Shining The Light

It’s Saturday night and the joint is jumping. Everyone at the Captain’s Table is moving with the beat. Georgia Rose is a tall, pretty, blond North Country lass who’s knocking out ‘Crocodile Rock’ with enough juice to light up L.A. Georgia glows. She smiles and sings with her whole body. You gotta be happy cause Georgia’s happy and she won’t let you be anything else.

Many sitting at the tables ringing the stage have a few wrinkles and a couple of grey hairs. The rest of the room is filled with young men and women, ten year old kids with their parents, teenagers, many singing along, all drawn together and lifted up by Georgia’s lovely voice and her radiance.

I’ve rarely met a more convivial crowd, or one more generous in spirit. This is a local’s bar, our first time here. We’re strangers to this island and have only a nodding acquaintance with a few people, but everyone comes and shakes hands or gives us a hug, talks with us, pulls us in. We become part of the community.

During a break I go to the bar and order a glass of wine. Mark, the barkeep and owner, smiles and shakes my hand. Mark’s from Detroit, served in the navy, been here in Gozo some years now. He smiles at the fellow next to me ordering in fractured English with a strong French accent. Mark smiles a lot.

Back at my table I talk with the lady next to me, a thin woman with brown hair shot through with gray and drawn back and tied, a light skirt and loose blouse. She’s from England, lived here two years.

“Many of us here are making a new life. Some of us have lost our husbands, or wives. Our children don’t need us and there’s not much for us at home, nothing but sitting alone in a room. I hear this music and feel like I’m sixteen again. I still feel the same inside. I don’t feel old at all. Except for my body.” She raises her open hand from her lap, palm up, gesturing at a trim but no longer young body. “Somehow I woke up one day in this body.” She smiles, first ruefully then brightly with a touch of insouciance, “Well, it’s what we have so we’ll make the best of it.”

My heart opens and for that moment I love this brave and lonely woman.

Then the break is over. The stage light hits him and Elvis blows the windows out with ‘I Gotta Woman.’ He’s shaking. He’s on fire. The heat is rising and Elvis has everyone rocking. Couples jump up and dance, dancing the dances of their youth, limber and agile as teenagers. Some of the dancers are teenagers. Mark’s mom is up and rockin. Eileen’s seventy-four, just had a birthday, been around the world a few times, worked with Motown from its inception, knew all the greats and does the Motown Shuffle to the Elvis beat.

Elvis segues to ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and moves in close. Real close. He’s singing to the melancholy lady next to me, singing right to her, right in her face. He goes to one knee touches her shoulder and her smile goes nuclear and her face bright red – her heart beats so it scares her to death.

Steve ‘Elvis’ Allen is not an Elvis imitator. Steve is an English vocalist and accomplished musician who has performed from Albert Hall to the Vegas Strip, and who interprets Elvis’s music and renders it with his own muscular grace and driving style. Let yourself go for a moment and you know, just know – the King never died.

Then Georgia’s back and the whole room is swaying to her sweet rendition of ‘Shine A Light,’ a Stones song from the long ago 60s. The currents of time’s great river slow this evening, and in a small eddy far from the turbulence of the center stream everyone’s again sixteen, the world and life before them. Everyone’s shining a light and holding back the darkness. I’m adrift in gentle waves of joy

How it is that all these people from far away places, and my love and I, have come to this tiny island in an ancient sea? A thousand years ago and more, Ulysses washed up on this shore, shipwrecked, worn and wounded from his battles and travel. He was healed and restored by Calypso’s magic. Maybe a trace of Calypso’s magic lingers, magic that draws in and heals weary travelers.

Around midnight we walk past the harbor lights, up the hill to our temporary home, walking hand in hand under a starry starry sky, enveloped in the scent of the sea, caressed by its soft touch, floating on an easy wave of island magic.