Last Call

Linda Ronstadt ignited the battle.  Not that it took much of a spark at that hour. Four thirty-whatever in the morning, one more cocktail than either of them remembered drinking, and the undefined nature of their current relationship had created a dry forest waiting for a careless smoker.  A yawn where a laugh was expected, apathy where affection used to be, insensitivity more awkward than aimed…anything could have set off the blaze.

Lila could not coherently explain why David’s musical selection had been the firestarter, but there were a few possibilities.   It was true, (as David protested) that she had told him to “play anything”  before she wobbled to the toilet, but that was part of the trouble.  After 10 years, Lila assumed that David would remember her distaste for California mellow.  She felt as if he had never known her.  Also, at a time when the generation between them had become their personal Donner Pass,  the intent of David’s oldies selection translated badly.  However randomly the Rondstadt song may have been chosen,  Lila felt accused of irrelevance.   Well-acquainted with David’s habit of disclosure by proxy, Lila bristled at the words, “Feeling better, now that we’re through…”   She was the one who openly sent messages via music, but David did so sereptitiously just about as often.   On this night, the two had teetered between prickly humor and bitchy hostility for hours. It was characteristic of David to unload unexpressed  resentment through code. It was characteristic of Lila to find subttext where none existed.

Neither Lila nor David could remember all that they said after the night burned.  David recalled more of Lila’s speech than his own, and the reverse was also true. (Received, not inflicted, wounds are the ones most nursed and coddled.)  Lila hid indoors the next day,  determined to be invisible until her anger and embarrassment passed.  David toggled between indifference and panic, settling finally  into indifference after his reason for panic proved unwarrented. 

What remained was a new discomfort that time might not soften.  The truth of words is not determined by the conditions of speech.  A day or so afterward, David tried to lighten the air with a half-joke about the un-wisdom of ordering another round at last call.  He was probably right about that, but even without accellerants, their eco-system had been too parched for too long to stand much exposure to heat.

The coals snapped and sputtered.  Lila sat in her apartment wondering if she would ever again be able to make authentic contact with David.  She thought of phoning, but could not face the inevitalble silent spaces.  She considered IMing, but could not imagine where the conversation would go. Most likely David was out somewhere anyway, building new muscle at the gym or reading over coffee near campus.  Lila was the brooder, not David, and though dwelling sometimes rewarded her with profound insight, she coveted David’s ability to keep moving and ignore. 

During her nap, Lila dreamed that Linda Ronstadt sat on David’s back porch singing a song called “Last Call.”  The screen door was broken and David’s back was turned.  “It’s just as well,” Lila muttered as the song followed her home.  “The money’s all spent anyway.”  When she awakened, her first thought was to tell David about her dream.

Dedication: obvious perhaps, but right on…

For my loved ones who are adapting to the liminal, embracing uncertainy with optimism, replacing existential dread with the parallel concept that life is project,  a reminder that the choices–terrifying as they may be–are ours to make.

Disney Isn’t Fooling Anyone…

The little girl was about four.  I was at T. J. Maxx looking at underwear. So were the girl and her mom.

The little girl was chattering as only four-year olds can, randomly, but with conviction, a butterfly speaking in tongues.  ” It’s nice outside; we should keep pushing; bras are boring,” she said. 

“You don’t like bras?” asked her mother.

“No, I like princesses. ”

“You like princesses better than bras?”

“Princesses are beautiful.”

The little girl paused.

“…but I don’t think I’d like to be one.”

Mom wondered why not.

“Because princesses don’t get to have any snacks.”

Thanksgiving, 2008

“The Full-length Velvet Glove Hides the Fist”

This post goes out to Daniel, Toby, Chuck, Amelia, Andy, Brad, Anna, and the Amazing Blake. I thought about writing separate notes to each of you–well perhaps not to Blake, who would rather look at birds–but the individual messages would all look something like this:  

Spending time with y’all was a soul transfusion.  It had been far too long since I sat around a big, noisy table warmed by unqualified acceptance:  what a treat it was to be able  to laugh and chatter so freely, without feeling compared, contrasted, bone-old, and lit-crit dull.   You guys revived my sassy side, which lately has been rather submerged.  It was good to discover that I can still hold my own among conversationalists who know how to add rhythm to flow with a bit of well-placed snark.  Best yet, you reminded me that being a tad queer is a gift to cultivate, not a flaw to suppress in the name of someone else’s ideal.   

I was looking for a video about friendship to include with this entry, but everything that came to mind was SO damn sappy that I decided  to go with my favorite song from the musical version of Grey Gardens instead.  There’s a touch of Little Edie Beales in every person who was sitting at our table last Sunday night–and yes, I do believe that even includes Blake.  As far as I can tell, none of us are as crazy as Miss Beales became–not yet anyway–but like her, we nurture our eccentricities with ferocity, humor, and style. 

Thank you for nudging me back towards who I’m supposed to be.  I love you all.

So This is Christmas…

I was going to ignore Christmas this year.  The holiday season is great fun when the personal weather is bright, but all that sparkle-and-smile stuff can be pretty harsh during life’s slushy eras.  Comfort and joy my ass, one wants to say, but then one recalls that this is how Scrooge got started.  Who wants to be that guy? 

Besides, I was raised with Christmas–like a kid, I still mark time from Yule to Yule–and learned a while back that the only thing more horrible than a depressed Christmas is no Christmas at all.  The Christmas of 1989 was a grief-filled holiday, so mournful that I allowed  no lighted trees into my house, hung no wreaths on the doors,  and kept the radio dial set safely away from caroling stations.  I had good reason for shutting out the angel choirs that year, but the result in the midst of everyone else’s glitter and song was a sense of being outcast as well as sad:  the little match girl, had she suffered from an affective disorder instead of hypothermia and malnutrition.  

So this December, even though my heart wasn’t in it, I decided to let the season take me where it wanted, relying on 53 years worth of mid-western Baptist instinct to lead me through this, an unfelt festivity in my period of  uphill climb.  The process was slow, but soothing in its steadiness.  At first I just looked up a carol or two online and ordered It’s a Wonderful Life from Netflix, (more out of habit than any real desire to see George Bailey find the true meaning of wealth again).  Not long after, on a snowy Saturday morning, I pulled out my favorite Christmas c.d mix to keep me company during the long drive to my class, (half-hoping that the Baby Jesus would protect me from all those crazy Hoosier drivers on a very slippery road).  

Last week I finally (and rather robotically) bought a tiny living spruce tree to enliven my miniature living space.  The poor little thing sat ignored for a couple of days, but then I elevated it to a table in front of the window.  A day later, I added a few lights, and the next afternoon tacked on some baubles and even hung the jingle bell wreath on the front door.   

I’m afraid that this is about as Christmas-y as it’s going to be around here this season.  My traditional descent into Martha Stewart decorating mania seems to be responding to the medication, and my usual (perversely anticipated) tears of holiday nostalgia just won’t come, even though I’ve tried playing every tear-jerking carol I know to get things rolling.   Could be I cried so much during the autumn that by now the saline stream has dried up.   Or–and this seems the more likely possibility–it could be that I have accepted that Christmas of 2008 will be different from those that came before, neither particularly happy nor especially sad: the holiday in which I stopped two-thirds of the way up my cold, steepward trek to build a fire, sing a song, and remember that the importance of annual rites lies in honoring them, regardless of conditions.  If I still mark the passage of time from Christmas to Christmas, it’s because I’ve learned to appreciate the value of ritual for its own sake.  Christmas is the closest I come each year to acknowledging the Christianity of my childhood–the wonderment of a religious narrative filled with stars and innocence and the promise that any child, anywhere,  could be the One.

The above video is more  like a three minute still-life than a film clip, but this season, John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over)”  strikes me as the song that everyone should hear.  It’s sweet and ironic, and ultimately reminds us that if we’re looking for holiday miracles, the first package to unwrap is the one stuffed with our own choices and potential.

Fly Now, John, For Real

The last time I saw John Zappa was two years ago.  It was a sweaty summer afternoon.  We met for lunch, along with our friend, Daniel, at the UM-St. Louis campus.  John was living in a halfway house then and his demeanor was subdued, (which is not to say that he was not still a big, jittery bundle of nerves, but only that he was calm-for-John).   My impression was that being on a college campus indimidated him a little: school always represented everything that John wanted for himself, yet could not believe was within his reach.  Once, I recall, when John visited my house, he said he envied all the books on the shelves.  The thing was, John didn’t really have the attention span to read all those volumes, but  he liked the idea of having them around.  On the humid occasion of our last meeting, Daniel and I nagged at John to get himself into art school where we thought that he belonged, assuring him that we would help navigate the application process. Phone numbers were exchanged and promises were made, but John never made it to unversity.  In fact, although Daniel and I meant well, it occurs to me that we may have been wrong to encourage John to follow our path:  life-together, or life-a-mess, I doubt that John Zappa’s temperment would ever have been suited to the traditional school-job-home configuration.  

Although no one from John’s former circle of friends has been able to confirm the rumor, it appears that he passed away from an overdose on September 14th.  I have never known anyone who craved visibility as much as John—being seen was his oxygen—and it strikes me as immeasurably sad that none of his old friends were able to witness his last public appearance.   I find myself wondering if he was aware of how much and deeply he was, and still is, loved by friends who had been forced by his lifestyle to keep their distance.  The active season of our friendship lasted only a few months, but John was never too far from thought or conversation.  Among a small group of people, John was a beloved “fabulous disaster”–a handsome, six-foot-one inch bomb loaded with equal parts destruction and potential,  who was worried over, but approached with caution.  It appears now that John’s destructive side eventually won out over potential, but my guess is that he kept trying to neutralize the worst and activate the best until the choice was finally taken out of his hands.  

I do not generally use this blog to post video, but the above Pink Floyd song has been running through my head since I learned about John’s death a few days ago.  Whatever and whereever the afterlife is, I’ve no doubt that John has made every soul there aware of his presence.  Here’s hoping that someone in the orientation committee is teaching him how really to fly.

Sitting Out the Hurricane

In mid-September, the hurricane that devastated Galveston was so tenacious that it blew all the way up to  Indiana.  Ike was elderly by the time he reached Lafayette, incapable of much beyond blowing the autumn in, but he was still impressive.  People who had to travel that Sunday tell me that driving was a challenge; here in town most folks stayed indoors hoping that the cable would hold.  Rule-breakers by nature, C. and I sat out the storm on the back porch, disregarding the warning sirens, searching the internet for an appropriate soundtrack, maybe noting silently that the strayed hurricane was a good metaphor for the entity formerly known as “us.”

That was about a month ago. There is a new porch for me now, an unfamiliar set of circumstances, yet like Ike, I have blown too hard for too long, raged too far past my natural limits, holding fast to a rotation that should have already dispersed.  I took meteorology as an undergrad–remember reading about the process through which renegade storms rejoin the pantheon of directional winds, but here, perhaps, is where metaphor stops and real life begins.  Grief is an emotional, not a material, phenomenon.  It obeys a singular set of rules that rejects the premise of all “shoulds.”  Should have or should be mean little to the mourning spirit, which communicates exclusively with the primitive brain.  Fresh grief is not rotation but pendulum, a relentless swing between blisslike shock and anguish that seems capable of causing death.  The mourner suffers from the loss itself, but also from the impossibility of controlling the pendulum; at first there is no way even to slow its motion down.

After being tipped and tilted for many weeks, I have at last begun to understand the mechanism of grief, and so also to comprehend what is and is not within my control.  The erratic mood shifts caused by loss of treasure can only be stopped by time, but rage, which so often accompanies grief, motorizes the pendulum and speeds its pace.  It is rage, not sadness, that enables the wildest swings, yet rage, I believe, is the single grief-driven emotion that one can choose to cultivate or deny.  Like many other disappointed people, I have thus far defended my rage as a right, but surely defensible rights are not those things that keep the heart off beat.  Surely right is that which allows the heart to find its rhythm.

Hurricane Ike is still out there, re-formed and part of some other pattern, as is C.–as am I.  If I’m honest, I’ll confess that I miss “us” less than the friend who was crazy enough to sit outside with me in the middle of a hurricane, plugged in and electrified as the rain blew sideways and the music played.  The destructive power of foul weather is always underestimated.  Grief is also unpredictably harsh, but if a single storm is allowed to destroy everything that is good,  who will play d.j. when the winds blow again?

On the Night Porch

The night porch became our living room in the final days of summer. Evenings and temperments grew cool;  interior space threatened sluggish normalcy, and so in pieces we moved outdoors, first to smoke and avoid, then to read and work, parallel, but at last because the night porch was a borderland and we were immigrants.

It’s Nice to Be Nice to the Nice