Selected Poems - Will James - Bog

Peachland in Winter "On my first day of the ninth grade, I arrived at the bus stop early. Johnny O soon joined me at the bus stop. We did not know each other well but over the next few years we would become close friends. Johnny was a year younger than me and had recently formed a band with my old pal Syd on bass. Johnny was the front man, the guitarist and singer. He was small, good looking-he had that whole David Cassidy, Mick Jagger thing going for him. With my long wavy, blonde hair, I looked pretty good myself (earlier that summer I had gotten chubby, but I dieted on Fresca and yogurt and with the help of a major growth spurt; I was once again a contender for the girls' hearts). I was dressed in my new clothes, a lavender shirt, corduroy bell bottoms and boots. (Soon there would be no division between school clothes and play clothes; I would wear blue jeans and whatever shirts my mother had laundered that week.)The ninth grade would be wild. While I wouldn't become a total stoner (that would come later), I would dabble with drugs whenever I had the chance. I would find the girl of my dreams and then lose her. I would then be asked to join Johnny and Syd's band (the best junior high band in the Twin Cities) and then be asked to leave. The thing about good fortune, about good luck, is that there always the chance of a reversal of that good fortune, of that glittering prize being stolen or lost. But a loss can bear its own kind of fruit, its own kind of wisdom, bittersweet and dark. This dark night can change us, transform us, if we let it. After all, it brought us the cantos of Dante after the death of Beatrice, and a whole universe of poetry and song."