Slouching towards Bethlehem...

You could spend a lifetime straddling stools in bars from the bay side of Isle au Haut to the far side of Tillamook, and every once in a bottle of Blue Moon you might find yourself squinting through rivers of neon and smoke, tucking your beer a bit tighter to hand and leaning into the voice beside you, all at once aware that what you’re hearing might well pass for wisdom, even, and this, a true test of wisdom, the morning after.

More often, of course, all that beer breeds only so much blather, all of it as frothy and evanescent as the foam trimming the top, none of it relevant, if even remembered, in the fog of a morning after.

But try as you might, in that same lifetime of jockeying bar stools, you’d be hard-pressed to hitch that voice of lagered palaver to a face, and to have that face belong to a wise man of dubious wisdom with the unlikely, but, oh, so mellifluent name of Melchior.

So imagine, for a moment, my own good fortune, when, a week or so ago, after a couple of hours fielding riffs from the grassy bleachers at the Iowa City Jazz Festival, Karen and I popped into a local watering-hole, angled for the empty corner of the bar and, while Karen headed to the ladies’, I swung into the saddle and took the lay of the land.

To my left the jukebox, the empty stool saved for Karen to the right and, just beyond, another empty, with a pack of smokes and a proverbially half-empty/half-full glass laying claim to what was obviously temporarily abandoned territory. The owner — a gallon of a man in a pint container, a tree or two on the shady side of 60, the brim of a ball cap topping a head given to a comical bobbling — returned before Karen did, slipping easily into the saddle of his own seat and immediately crossing the divide with a good-natured dig at the recently implemented ban on public smoking in Iowa.

“It’ll never last,” expounded the man who would soon enough introduce himself as Melchior, in story the name of one of the wise men, in legend the one who bore the gold, giving me, suddenly all ears, the gift of writer’s gold. “They’ll repeal it before the summer ends. You just watch,” he sputtered, the words whistling between missing teeth.

I nodded, far less in agreement, given the welcome improvement in oxygen content since the new law had gone into effect on July 1st, than in politeness, then watched as Karen cantered toward, then slipped between us, Melchior brightening visibly at the suddenly lovelier horizon, and almost immediately registering his improved prospects with the downing of the dregs of what might, under less fortuitous circumstances, have been his last call.

After that, all I had to do was listen.

He had grown up in the Poconos, spent a decade and then another, not one day of which he could ever live to regret, in the Navy, some of that stint, if I close-hauled his wake, in a dreamily remembered Hawaii. Along the way, he had met, married and later ex-ed the woman who had been his wife. At some point, too, and somewhat incongruously, he had studied art in the company of Andrew Wyeth. And somewhere two more roads had diverged in a wood, and Melchior had emerged by the one more traveled by, piloting the business end of a semi while another pair of decades slipstreamed by.

I’m not sure when he picked up the pilot’s license, although he was quick, and we’re talking in the next breath, to invite me up for a spin.

Now, I left out the part where Melchior related how he’d not so long ago given up riding a bike to the bar after he’d taken a tumble on the way home. Better, I suppose, to walk, wobble and make whatever headway against a beer-and-bourbon tide than to ever again do a header over those handlebars.

It would also help you to know that the only times I had ever enjoyed travel by air was when Ireland had been the destination. I can’t explain that, other than by some dead-reckoning of the soul that had, on those many ocean crossings, led me reassuringly home. Except for that, every other flight, almost always of a business persuasion, owed much to wing but more to prayer. Not only that, but a life detoured by all this recent education, had meant a life without much in the way of vacation, the upshot of which is that I’ve not been on a plane in 14 years. Yet here Melchior was, having walked away from a boozy bike wreck, teetering as precariously now on a bar stool as he had that accidental night on a bicycle seat, and going Frank Sinatra on me with his own version of “Come Fly with Me.”

So I did what you’d do and ignored the invitation.

As luck would have it, nature, in the form of a nicotine break, called, and Melchior, more deftly than I would have predicted, fingered a smoke from the pack, snagged his lighter with his other hand and followed temptation and the brim of his cap to the great outdoors.

A bit more luck, and any memory of that invitation would have been just that, memory. Instead, no sooner had Melchior remounted his bar stool when he tried again.

“Anytime you want to go up, you just let me know.”

I looked at him, took in the bobbling cap on the bobbling head, the merriment in his eyes, remembered in that instant all he had already told me, and, even as I reveled in the wonder, the utter and unexpected wonder, of the moment, dropped any pretense and bared my manhood.

“I’m not one for planes,” I confessed, choosing not to add, “unless Ireland’s on the far end of the flight path,” lest he trump my petty ante and offer to ferry me by air to Shannon.

With the grace born of long years of marriage, Karen, right on cue, vouched for my midair derring-don’t, grounding for good any further flight of fancy on the part of our newfound companion. The three of us moved on to talk idly of other things, then, at some point, Karen and I huddled a moment to share a thought, only to look back to see that Melchior, this time cigarettes and all, had himself become night and memory.

Wisdom is, often as not, a wistful thing.

You can, if you listen, hear it in Springsteen and, if “Thunder Road” is what you’re listening to, catch it in passing in the rear-view window of your own life. You can read it in the likes of a Whitman or Agee, sense it on prayer mat or pew, encounter it in proverb or, even better, the script for “Bull Durham.” And sometimes, just sometimes, when you’re entirely unaware, when you’re slouched on a stool, with the namesake of a wise man at your elbow, each of you bound for your own private Bethlehem under some distant and brighter star, wisdom, in its wisdom, bellies up to the bar and buys you a round on the house.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon