Bill Maraschiello, A Friend In Dreams |
Dreams Are Messengers And Messages Alike...
The next year, he came back for the entire school. Everyone kept him busy, and we rarely talked. He was making close friends, but I was afraid to be one of them, afraid I'd have that same reaction and not want to go home, where I was badly needed.
Ghosts were everywhere. Even the moon was a ghost. The woman was thin skinned, on the edge of hysteria. I asked her if I could help clean his room. She didn't want to do it herself, but she screamed no. She wanted the grief to herself.
I got down on my knees and begged, telling her that I loved him too, that I knew and had nothing of him. She gave up and let me come in.
His room was my mother's old room. Why? It was filled not just with his things, but his ghost was there, and so were the monsters of death.
The woman froze in fear. I walked forward and beat at them and yelled " Go away!" But I could only beat them back under the bed.
He walked forward then, half invisible in a cloak. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, "remember what we were."
I sat down in the dream, writing down the incident, and saw the lyrics of Richard Fariña's "Reflections" beside the paper on the table.
When I first found the note after many years. and read the dream again, I didn't know what it meant by Richard Fariña's "Reflections." I didn't know the song. I do now, for I have found it. The Internet makes it easy for "ghosts" to speak to us. And it's definitely a message, not just from Bill, but from Richard - because this song seems a precognition of Richard's own death in a motorcycle accident in 1966, on the day his book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me was released. The two men are linked in my mind now, both writers and musicians who left us much too soon. They are also the voices in my ear that tell me to keep on going no matter what.
Richard and Mimi Fariña Sing Reflections
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to... Penguin Classics | Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me A DELL BOOK Only $43.19 | Hundido hasta el cielo El Aleph Editores Only $44.28 |
Richard Fariña
I learned about Richard Fariña after he had died, through the music of Judy Collins and Joan Baez. I hadn't heard his actual music, recorded with his wife Mimi (Joan Baez's sister). The Internet finally brought hus music to me. Yet it's not his music that calls me out - it's his life, reflected in songs like the one I'm sharing here. Not the details of his life - the texture of it, the fabric of a young man looking for life in so many places and changing what he found into wonderful words. I find in Richard Fariña a brother. I feel Richard had the life Bill wished he had led more fully.
Richard Fariña
Read more about him on Wikipedia
Richard and Mimi Fariña: Recordings at Amazon
Reflections In A Crystal Wind VANGUARD Only $9.49 | The Complete Vanguard Recordings VANGUARD Only $28.49 | The Best Of VANGUARD Only $9.49 |
Celebrations For A Grey Day VANGUARD Only $9.49 | Pack Up Your Sorrows, Best Of The Va VANGUARD Only $9.49 |
Bill Maraschiello
The Waters of Time
More About Bill
Celtic and Filk Music was his life.
Filk Hall of Fame
Bill was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 1996.
Pegasus Awards
Bill won three Pegasus Awards for his filk lyrics.
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