woobiquity

lxxviii. Of lives lived inside the tiny screen

Call it the inevitable democratization of the paparazzi. Already celebrity trash magazines like Heat (if you must know, someone left a copy lying on the train) have set aside column space for readers' grainy picture-phone celebrity sightings. And if the scene at yesterday's central London Babyshambles gig (above) was any indication, the flickering screens of digital cameras and phones have become what cigarette lighters once were to star-struck rock and roll audiences. The eye of the flame takes on a whole new meaning.

If the snapping photos is an obsessive act when there's a clebrity in the room, it's downright irresistible when there's a dangerous celebrity present -- an admitted heroin addict who at his band's last gig had started a fist fight and a small riot despite being out of jail on bail. That's Pete Doherty for you, and the thrall with which his afternoon audience of 100 fedora-donning die-hards not only accepted the hostage situation that encircles this troubled genius but reached to document it proves that some within our perfect world of Bree Van de Kamps and Queer Eyes still crave the kind of rough and ready culture that leaves the taste of fresh blood in the mouth. Raise hell, Hunter S. Thompson.

And yet, I wonder whether the urges to ride the crest of demented legend and to record that ride through a pocket-sized screen aren't to some extent mutually defeating. In the way that legends by definition loom large, I mean, usually only reaching the required scale within the infinities of imagination, retellings and dreams.

Aside from all that, dangerous celebrity mixed with digital channeling carries a much more basic, a much more physical hazard, as I discovered at the end of yesterday's gig when I raised my camera to get a close-up of Pete Doherty hound dog lolling on the nearest corner of the stage, only to catch a brief glimpse of his eyeball in the camera's screen as the crowd surged, Pete aloft, dragging me, my scalp and half my belongings with them, although not so far as the backstage holding-cell our desperate hero vanished into.

lxxvii. Of beauty in winter

A patch of sky reflected in a woodland creek that runs through the family land in North Carolina. Last week.

lxxvi. To heaven in a red dress

My Grandma died last week. We had been standing around her bed singing “Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling…” in perfect, three-part harmony just a couple of hours earlier. (It sounded perfect to us, anyway. Grandma had been in a coma for days by that point and did not register a response, although my guess is she'd have said, "That's pretty, y'all" and rushed back into the kitchen to check on her yeast rolls.)

When the moment came for her to cross over to the other side, we were there for that, too. Of course, at a certain point -- a point that was surprisingly difficult to discern -- she carried on alone and we were left in the room with a body.

I had never seen anyone die before, so could not say whether this death was typical. But none of the clichés held. There was no holy glow, no last-second smile, no sudden ability to speak in tongues. If anything, the break in the addictive constancy of Grandma's raspy breathing, the race back to the bedside, the way her mouth finally closed, opened, closed, and opened again, the way our grandfather leaned over her, exonerating, "I need you to take a deep breath for me, Sweetheart", even though she was probably already dead, created a sense of expectant terror in the room, gradually replaced by a queer form of relief and a collective outpouring of 13 people's grief.

Grandma had not been ready to die. A young 72, she had been too busy living. And there was something else. She had quietly let some in the family know that she was afraid to go because she couldn't be sure where she was going. "I'm not sure I'm good enough to make it to heaven," she said to my aunt. (Only a person as good as Grandma was could worry about such a thing and really mean it.)

Because she worried privately, we worried publicly on her behalf. And I'll admit that we were receptive to the sign when it came. That it came by way of the local Presbyterian minister lent it credence and suspicion in equal measures. He had after all gone to bed with the news that she had just died, wondering what to say to everyone at church the next morning. That he would see her in a dream, sitting amongst a lot of other chatty deceased people from Stokes County is not that remarkable. "Tell everybody I'm okay" -- that was just the kind of thing she would say.

Only the red dress she had on -- not in character for a woman who in life had mostly worn clothes she made herself -- may have struck the preacher and his wife as a little odd when they discussed the dream over breakfast. In the end it was the dress that gave us peace.

Because before the dream, well before the preacher's wife would needle him beside the open casket and whisper, "would you look what she's wearing?," my mother and my aunt had handed the man from the funeral home a sack containing the new red dress Grandma would be buried in.

If the living dream, what do people do when they're dead? Tell Grandma, we're okay, but I didn't know I could miss you this much.