. All she got were blank, somewhat frightened stares.
Her boss was so bent out of shape by this emotional outburst he promised to dock her a week’s pay, shouting “Shut up, Shut Up!”
Apparently, that was all it took. She quit her job on the spot. Within a week, after hawking her furniture in a yard sale, she left Southern California and its sad ghosts, setting out for San Francisco in a beat-up Volvo, her cat at her side, and all of her worldly possessions piled on the back seat.
After only one day in the Bay Area, knowing no one, and with little money, her luck took a sudden positive swing. She met a young couple in a city bakery who offered her a free apartment and a job.
The place was across the bay in Oakland, and was part of a project to build a temple for a remarkable man from India, who was identified only as Baba. The pay wasn’t much and the neighborhood was a little dodgy, but it was a clean apartment, and the people were absurdly friendly, and it felt like a fresh start.
She fell in with the temple project people, helping cook for the building crews, answering phones, and assisting other newcomers to learn their way around. It was there, two weeks into her new adventure, that she met the kind hearted man who would become her husband.
He was an architect who was donating time to the building project. One afternoon she served him some peppermint tea, he smiled, and the rest, as they say, is history. Extremely happy together, they were married within three months. Less than a year later, he had moved his practice to New York City. They first came to love the Caribbean Islands when he was commissioned to design a luxury resort in the region.
When his grandfather left him an unexpected fortune in the form of a fine art collection they decided to move to the Caribbean and raise their first child out of the big city. She had the poem laid out by a renowned calligraphic penman, then had it turned into an “illuminated” page in the style of the Florentine Renaissance by the top restoration artists at the Met.
And that was her story.
Entranced by this amazing saga, I then recounted to her how I had written the poem, and why, and how, through my habit of penning public poetry she had come to find it.
She confided to me that she always considered my poem the key to her current happy fortunes, that this cast-off piece of scribbling had been the catalyst to the most dramatic change in her life, and for this reason she had enshrined it here, among their collected masterworks.
With both the bottle and our revelations spent, we were again rendered speechless, mostly by the true peculiarity of our chance meeting, and for her, I assume, the “mystery of the poem” finally being revealed.
There came a shift in the mood, and a bit of embarrassment and some quick explaining, when at the exact moment that she decided to hug me her husband and my friend David entered the room. They both found the story of the poem, and my being there, a tale that defied all probability.
With business concluded, it was time for the four of us to enjoy a quick but excellent local seafood meal, during which we all agreed that the odds of us ever meeting, five-thousand miles from where we had once crossed paths and many years later, were somewhere around 10 billion to one, or greater.
I was given an open invitation to visit their home again, and after kind farewells and a comfortable ride to the airport in their spotless ivory Land Rover I found myself winging my way through a brilliant Bahamian sunset, en route to an unknown future of my own.
Throughout that flight, and over the many years since, I have always been amazed at the lesson I was given that day: That we are all inexplicably bound together, and that to commit ourselves to both the act of writing, and to the free sharing of our ideas and efforts, provides us with a secret wealth that we should never doubt the value of.
How could I feel sad about the challenges of my chosen path knowing that something so simple as that abandoned poem would be the source of such amazing inspiration to a total stranger? Now I know the truth.
-Richard Arthur Love
I’d been hanging out in the West Indies for the better part of two years, writing, painting, surfing, and hobnobbing my way through the expat culture of sunstruck American, British, and assorted South Americans that found the languid pace of the islands relaxing.
Now, alas, my funds were running low, and the time had come for my return to California. As a cost saving measure I conveniently managed to spare myself the price of a plane ticket by hopping a ride to Miami aboard my friend Dave McCann’s sleek new turboprop airplane.
Two days later we were lifting off in comfort in a Beechcraft King Air from Barbados’ Grantley Adams Airport. Once airborne I discovered there would be one quick stop on our flight to Miami, in the British Virgin Islands, one of my favorite places. No worries Mon!
It was well into midday when we put down at the tiny Beef Island airport, then took a bumpy Reggae music enhanced taxi ride to the Virgin Gorda residence of Dave’s business associate.
At the top of a ridiculously steep hill sat the sprawling luxury estate that was our destination. Once at the top I was mesmerized by the astounding view. The perfectly sculpted coastline rolled out before us like a primetime Technicolor advertisement for packaged holiday trips to paradise. The opulent tropical gardens were a riot of lush color, the tall palms nodding in the refreshing trade winds as if to offer their approval of nature’s astounding display.
After introductions to our congenial host and his wife, the pilot and the owner of this lavish hilltop hacienda retreated to chaise-lounges in a white tent-like poolside cabana to discuss their affairs. I was left sitting in a spacious living room enjoying an exotic imported cigarette and chatting up the attractive lady of the house, a charming young woman indeed.
After a few moments in this unfamiliar but relaxing place I began to notice in greater detail the rich and tasteful decor of the room, particularly what appeared to be a pair of original Matisse portraits. Who wouldn’t have noticed them?
Upon inquiring about the paintings, the woman gladly walked me across the room and into a long adjacent corridor, guiding me on a tour of their impressive art collection. Now this was a true privilege to see.
They were indeed real Matisse paintings, and there were also a pair of Degas, three Dali’s, and a large Marc Chagall.
We stood together, taking our time to view and discuss each of the paintings, and they were all breathtakingly impressive, but what finally stopped me in my tracks was an unusually ornate gold gilt frame showcasing a large piece of richly crafted calligraphic poetry.
The penmanship was exquisite, looking much like an illuminated manuscript from Fourteenth Century Firenze, only written in English. We both stood gazing in a reverent silence as I read the work, which now held my total attention.
By the tenth line it dawned on me that I was somehow familiar with the piece. The more I read the more familiar it seemed. By the last stanza, I realized I knew the author very well indeed. My surprised expression caught the notice of my hostess’s watchful eye.
“It’s quite special, isn’t it?” she exclaimed.
“Why yes. Very!” I replied. “Where did you get it... Who did this?”
“There’s a bit of a story attached to it, “she said. “Sadly enough, I don’t know who the author is.”
I turned to look at her, the fire in my eyes now shining brightly, and I said, “Well, I do. Would you like to meet him?”
She looked at me with an expression of mildly humorous disbelief.
“You’re kidding, of course…“
But with her gaze riveted on my face, she quickly realized that I was entirely serious.
“Would I ever! You don’t know what this poem means to me.”
‘Why don’t you tell me where it came from, and I’ll tell you who wrote it,” I replied, burning with my own curiosity about how she came to have this work of art.
“Agreed?”
And tell me she did, explaining that the antique frame originated from a friend who’d found it in the Amsterdam flea market, and that a pair of classical Italian restoration artists at the Met in New York City had done the calligraphy and the artwork at her request, and all from a poem she had found draped over the haphazard mess of a restaurant busboy’s tray, tossed in with the dirty dishes and silverware waiting to be washed.
Her face fell when I asked, “Did you find this poem in Ford’s Café at Victoria Cove in Laguna Beach, California, sometime in the late summer of 1976? Probably written on a paper placemat?”
After a stunned pause she narrowed her beautiful green eyes and blurted out, in a genuinely suspicious state of awestruck wonder, “How on earth could you possibly know that?...where I found this poem? How…?!?
I had spent years living as a prolific unknown pundit, scribbling and leaving inspired aphorisms, Buddhist sutras, and illustrated musings in my wake, written perhaps for no reason other than I was creatively compelled by some greater force to let my hand dance across any unmarked surface that presented itself.
This was a period when almost every restaurant in America put white paper placemats on their tables, a perfect canvas to scribble on while waiting for my order to arrive.
I may have left behind hundreds of poems on forgotten topics on an equal amount of tabletops, but this one I knew only too well, and I recognized it with no doubt of the time and place of it’s origins.
It was penned the week I separated from my then greatest paramour, the path to true love never seeming to run a straight course, particularly for the emotionally charged young artist that I was then. Ford’s Café was my regular stop off on the way home from surfing Salt Creek Beach. Good chili and great coffee. And java at Ford’s Cafe was still a dime a cup, unlimited refills included.
Now the site of the Laguna Nigel Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Salt Creek was then a pristine stretch of coastline, a virgin beach, sweeping Pacific surf thumping incessantly below steep yellow wildflower covered bluffs, a wild watermelon patch above, the entire coastline owned by two grumpy old codgers who ruled the place from a tilted driftwood shack and charged surfers the then exorbitant price of fifty cents to drive into their beach, thus inspiring us to trespass over the wilderness trails to avoid their sassy taunts and unwelcome tariffs.
It was a piece that had held a prominent place in my personal history and was the first page of one of my poetry chapbooks. I remembered the poem being dated September 1976. I knew the work in all certainty to be mine. I must have left a raw draft of it on a paper Ford’s Café placemat—shortly after dreaming it up while soothing my lovesick heart in the cool and comforting arms of the blue Pacific surf.
“How could I know that?” I said. “Simply because…I am the author of this poem!”
Frankly, I don’t know who was more shocked by this odd revelation, her or me. We both stood stock-still, frozen for an infinite moment by the sheer strangeness of our shared discovery.
“This is beyond belief,” she said, and took my hand and led me across the room to a long white linen sofa where we sat, still holding hands. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
She continued searching my eyes for some sign of a trick, for confirmation of the truth of my confident pronouncement. We just stared at each other until we both broke into ridiculous grins. It was true, and we both knew it.
“What do you say we…” She rose, moved to an elegant adjacent bar, and returned with a cold clear bottle of Christal champagne and two long-stemmed glasses.
“This is a special moment. Will you share a glass with me?”
Naturally, I accepted, opened the bottle for her, and carefully poured, filling our glasses with what had suddenly taken on the air of a ceremonial toast.
As I watched the tiny bubbles streaming up from the bottom of my tapered crystal flute, she began to unfurl the colorful details of how she came to have my poem, and the dramatic results of her first reading it. With an innocent sense of real intimacy this lovely woman told me a tale of how she had been a struggling waitress who at the time was dealing with the tragic loss of her first fiancé in a fatal car crash.
Despondent, repeatedly harangued by her boss, and drifting on the verge of an emotional implosion, she had found my poem sticking out from a pile of dirty dishes in a red plastic dish room tray. For no logical reason she set down the food order she was carrying, fished the crumpled paper out of the muck, smoothed it out and read the darn thing.
Finally, after rereading the coffee-stained thirty-line sonnet for the fifth time, she realized she was half sobbing, half laughing, while a flood of fat, sad tears streamed down her face. Embraced in something of an epiphany, she dashed into the dining room of the café shouting at the startled customers, demanding, pleading, to know who had written this poem. All she got were blank, somewhat frightened stares.
Her boss was so bent out of shape by this emotional outburst he promised to dock her a week’s pay, shouting “Shut up, Shut Up!”
Apparently, that was all it took. She quit her job on the spot. Within a week, after hawking her furniture in a yard sale, she left Southern California and its sad ghosts, setting out for San Francisco in a beat-up Volvo, her cat at her side, and all of her worldly possessions piled on the back seat.
After only one day in the Bay Area, knowing no one, and with little money, her luck took a sudden positive swing. She met a young couple in a city bakery who offered her a free apartment and a job.
The place was across the bay in Oakland, and was part of a project to build a temple for a remarkable man from India, who was identified only as Baba. The pay wasn’t much and the neighborhood was a little dodgy, but it was a clean apartment, and the people were absurdly friendly, and it felt like a fresh start.
She fell in with the temple project people, helping cook for the building crews, answering phones, and assisting other newcomers to learn their way around. It was there, two weeks into her new adventure, that she met the kind hearted man who would become her husband.
He was an architect who was donating time to the building project. One afternoon she served him some peppermint tea, he smiled, and the rest, as they say, is history. Extremely happy together, they were married within three months. Less than a year later, he had moved his practice to New York City. They first came to love the Caribbean Islands when he was commissioned to design a luxury resort in the region.
When his grandfather left him an unexpected fortune in the form of a fine art collection they decided to move to the Caribbean and raise their first child out of the big city. She had the poem laid out by a renowned calligraphic penman, then had it turned into an “illuminated” page in the style of the Florentine Renaissance by the top restoration artists at the Met.
And that was her story.
Entranced by this amazing saga, I then recounted to her how I had written the poem, and why, and how, through my habit of penning public poetry she had come to find it.
She confided to me that she always considered my poem the key to her current happy fortunes, that this cast-off piece of scribbling had been the catalyst to the most dramatic change in her life, and for this reason she had enshrined it here, among their collected masterworks.
With both the bottle and our revelations spent, we were again rendered speechless, mostly by the true peculiarity of our chance meeting, and for her, I assume, the “mystery of the poem” finally being revealed.
There came a shift in the mood, and a bit of embarrassment and some quick explaining, when at the exact moment that she decided to hug me her husband and my friend David entered the room. They both found the story of the poem, and my being there, a tale that defied all probability.
With business concluded, it was time for the four of us to enjoy a quick but excellent local seafood meal, during which we all agreed that the odds of us ever meeting, five-thousand miles from where we had once crossed paths and many years later, were somewhere around 10 billion to one, or greater.
I was given an open invitation to visit their home again, and after kind farewells and a comfortable ride to the airport in their spotless ivory Land Rover I found myself winging my way through a brilliant Bahamian sunset, en route to an unknown future of my own.
Throughout that flight, and over the many years since, I have always been amazed at the lesson I was given that day: That we are all inexplicably bound together, and that to commit ourselves to both the act of writing, and to the free sharing of our ideas and efforts, provides us with a secret wealth that we should never doubt the value of.
How could I feel sad about the challenges of my chosen path knowing that something so simple as that abandoned poem would be the source of such amazing inspiration to a total stranger? Now I know the truth.
-Richard Arthur Love
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