To Dance with the Barn Owl

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer

Photo by John P. Weiss

Note to readers:

This short story appears in my book The Morning Fox: Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope. I offer it here to share something special.

Michael Williams is a musician and a ten-year Army combat medic. He composed, performed, and recorded an original song inspired by this story. It is stunning and beautiful.

Read the story, and then at the end listen to Michael’s moving piece.

---

One wrong turn can change the entire trajectory of your life.

Exhausted, sipping a bitter cup of gas station coffee, I was determined to get home by daybreak. I don’t like driving through the night, but the writer’s conference I attended for the last three days ate up most of my accrued vacation time. I needed to get home, leaving just one day to unpack, do laundry, and sleep before work the following day.

Not that I love my work.

Being a copywriter for a digital company is a means to an end. A bridge to the future, when my novels hopefully reach a broader audience and financial success.

GPS is a wonderful thing when it works. But sometimes high mountains, poor cellular range, and the alchemy of fate set you on a different course and a wrong turn.

The turn off the main highway felt astray, but whenever I ignore GPS, I usually regret it. So I kept driving for miles, as the road narrowed and the surrounding countryside disappeared into curtains of pitch black.

“Where the hell am I?” I said to myself. Then the GPS went haywire and its little voice blurted out “Re-calculating…proceed to the nearest route.”

“Great.”

There was a gravel driveway in the distance, leading to a small house and a delapidated barn. An old tractor sat in the yard. The house was dark, but a light shined in the barn.

It was nearly 10 PM, and I didn’t want to startle whoever lived there. I parked near the barn. I heard classical music (a waltz) when I opened my car door. It was coming from within the barn.

I walked over to the closed barn door and called out, “Hello? Sorry to bother you, can you help me?”

Nothing.

I knocked loudly on the barn door. “Hello, is anyone here?”I was about to knock again when a deep voice startled me from behind.

“Can I help you?”

I spun around, barely able to make out the dark figure standing in the shadows nearly ten feet from me. His raspy, baritone voice bore a slight southern accent.

“Yes, hello. I’m so sorry to interrupt you at this hour. I’m afraid I’m lost. Made a wrong turn.”

“Hard to say if turns are wrong or right. I’ll wager they’re just turns. It’s up to us to decide what to do with them.”

I couldn’t decide if the man’s response was odd or wise. He stepped forward, out of the shadows, into the ambient light from the barn. I felt like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

He was a bear of a man. Bald, bearded, wearing overalls. A large leather glove covered his left hand. Perched on the glove was a magnificent white barn owl.

“Penelope and I were about to dance together, but then the motion detector went off in the barn, and we knew we had company. We don’t get company, especially at this hour, so we slipped out into the night. We’re both comfortable in the dark.”

The owl repositioned slightly on the glove, spinning its head around to look directly at me. The man came closer. Despite his size, he moved silently and gracefully.

“I’m sorry, you and the owl were about to…dance together?”

“Yes,” the man said with a half grin. “We’ve been dancing together for a few years now. The music and movements seem to calm us both. See, we both have a little PTSD. But then I guess no living thing in this world escapes life’s slings and arrows.”

Part of me wanted to run back to my car, lock the door, and get the hell out of there. But my writer’s brain kept screaming, “This is gold! You can’t make this up. Maybe you should go dance with the big guy and his owl!”

“Can’t say I’ve ever danced with an owl before,” I said, surprising myself.

---

“Jake,” he said, extending his meaty right hand.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Patrick.” His rough hand swallowed mine.

We entered the barn, which surprised me. I expected farm equipment, or maybe a woodworking shop. Instead, there was a large painting easel beside a desk that held a palette, brushes, sketchbooks, and various containers for mineral spirits, mediums, and paint tubes.

There was a lovely landscape painting on the easel, depicting a sort of nocturne mountain scene, in muted colors. It was beautiful, haunting, and solemn.

“Wow, is this your work?”

“Yep. Painting relaxes me. And it’s a great way to channel what I feel when I’m out there, in God’s country.”

“Do you sell your work?”

“Here and there. Mostly, I paint for myself. Galleries are about commerce, and collectors are sometimes about vanity. Neither helps an artist in pursuit of truth and authentic expression.”

Jake walked over to a large record player on a table next to a stack of old vinyls. He slipped a record off the player and placed a new one on it.

“I like Tchaikovsky, but Penelope prefers Strauss. Whenever I play ‘The Blue Danube,’ I swear her eyes get bigger,” Jake said.

I pointed to the record player and said, “I see you’re an old-school guy. Do you prefer vinyl music?”

“Vinyl records have grooves that allow for an open, resonant quality. Digital compresses sound. It lacks open space. And you need open space to hear the warmth, richness, and depth of the music. Especially the divine music of Tchaikovsky and Strauss.”

“Who is this guy?” I thought to myself.

---

There were some pops and cracks as the record began spinning, and then the music opened up and filled the barn.

Jake ran his right hand across Penelope’s neck and back, looking tenderly into her eyes and saying, “Are you ready, my dear?”

And the two of them began a sort of slow waltz to the music. I could hear Jake hum slightly, and the owl seemed to twirl and sway on the glove as they gracefully crossed the dusty barn floorboards.

It all felt so surreal.

Jake worked his way over to me. He slid the glove off his hand and said, “Give me your left hand.” I reluctantly held out my hand, and he slid the glove on it, with the owl repositioning along the way. Her weight on my hand and forearm felt solid and strangely satisfying.

“Now, hold her close, and feel the music,” Jake said. “Feel her presence, her spirit. And when you’re ready, do your best to sway, step, and waltz to the rhythms of the music.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the owl move slightly. As if she were saying, “Go on now.”

Before long, I was swaying and moving to the music. My self-consciousness gave way to the moment, the music, and the presence of this magnificent owl who was riding across the barn floor to my waltzing.

I felt a twinge of emotion, fullness, and joy.

“Yes, now you’ve got it,” Jake said. “You feel it, don’t you? It’s like a divine peace. I think it’s good for the soul.”

---

We took turns for another half hour, waltzing with Penelope. And finally, Jake strolled over to the record player, switched it off, and said, “Well, let’s make you some coffee for the journey home.”

We walked across the yard. The cloud cover gave way and the gibbous moon illuminated the pathway to the house.

For the first time, I noticed a sign above the front door to the house. It said, “Jake’s Backcountry Tours, Birdwatching & Restoration.”

“So you give tours,” I said, pointing to the sign.

“Yep. After my military service, I retired out here to paint and heal. I went hiking and birdwatching. It’s how I found Penelope, injured and stuck in a barbed wire fence. She was little back then, and I mended her wing as best I could, but she can’t fly very well, so she lives with me now. We give tours for out-of-town folks. Teach them about the birds, and help them heal a bit too.”

“Heal from what?” I asked.

“Life’s injuries. The noise and blinking screens and keeping up with the Joneses. The people we see are all a bit broken inside. They’re searching for some peace. Some hope. And nature has all of that, in spades,” Jake said.

We stepped inside the house. I noticed rows of bookcases, a huge leather reading chair, and notebooks. Jake said, “Make yourself comfortable,” before he disappeared into the kitchen to brew coffee.

I picked up a leather journal on Jake’s reading chair and opened it to a random page. The handwriting was immaculate. There were random notes, thoughts, poems, and quotations. I read one in the middle of the page:

“Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields—and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.”—Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

Jake poked his head around the kitchen doorway. “Want anything in your coffee?”

“A little milk or cream, if you have it.”

He disappeared and I flipped to a different page in the journal, feeling guilty for snooping. Another quote was penned neatly at the top of the page:

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”—Marcel Proust

“Ah, Proust. Have you read him?” Jake startled me. He was right in front of me, holding two mugs of steaming coffee. He handed me one, nodded at his journal, and said, “It takes a lot of patience to get through ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ Talk about a guy preoccupied with the minutia of experience.”

“I read a bit of Proust at University…Swann’s Way, I think. All I remember were Proust’s long sentences,” I said.

“The German Jewish philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin called Proust’s writing ‘the Nile of language’ which ‘overflows and fructifies the regions of truth.’ I found Proust a bit long-winded. Hemingway suits me better,” Jake said.

We sat in Jake’s living room library. I told him that I was an aspiring writer stuck working as a copywriter. I talked about the writing conference I spent the last three days at.

“I wouldn’t spend a lot of time at those conferences,” Jake said. “They’re all marketing sessions, commercialization, and genre piffle, platform discussions, ethics and artificial intelligence talks, cultural appropriation handwringing, book cover design strategy, and agents and publishers bloviating about what they think the reading public, shrinking though it is, actually want to consume. You’d be far better to read great literature, let it percolate in your creative brain, and then channel the results into your prose.”

“How do you know so much about all this?” I asked.

“Well, I read…and I dated a woman who was a novelist,” Jake said. “She was disgusted with the industry, where publishing is going. Best-sellers today are mostly celebrity tell-alls, shallow political rants, insipid self-help twaddle, and formulaic thrillers by the same established authors. People lost their attention span for great literature. They’re too busy watching cat videos on YouTube to tackle Dostoevsky or Kafka. And the schools, God help us. They don’t teach kids how to read and write. They’re too busy exploring gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. Talk to a university graduate today and ask what they’ve read. They know ibram x kendi, but never heard of the Brontë Sisters.”

“Well, it’s important that young people read today’s thinkers. Contemporary thought. Not just the old, white, dead guys. Right?” I said.

“Sure, a broad perspective is good, but not at the exclusion of the Western canon. So many of today’s writers are wrapped up in dreadful politics. Eloquence, elegance, and artful prose are fading. As well as deep thought, about life and purpose and meaning. A lot of today’s writers omit what they don’t know.” Jake sipped his coffee and stroked Penelope, who was perched next to him on a stand.

“Omit what they don’t know?” I asked.

---

Jake reached and grabbed another of his notebooks. Scraps of paper with handwritten notes fell out of it as he opened the pages. “Ah, here we are,” he said, clearing his throat. “Ernest Hemingway.”

And then Jake began reading:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

“Forget about all those popinjays at the writing conference, Patrick. Read the best books. Travel. Talk to interesting people. Keep journals. Write it all down. And then, when you think you’re ready, publish your stories. If they’re good enough, if they move people and make them think, you’ll find an audience,” Jake said.

“I hope that’s true. I mean, you said yourself, people are losing their attention spans. They’re all on social media now,” I said.

“Yes, but there’s still enough of us left. The ones who crave something more. Something truer, deeper, and life-affirming. The cream rises to the top. Good books still get published. And maybe, just maybe, it’s not too late to inspire others to dump the YouTube nonsense and feed their minds and souls with something far better.” Jake stood up and motioned to follow him.

I took one last look at his library, and Penelope, who was napping on her perch.

In the kitchen, Jake poured another cup of coffee for me into a travel mug. “Keep the mug, Patrick, I’ve got several.”

Jake drew a little map with his fountain pen on a scrap of paper, walked me to my car, and said, “I’m glad you turned down my driveway and danced with Penelope and me. Fate’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Also, remember what Hemingway said, ‘a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer’ and ‘a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.’ I think Penelope would concur.” And then Jake laughed heartily.

“This has been quite an experience. It was a pleasure meeting you, Jake, and Penelope too.”

He patted my shoulder reassuringly as I got in the car. I backed up, drove down the driveway, and saw him waving in my rearview mirror.

---

Jake’s map lead me back toward civilization, and soon I was on the main roadway. I stopped at a gas station to fill up, use the bathroom, and buy some snacks.

At the cashier stand, I noticed a framed photo on the wall of Jake and Penelope above brochures with the words, “Jake’s Backcountry Tours, Birdwatching & Restoration.”

The cashier noticed me and said, “People from all over book weekends with Jake. He used to be one of those special forces dudes in the military. I guess he saw some serious shit. It affected him. But now he’s like this wise philosopher/artist,” the cashier said.

“Yeah, I met him. I made a wrong turn, or maybe it was fate. Anyway, he helped me out,” I said. “He gave me a lot to think about. Especially about my writing. How to become a solemn writer.”

“Did you dance with the barn owl?” the cashier asked.

“You know about the owl? Yeah, I danced with the barn owl. It was…I don’t know. It was…” but before I could finish the cashier interrupted.

“It was magical, wasn’t it? People who visit Jake always say it’s a life-changing experience to dance with the barn owl. My wife says there are angels on this earth. Sometimes they’re people, and sometimes they’re animals. Maybe even an owl?” the cashier said.

“Maybe even an owl,” I said with a smile.

I got back in my car, entered the highway, and settled in for the long drive home.

I turned on the radio, spinning the dial to find a station amidst all the crackles and static. Finally, I landed on one, strong and clear, as the announcer said, “That was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. And now, settle in, relax, and enjoy the classics here at KCBN 89.5 on your FM dial, home of the magic of classical music.”

I’m not a religious man, and what some people call magic or fate, I call coincidence.

But that was before Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz began playing on the radio, and I could feel the magical Penelope on my hand again, and that same feeling of peace and quietude filled my heart.

In that instant, I knew I would become a solemn writer, and that sometimes taking a wrong turn is how you find your future.

The following song was written and shared generously by Michael Williams.

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