(NOTE: This story appears in the September 2024 issue of ED Magazine. Scroll to the bottom to read an essay written by Devyn Waitt in memory of her father.)

As the saying goes, a picture is worth 1,000 words. And while there aren’t enough words to describe what Don Waitt meant to ED Publications, to the EXPO and to the industry at large, we hope that the following section serves as a warm memorial to his 30 years at ED, and the many, many friends he met along the way.

Rocks

by Devyn Waitt

We were walking away from the amphitheater, with a trace of light left in the evening summer sky. It had rained during the show and all the small puddles in the parking lot had phosphorescent sheens from motor oil, the water transforming the heat of the pavement and air into something manageable, lukewarm, comfortable.

As we got further away, and closer to the grass overflow area where we had parked, the sounds of cicadas began to swallow up the fading sounds of Rob Zombie. I have thought about the best way to word the setting of this particular walk and determined it is impossible to communicate. It was just, holy somehow. Maybe I will keep trying.

When I was still in elementary school, my dad took me to see White Zombie and I remember thinking the girl with the long green hair was the *coolest.* I also remember telling people that one of the guitarists had a clear glass guitar filled with blood that he broke over his head at the end of the show and it poured down him in rivers. I am pretty sure I made that part up.

So a couple of years ago, when I saw Rob Zombie was coming to town, I got my dad and me tickets. This old dog still hunts!

It felt full circle to see him twenty years later, for us to be there, together, 20 years later. A new group of babies with wide-legged pants and heavy eyeliner, and old babies with more leathered skin, bad breath and faded tattoos. And my dad and I in the cheap seats watching Mudvayne because Rob Zombie didn’t go on for a while.

I was thinking about the sweetness of passing time and my dad was engaged in a micro-drama playing out in front of us. A girl frustrated with her drunk boyfriend, who kept disappearing and then reappearing with different strangers.

Nothing about it gave me that sad feeling of chasing; rock stars past their prime still gyrating or whatever. But I did feel the difference in the appetite for the evening. That we were looking back on something, still in something, but seeing it from a different vantage point.

My dad was on the fence about Mudvayne and I think enjoying himself a bit but also wondering how much longer until Rob Zombie and then how much longer until he was back in the comfort of home, eating a bowl of cereal before bed.

So after we heard “More Human Than Human” and the girl with the boyfriend made good on her promise to get her own ride home, my dad and I walked through the atmospheric parking lot, back to his car.

He was talking to me about all the “tableaus” that had been playing out around us. I remember his use of that specific word and feeling a spark of delight at its sound. And then he was thinking about something I could tell he didn’t quite have the words to express. Which is unlike him.

He always had the words. The rhythm, the pauses, what to leave out, what to reveal. We were discussing the idiosyncrasies of the scene we had been in, the jokes and observations, and he told me, “It’s enough just to think it.” I sort of understood what he meant.

“You and I are both so concerned with sewing our names into the fabric of time,” the hint of sarcasm in his voice, the mark of a storyteller. “But it’s enough just to think it.”

I don’t know if he was talking about the movie I have been trying to get made, the books he has written that only his immediate family and harsh critic of a 90-year-old aunt ever read. Or just addressing a base desire to be seen, to share, to express, to be understood. And even though he didn’t quite have the words, staring at the violet swirls in the parking lot puddles, like the undersides of oyster shells, I started to grasp what he meant.

The knowing came as a feeling in my stomach. The sound of our footsteps, an intermittent sticky breeze. A rare moment of silence as he tried to re-word it, to really impress upon me what he was getting at. The left, right, left of walking helps thoughts move through your brain. When two people are sitting on rocking chairs near each other, eventually they start rocking in the same rhythm. This is called entrainment.

I think part of what he meant was, you are lucky to think it. That your first and best audience is always yourself.

*****

Last week I found myself in the fortunate position of being at a poker night with some Tribal elders on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. The sounds of chips being sorted and stacked, money counted, potluck fixings assembled and good-natured ribbing about who was going to take who’s money all felt familiar and like it was happening on another planet at the same time. Like dozens of poker games I had been to with family friends.

I walked into the bathroom and held tight to the little gold moth necklace I have started wearing around my neck. And I thanked my dad for teaching me how to play poker. I thanked him for the gift of my mind and the ways that he shaped it. I thanked him for showing me how to be someone who would not only end up in this exact moment but have the gusto to enjoy it.

Here they say that their old people go to the Milky Way. But he wasn’t old. And because I get to choose the contents of my mind, I know the story I tell myself about where he is now is mine alone.

I don’t know what it is yet. But I know my prayers have changed. I have learned you should give them to rocks because they live forever.

So I whisper into its smooth surface, “Please let there be more.” Somewhere we are walking through that parking lot, wet with relief from the summer heat, enjoying these gifts we give ourselves.