I first met Wendy McKendrick in a roundabout way through my brother Tom. It was 1973, and I'd just gotten out of the Air Force. Tom was living in an old house on Rutledge Street in Madison, and I sublet a room there that summer for $30 a month. Tom and I had a housemate named Joan Heller, and Joan had this friend named Wendy, who lived an hour away in Wisconsin Dells and usually stayed at the house when she came to Mad City.
Somehow Wendy and I hit it off and ended up spending a lot of the summer together. It was the kind of summer you tend to remember, but it ended and our lives moved on. We stayed in touch for a while, ran into each other off and on, wrote a few letters, drifted apart. I don't know where she'd be today. I wouldn't even know where to look.
I thought about Wendy when I was watching the Jim Jarmusch movie "Broken Flowers". In the movie, Bill Murray plays a guy in his 50s who gets a mysterious letter and embarks on a personal odyssey to look up several old flames. It's a quest he approaches with ambivalence, and that's where the film strikes a chord.
Anybody who's made it into late middle age (or beyond) has a gallery of ghosts, people we knew long ago and can't forget, who continue to haunt us long after the last moment of contact. Murray's character has four of them (or five), and as he works his way down the list, going from airport to airport and house to house, the reception he gets from these women turns increasingly cold and forbidding.
"Broken Flowers" isn't everybody's kind of movie. Jarmusch and Murray are low-key extremists, and working together they take minimalism to a whole new realm. If the movie moved any slower, it'd stop. But watching Murray confronting his ghosts, you start to consider your own. You can understand his reluctance to make the journey. And you can understand what makes the trip hard to resist.
I took a picture of Wendy in Madison the last time we got together. It's a simple black-and-white snapshot and she's smiling, looking straight into the camera, and you can tell it's summer, because she's wearing a tank top, with a pair of sunglasses pushed up on her head. She looks great. It was 1979.
More than 30 years later, I still think about her sometimes. Wonder what she's up to, what she's thinking, what she looks like, who she's with. Like Bill Murray in "Broken Flowers", there's a part of me that can't help being curious. And another part, a bigger part, I guess, that doesn't want to know.
Sometimes life leaves you hanging like that, just like in the movies.
Sometimes it's better not to disturb the ghosts.
