Pat Jobe Makes My Face Hurt (actually a blog on losing my laptop)

Pete: "I just love Pat Jobe."
(breaks into shit-eating grin)
Janet: "I know you do. And he just loves you, too."
(rolls eyes)
Pete: "He's like the other side of me. If I were a guy, I would be Jobe."
(grins even wider)
Janet: "Yep, yin and yang."
(rolls eyes the other direction)
Pete: "Heh, heh, heh..."
(facial muscles cramp as grin threatens to split face)

Okay, go ahead and rinse your mouth out to get rid of the little bit of vomit that came up when you read that piece of dialogue. And you don't even want to know how many times we have actually had that very conversation. I believe that would be every time we saw Pat perform, or he sent me an email, or I sent him an email, or heard him on the radio, or watched him on TV.

The cosmic translation of that drivel, however, is something else entirely: in 1979, Pat Jobe saved my life. Seriously. It was a dark time for me, a time when I felt alone and separated from everything and everyone around me. I wanted to die and take all the light with me. Then the powers that be dropped both of us into the offices of the JDRE and the light began to flicker, sputter, and stay on again. At the time I thought I was in love with the goofball, but in reality I was, like Narcissus, falling in love with my own reflection.

It took me a long time to see what really happened back then, but what I found in Jobe was my first recognizable link to all that is. That is why I keep making the comment that he is the other side of me, that I just love him. He was my "first," my initial reconnection with Oneness. It is not that he is perfect (insert sound of Universe guffawing) or enlightened or some spiritual guru -- not even close. He is something much more valuable to me.

That connection with Pat Jobe is my touchstone.

Not in the traditional sense of a stone used to assay the purity of precious metals -- although at times I have scratched my words across his surface to see what kind of mark was left -- but rather in the sense of being able to reach out and touch that connection again whenever I need affirmation, but am doubting my own knowing. And sometimes that reaching out has not been a conscious act. Sometimes when the waves of doubt seemed about to wash me away again, my hand would reach for a handhold, anything to steady me, and my fingers would brush against something in the darkness and there he would be: on the radio, in my inbox, on a poster announcing a performance. Cool, huh?

But this past December, when my laptop disappeared into the maelstrom that was those final days of 2007, I felt an old familiar sense of loss and separation and grief rise in me, and there were moments when I reached out and found only darkness. That laptop held my life - my personal records, my contact information for friends and family far and near, pictures of events and evidence of relationships over the past 4 years, the only photos of my youngest never met in person grandchildren, documentation that I existed, that I interacted, that I was connected... gone.


In just a moment of paralyzing hate and anger, someone struck out blindly, needing to cause pain, and the blow missed its target and landed on me instead. It felt like a large portion of my life just vanished. In fact, it was actually physical -- the deep, gut-wrenching emptiness that instantly swept through me. And almost immediately, the realization that almost brought me to my knees in grief: all my writing was on that computer. And not just the novels and stories and poetry, but the little pieces that meant so much to me -- Bill's eulogy, my essay on Fred Rogers, love letters, that glorious piece on being a redneck, the notes and scribblings of works in progress and ideas for the future. Gone. Someone had stabbed me in the belly of my creativity and the child I had nurtured for so long lay bloodied and dismembered, a gash of scarlet across a sandy beach, washed away by a relentless tide...

Think that is hyperbole? Are you a writer? An artist? I tried to explain it that day, and people tried to be sympathetic, but, bless their hearts, it was not enough. I needed to share this pain with another writer, someone who would understand, someone who would hear of my loss and wail along with me, someone who would understand my grief and the overwhelming finality of losing my creative "child." I needed Jobe, but my means for getting in touch with him were on that computer. And then it really hit me.

In this day of too busy for letters, too busy for phone calls, e-mail keeps us connected on this rapidly tilting planet. And all my email for the past 8-9 years was carefully organized on that laptop. Oh my god. Those emails were a journal of my life, the lives of my friends, the death of a friend, the back and forth flow and intermingling of lives on this physical plane. Short little notes to stay in touch, longer epistles of sharing, the epic emails between Nancy and me (the last vestiges of a relationship gone silent) and everything between Jobe and me, including that last painful admission from him that another marriage had gone under and he was feeling lost -- that last email that I never answered...

I am trying to learn to stay in the present moment, to be fully aware and connected at all times, and revisiting this loss -- as revisiting any moment from the past -- only serves to disconnect us from what actually is. But this is a loss that needed to be grieved and I have been making myself sick with the denial of my pain. Tonight I have let this rise up and through me, twist my heart with the agony, and wash away the bile with my tears. I look like shit, but I feel like hope.

And in the clarity of this new day, I am aware of all my touchstones, all my connections past and present and as yet unnamed, all the pieces of us that are the whole of us, and I am filled with the wonder of it all. My life, my loves, my friends, my family are not the pictures or letters or pieces of fluff I held onto in hopes of avoiding loss. No, all of those people and times and places became part of me in those moments. And I am still here, so they are also -- only even more than I had allowed them to be in my narrow, stagnant view. In a way I have freed them and myself to move on and grow and be for all time. Pretty cool.


And that creation of mine, the literary "child" unborn? Even while I allowed my heart to mourn, I had to face that vision of a creation conceived so long ago, but never birthed. I had to own my words aborted, but still in utero, held prisoner for years by my doubts and fears. I had to let it go, all of it, so there will be room for something more -- something like this:

Pete: "I just love Pete Gaither."
(breaks into shit-eating grin)
Janet: "Well, it's about time."
(rolls eyes)
Pete: "She's like the other side of me. If I were a writer, I would be Pete."
(grins even wider)
Janet: "You are a writer and you are Pete."
(rolls eyes the other direction)
Pete: "Oh yeah, I know. Heh, heh, heh..."
(facial muscles cramp as grin threatens to split face)

Thank you, Jobe, for being the first and for making me laugh and letting me cry and seeing the wonder in me until I could see it for myself. And thank you, gentle reader, for doing the same.