Sitting in the Herrenhäuser Gärten

It was wonderful having Jill come to visit me here in Germany recently. She and I are old friends- which means that we’ve known each other for over ten years now and I hadn't seen her in two of those years. Actually we used to be boyfriend and girlfriend; we had had a real-life impact on each other and then we broke up. That was years ago but she knows a lot about me and she knows about Tom because I had always shared things with her that were going on in my life and as I traveled in different circles, I had spoken to her about him. I shared things with her that were important to me.

On one particular day during her visit we went to the Herrenhäuser Gärten. These are the king’s gardens of Hannover created in the 17th Century and preserved and maintained today in all their stately beauty. The flowers were blooming madly and sun beat down on us as we walked along the rows and rows of magnificent beds of color. We took a stroll through one of the rose gardens, walking along and talking about our lives which seemed to be quite appropriate in the peace and tranquility of the garden. At one point I mentioned Tom and she asked me to tell her more about him. Just at that moment we were passing the entrance to one of six private arboretum spaces that ring the central fountain. I took Jill’s hand and led here into the quiet space. The late afternoon sun was flickering through the tall trees that surrounded the enclosure and straight ahead of us were some park benches that seems to be waiting for us and for me- to tell her about my old friend.

It must have been the rarity of her visit combined with the warmth of the sun and privacy of that garden space that brought out the intimacy of the moment. I felt alive and inspired to talk about Tom to her and I felt our lives as they passed through me and around us both. She asked me, “What happened to him?” “What did he do in his life?” Her curiosity brought me back to the times we had had, to the places we had been to and to the things we had done together in our youth and years later as well. I felt so invited to speak and to tell her what I knew about him and I did.

I began to tell her of how I had first met him, how I had been so impressed with his ability and his creativity. How I had followed him around Brooklyn and how he had such an impact on me in showing me the way music is made. I told her about his challenges, his depressions and what I knew about his fear. What I have since learned in my own life has made me painfully aware of what I had described in those days only as something that Tom was ‘going through’. Years later however some of the pieces seemed to fit together better and I wish that I had had the presence of mind then to intervene in some way, if only to have said something to him then, to have had an impact on him as he had had on me.

The tale I told her was also a colorful one and filled with his accomplishments, his triumphs; for Tom was triumphant in his own way and I want just as much to remember this about him. He had excelled and he had gone to places that none of us had ever gone to and he did it all with the same gusto with which he played that bass. I told her that despite the tough things that had gone down between us, the things that no one could ever say were his fault or mine, I loved Tom. I loved him because he was my brother. I fought with him over the years because I cared so much about him.

Sitting in the quiet of garden and holding Jill’s hand, I remembered him again and thought to myself that here I was in Germany so far away from everything we had known together or apart and yet in his absence he stays so close to me. It just hit me how some people just have a deep and lasting impact on us. My old friend who’s gone now was that person for me. And all the richness mixed with pain is what I feel in these days to think about him, that we had been somewhere, sometime a long, long time ago and quite like a minstrel’s song his story will always ‘be’ for me, the song of our youth and our dreams- street corner dreams, the ones that never die even as they are ground and tempered in the fire of our real lives. Sitting there was so special that I had to write this. One more time that I think of Tommy Sheehan, one more time I ask the world to remember him again.