Kisses For A Eulogy

I am full of eulogy this evening. There is a constant narrative in myself that dictates what it sees in the past tense. What has passed, what we thought about it, what seemed to be true at the time that in retrospect seems suspect.

I am full of those moments where you're seeing the world naked for the first time and wondering why you aren't more embarrassed. Those moments where clarity exceeds your years. Where you are seeing what some people take a lifetime to get hammered into their skulls. Where you're hemorrhaging with the voice of experience because it has become too full, too bright, and life has become engorged with vision.

These moments almost always happen with no witness.

They often happen in the middle of stifling heat waves. When the windows are open to catch lazy breezes and an ounce of air where it is sucked deep into waiting lungs. They pile one on top of each other in my San Francisco memories. The place where I was born. Returned to at fifteen with my mother. Like home. Like a homing pigeon come back to where all the messages originate. The dovecote waits for its inmates.

Nineteen years ago I put on my Bessie Smith album during an unusually sultry heat wave. I had lovely windows in my apartment which I had thrown open to full capacity to catch whatever errant chill might roll by. I was wearing my lemon yellow printed organdy 1950's dress which, due to its transparent nature, was made more demure by an old slip. I wasn't legally old enough to drink, and didn't drink much besides, but I had connections. I poured chilled plum wine into a glass. Probably not a wine glass. As Bessie sang the laundry blues I got it. Got life. What had been; what was yet to come. It all made a kind of pattern.

I was enjoying the early scratchy blues on the thick air, all of it blowing through my dress. As was nearly always the case, I lived in the moment, and I lived outside the moment, in a tumultuous tangle. I was keyed in to all the people in the city. I could hear all the dirty living out there. I could feel everything sluggishly easing through my casements and back out again. Like a stage set it wasn't completely real. I was standing part way outside myself. My room mate was out partying.

Our building on 27th avenue was almost next door to a Russian Orthodox church*. Have I mentioned how much I love strict religion for its pageantry?

I was reading (for the hundredth time) E.M. Forster's book "A Room With A View" when something dolores wafted over the printed letters, something I could follow with my blood, something tangible like liquid love. I turned Bessie off with apology. I followed the sound to my windows, already thrown wide open, and found the source of the lament in the side yard of the church next door. There was a procession in progress of priests in tall stiff hats followed by pall bearers carrying a box of dead trailed by mourners. The priests must have been doing the singing but I could feel the spirits of the mourners following the notes like identical hands shaping the air. Slow, deliberately, they took their time, made their song into the dark, as I watched.

Voyeurs are not romantic figures. Nor are they admirable. I intruded into the hot sinking air with my eyes, with my silent strange eyes watching.

Maybe not, though. I felt the spirit of the dead too. I followed it with my other self. The one not trapped in flesh. The one always free enough to see 180 degrees around. That self crawled inside the coffin and laid next to the corpse. That self said "Goodbye person. There is love enough for both the living and the dead. So feel peace."

The music faded. The entourage rounded the corner. I was left with the heat. With the humid earth funneling through the city lights and shimmering against the break of windows. Bessie's wisdom was still circling, resonating in the quiet. What was true before had become suddenly vivid. Technicolor truth.

We all end up in the same place in the end. It doesn't matter how we go. It doesn't matter if it's too early or much anticipated. It's all the same when we exit. The only thing that truly matters is how we acquit ourselves in this moment right now. Not when we know we're about to die but when we think we have the rest of eternity to be an asshole if we want to.

I was nineteen years old.

I was seeing inside the coffin.

I was just emerging from the crushing weight of the impossible cocoon of a dissociative half life.

I was just coming out of insanity with some of my head not lost.

Like waking up on the side of the road and remembering the gravel speeding up your nostrils in the dead of night. Asphalt tar streaking through you like a near-death imprint.

Waking up to wonder how you got to this stretch of road?

Soon I would trade in my sweet pretty shared apartment for life on my own. Life completely free of any unsolicited advice, company, opinions, or reality check. Soon I would be communicating directly with the cockroaches deep into the night while watching the needling in progress out my living room window.

That night lives in my memory like a portal to something so much greater than myself. It has sustained me through many transitions. I took a shred of it with me and stashed it into my private drawer. I'll never know the name of the corpse.

But I'll always send it kisses for a eulogy.




* I found this picture on Uzvards' flickr pages. This is the actual church I'm talking about in this post. From my window I could see the side yard of this large church which is where I saw the procession described. I loved this church but am now asking myself why I never went inside.

Invisible Snow

Sometime soon I will resume writing more about food and including some recipes as well. I am only this past week really getting back into cooking after a whole lot of eating out while moving. In the meantime I want you to squint your eyes almost shut on the above picture and tell me if you can see the snow? Point and shoots don't capture snow very well. At least, mine don't. I'm hoping that the camera I'm buying from my crafty friend Mary (at The Craft Addict) will capture it better. I love snow. Even in April! It snowed giant flakes yesterday in the late morning.

Weird weather? Hell yes!! Last week there was one day that got almost to the 80's. Now snow.

I have no desire to live in a big city again, but if I did, there is only one city I would consider moving to: Portland, Oregon. It's so beautiful! The flowering trees alone are enough to take my breath away, but all the gardened nooks and crannies, the crazy number of bicycles and scooters in evidence everywhere makes me giddy. While I will always consider San Fransisco one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I'm sorry to say that I have put Portland on the top of the list, right next to Edinburough.

This is my mom's neighborhood. That's my mom in the purple.

The best news is that Pippa is officially free of ring worm. Penny still has a tiny speck of it but because it is so tiny the Vet has given them both clearance to be out of quarantine. As long as we don't sleep with them. So the acclimation of the pets has begun and it is a tedious process. The heartening truth is that Chick doesn't want to eat them, she wants to play with them and lick them til they're sopping with dog slobber.

Pippa is fairly tolerant of it though she's constantly trying to figure out how to avoid this dog whose tongue is bigger than she is. Penny is not at all willing to be covered in Chick's spit. I don't blame her a bit. Chick was being an adorable puppy trying to get them to play by nudging them with her paws. Unfortunately, too hard of a nudge with her paws could produce a kitten pancake so I have to force the dog to sit and mellow out. Which she does for two seconds.

The encouraging part is that neither of the kittens is so fiercely hateful of the dog that they've tried to hurt her. Penny has made a couple of gentle swipes at her nose but not put her claws out. This is encouraging because Chick was tortured by Ozark and in the end I'm pretty sure she changed her agenda from "Play with weird creature" to "Eat small orange feast". If the kittens don't torture her they may come to some kind of truce, maybe they'll even develop one of those enchanting rare relationships where the dog and the cats snuggle up together.

We have finally found out why it seems that we are surrounded by nursing homes disguised as regular homes- it's because we are surrounded by three homes for developmentally disabled adults (two of them for men only) and one hospice. For some families this might seem like a giant shadow on the dream house situation. I can't say I'm particularly excited to find out that we're surrounded by pretty iffy characters...but to be honest, I don't really think it's much different than anywhere else. At least we know what kind of issues might be found in those homes, generally speaking you can be living next to Jeffrey Dahmer and not know it until someone finds a human head in his freezer.

There are two reasons why I'm not particularly concerned:

These homes are under constant supervision by professionals, day and night.

We have a ferocious black dog who has already terrified EVERYONE in our cul de sac. No one will try to enter our property without permission.

It just seems so typical of us to find our dream home in a cul de sac where people come to die or to live under the caring iron rule of professional assistance. Anyway, it's the kind of thing we're used to. Philip's parents, the whole time he was growing up, had him and his brother spend every Thanksgiving and Christmas with the homeless people of Sausalito, the majority of whom were drug addicts or crazy people...often both at the same time.* I grew up around a lot of hippies who were pretty much fringe drifters; people who put their toes into the pools of regular life but always ended up drifting back to the outer edges of society with their pot and their guru sloguns.

It it flipping cold outside today so I think this is the time to dig into the sewing room I promised a sneak peak at my newest project but it will have to wait for one or two days as I unpack my sewing crap. I'm so excited about that room but it won't really come together until it's painted which certainly won't happen until after my trip to Scotland.

For those not yet in the know: my dad is getting married in Scotland in May. I am going to go without my boys because we can't all afford to go. Both my brother and my sister will be there and it will be the first time we've traveled anywhere together in over twenty years. I'm super excited and the only shadow over it all for me is how I don't have time to slim down and I am embarrassed to have my family see me so large. (My dad and my brother have not seen me in two years) I have decided that I must at least have some clothes for the trip that don't make me look worse than I already do and I am going to make a new coat.

I think it's time to go and make more coffee and then start dealing with the room. And the mess. Yes yes. I can't do it. What doesn't kill you may not make you stronger, but at least you're not dead.





*Not to build their character but to be good Christians. They sponsored an "open door" night at their church every Friday night where they would cook meals for the homeless and poor. This included Thanksgiving and Christmas.