Often, when we least expect it, the pain and the preoccupation come back, and back — sometimes like the rolling crash of an ocean wave, sometimes like the slow ooze after a piece of driftwood is lifted and water and sand rise to claim their own once more. — Martha W. Hickman, Healing After Loss
How is it that the Internet is forever in some ways, and forgotten in the ways that matter the most.
I used the privilege of my first hand-coded website before the turn of the millennium to render some poetry I imagined I wanted to keep forever, and to create a few lines of my own. That one I wrote, Last Night on Ocean Beach, is now no longer accessible but for the Internet Archives, but reading the above line in the forward by Martha W. Hickman, it surges back again.
The Internet can’t keep our people, but I can try.
Last Night on Ocean Beach After wandering way back out past surprised starfish exposed clinging to slippery green undersides of rocks and stripped bare to the rising sensations now remembering their dreams of foam-dashed rocks succumbed to sleep, high storm at sea once again prepares its home and rises
Driftwood on the Northern California Coast, August 2025
We arrived a little late from San Francisco to the Oakland Coliseum on the lovely, warm afternoon of Friday, May 31.
Although we missed the first opener (Levi Turner), we made it just in time for the second act, Mt. Joy. The Coliseum, while absolutely, panic-attackingly crowded and terrible inside in the corridors, was so pretty outside in the golden hour of twilight.
Our seats were up a couple levels and just left from center of the gigantic stage stretched out across the outfield. The field was half lined with chairs and half open space. It was already pretty full throughout the stadium and certainly mobbed just behind us inside.
Initial Panic
I spent most of Mt. Joy’s set braving those corridors and waiting in an enormous line for a tall can of Negra Modelo, failing at resisting feeling old and wrongly attired. I’m not sure where most of the crowd came from, but looking around, I felt a wistfulness at not being a woman who could pull off a wispy white sundress with a straw cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and not just because of the Bay Area’s Karl the Fog.
Mt. Joy
I’m also not sure how to qualify or characterize the night’s music genres. I’d never heard Mt. Joy before, and was enchanted when I made it back to my seat in time for the refrain Jesus Drives an Astrovan. Clearly this was a crowd favorite, played so well that I can still hum the tune two weeks later. But was I an imposter, not previously having this music in my life before?
As the sun dipped below the stadium rim, the lovely strands of light strung back and forth across the field illuminated the view between seats and stage. By the time Zach Bryan came on, it was dark.
A grainy black western video lit across the entire stage backdrop as Zach and band kicked it off and the whole of the audience, which appeared to be sold out across all stadium levels, launched up from their seats, barely sitting down the entire show.
Black and White Rodeo Entrance
Aside from the very pretty video backdrops, the first thing that struck me was Zach’s James-Dean-twinkly side-eye gazing in apparent wonder across the fired up crowd. He said something like he “never expected to play a crowd like this,” and although I wasn’t sure whether he meant Oakland, not necessarily a country stronghold, or the sheer stadium size, he seemed fully geniune admiring and thanking the adoring crowd the whole night. It sure looked beautiful from our seats, too.
Rapt Crowd
I wouldn’t have called myself a fan before the show. I had only known a few of Zach’s songs, but those I knew (Something In The Orange, not played this night; and several others that were played, like Burn, Burn, Burn; East Side of Sorrow) hit on some deeper level than a casual listen.
The crowd, on the other hand, was all in, often singing along in a back-and-forth with Zach.
Even when Zach debuted the first live performance of the newly released Pink Skies, the crowd sang along – to every word – while Zach looked on, it seemed, in open wonder.
The Open Wonder
That’s a special kind of songwriting. I have been looking at show reviews since, and it feels like we really were in the magic hours that night. This is a real-talk guy, and I saw that he had been quite vocal against Pink Skies being released to pop radio that week. I knew his music casually, and likely the better part of the crowd were diehard fans, but a reach across music genres feels like a reach across aisles of a truly healing kind. When he later relented and apologized for being anti-pop or whatever it was – not that that particularly matters – it made me feel less like some kind of imposter without a country background and a carefree, white sundress.
Across Aisles
I believe music IS at its universal best when it transcends genres and thus differences. I’m thrilled I got to see this show, and can’t imagine there are many people, even if they don’t see themselves as religious country fans, who would not feel a chill at lines like “I bet God heard you comin’.”
White Sundresses and I Remember Everything
The encore was transplendent. A set of golf carts set out from the stage towards a different platform more in the center of the floor. As the floor crowd got the memo, there was a human surge in that direction. Then this platform lit up, and the band struck up a most lively rendition of Revival. There were many solos from the large and varied instrument pool on stage, including the kickass fiddle solo by the woman who apparently was a guest to the band subbing for a new father, and a fainting act – revival fashion, I realize, with embarrassment, in hindsight – by the banjo player that had me downright fooled. Fireworks ensued. Warm glows bathed the carefree dancers in their white sundresses on the small part of the floor that was empty. It was a stunner of a closing song and setting.
Revival
If there is a problem with this superlative of a live experience, it is that all other music, at least for a time after, sounds tired. I’m coming out of that slowly, but I will remember the color and the warmth and – maybe most of all – the feeling like we belonged. From the looks of it, this fellow from Oologah, Oklahoma, felt the same about his Oakland, California welcome.
You bailed him out, never said a thing About Jesus or the way he’s livin’
After her brain injury in October 2020, I remember sitting with my mother outside on the patio at the house in Vacaville. The most voracious reader I have known, she couldn’t, and could never again, see well enough to read due to visual field cuts. She would never fully regain her balance, and in these early days she was mostly drowsing and not very responsive. With help, we brought her outside and I sat with her in the stillness of this particular autumn afternoon and played audio of the readings of Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I like to think it helped her think of her homeland and Irish family.
Over the following several months she regained an astounding amount of function as family, and many friends old and new, bore loving witness.
While she could not live independently again (and had not wanted to live alone at the house in Vacaville anyway after Dad died), in San Francisco, she did nevertheless have her own place with her own carers, worked very hard with therapists so that she could get her own self around the apartment, and thus did gain some independence for herself. We could visit every day; she enjoyed very good foods and very excellent care; she had a sunny window with a view of the city; and she made new friends.
Despite her constant struggle after that to retain short-term memory, she was always happy to see us. She not only built loving new relationships with carers and our trainer, and even with therapists who perhaps visited only briefly, but she always kept precious the memory of long-time friends, some of whom went to heroics to visit and to constantly keep in touch.
And like a volume of books, she retained the memory of songs and poems from a lifetime ago — from a distant Irish past. She trotted out old Irish songs I had never heard before, and continued to recite poems from far and wide, as if not being able to read was not important, because the words were etched with permanence inside her mind.
Although her dad, Grandpa Norman, taught me to memorize the alphabet backwards, I have never been as talented at reciting poetry as Mom and Grandpa. But I thought if I could remember a poem like she could remember a poem, I could keep her.
So I memorized this poem, and read it at the cemetery:
And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
Postscript by Seamus Heaney
It strikes me that this poem is breathtaking because it describes a moment that can never be captured or relived, which is, of course, what makes it precious. On the other hand, memory — especially in the short term — can be so fickle. When you have that one moment of the present, you can’t turn around to drive back to get it again. I am happy I got to say “I love you more” a million more times to my mother, but I can’t say it that one more time.
I was able to recite the poem from memory. But I was still unable to keep my mother.
After he died, a fellow poet said of Seamus Heaney: “His work will pass into permanence.” So maybe memory isn’t exactly the way I will get to keep her.
I will breathe in deep breaths, and when I release them, maybe each time I will allow a little more of my mom to pass into permanence in my heart. And I will know that she is there not in the keeping, but in the release, during every countless random hurry when the wind and the light catch it off guard and blow it open.
Moya Watson 