An accidental poem

My friend Tavie wrote a heartfelt note earlier this week about accidental poetry centered on the topic of elder care. It reminded me of this poem I drafted circa 1995...for years I've worked and reworked it, and have come to the conclusion that the ending will, sadly, never satisfy me. And I also worry that it's murky (a sure sign I've stared at it too much.)

Leaving Room 107

Leaving Room 107 (Leta’s Room)
and cross over to other side
and go to other side down to
end near kitchen and then turn and
go up to Fred’s room and go in
and wait. Then go up to other
end and turn and come to
table to eat.

I found these instructions
after he died.
Handwritten,
folded into pants-pocket
shape, red ink fading to pink,
they were my grandfather’s compass
around the nursing home
that never was familiar.
No matter how hard he tried…
no room in his brain.

Leta was his one true friend.

Four years older—her mind intact,
her body tentative—
she did the thinking
while Grampy, still strong,
gave her his arm.
Widow and widower
walking together.

After three years
Grampy was asked to move.
(Something vague about
needing more care.)

Soon after,
Leta had a stroke,
robbing her mind,
taking her speech.

We visited,
and she cried
harder than I’ve ever seen
anyone cry—
wailing, unable, alone and afraid.
Grampy stroked her cold hand
and said, “Now, now,
that’s okay. Old Fred’s here.
Remember me?”

One week later, Grampy fell,
dizzy from flu.

He never walked again.

In memoriam:
Leta B. Chisholm
May 16, 1900 – March 22, 1993 

Fred H. Arnold
January 23, 1904 – May 21, 1993

Absence

"Happy My Day," you say to your kids upon waking up on this bright May Sunday. But despite the successful laugh line, you know it's not true. This day is hers, and she's not here.

The photo of Mom you put up on Facebook took your breath away, in fact. The familiarity. That facial expression, her blend of humor, pride, and a little bit of on-guard. Because you were not easy to guide, and you and she were emotionally dissimilar--a practical soloist versus a blindly gregarious optimist. But as your adulthood finally took hold, you frequently supplied things the other lacked (usually by telephone, but that was the negotiated landscape).

Her eyes are looking right out at you in this scanned Kodak moment. It's the moment, a signature capture commemorating her triumph that, somehow, you did not flunk out of the prestigious college she had prayed, yearned, demanded you would attend. You're a dazed mess, because graduation was held on a humid, stormy day inside a gym on campus. (You had never been in that gym, ever, before the day you graduated in it. Which is a hilarious little digression. And the hangover. Oh, the hangover.)

Your path and hers diverged so completely after this day. You stayed behind in that town, that state, and she returned to her New York City existence--the loner in a sea of people, sounds, and visual arrays. She liked it that way, like a cork bobbed on a wavy, ceaseless sea. Punch in her numbers on the first telephone you ever owned (brown, with that big dumbbell handle you could cradle under your neck for efficient multi-tasking) and she would be there, always. You could see her in your mind's eye where she sat. You couldn't bear her aloneness, yet you couldn't fix it. And her maternal voice would flip on as soon as you had a crisis. Maybe you couldn't fix things for her, but she frequently did so for you.

On My Day, you get up and dress for a social outing with your family. Maine's still damply chilly despite the new springtime, so it's sweater and jeans time. Your afterthought, after the jewelry and the combed hair, is one of her scarves. There can be no greater symbol, really, of Mom's New York existence than these filmy, silky, satiny relics of her work life. Saks Fifth Avenue, B. Altman, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf's--her colleagues bought clothing there, but Mom could only afford scarves. Almost all of her scarves, which you've inherited, are prints and colors that you would never ever select. And there's something 1970s about them that feels unreachable. But when you twist them, roll them, and knot them loosely around your neck, they become a little more you. And tucked underneath a sweater collar, they are subtle.

It's on you now, today's scarf. Some kind of comic-book burst of color, you don't even know what's pictured. But here's your My Day present: it smells exactly like her. Six years this month that she left this earth, and her scarves still bear her scent as though you just opened the drawer in her bedroom and stole something for a night out in Manhattan.

And as you write this piece, your youngest comes into your office and hands you an essay, trilling "Happy Mother's Day!" Unbelievably unique prose, and an overwhelmingly optimistic sentiment expressed in the piece, which is called--not making this up--"The Energy Given From Others." It is Your Day, it is Her Day, and it's His Day too. Revel in your fortunes, and hold your mother close.

After the hurricane

(Honestly, I'm not all grim all the time. Not even like 10% of the time. But sad things have happened, and I am driven to write about them...to gain understanding, mastery; to give shape.) So:

It's a famous case. There's a popular movie with an Oscar-winning actor, and a Bob Dylan song beloved and believed by people all over the world. I found out today there's a new autobiography by the man who claims he was falsely accused and framed. Nelson Mandela wrote the foreword.

 45 years later, and I still yearn for a woman I can't remember, my grandmother, whose life was tangled up in a dark, evil night, and there destroyed. The details of her wounding and death were horrific; given the subsequent literal hurricane of accusations, court papers, slippery evidence, conflicting testimonies, and raging controversy, Hazel's murder will never be solved. I accept that I will never know who did this to her, and I embrace the peace of that. But today, cnn.com commenters are debating all over again the innocence or guilt of the convicted man. And someone actually posted: "... after all this time, not sure it matters anymore."

What matters, then: Hazel was beautiful, truly. She had a lilting singing voice, coupled with a mischievous smile and a winning personality. She parented lovingly and fiercely, after a childhood of abandonment and poverty. She was mine, and I'll never have her. Needing my grandmother is one of the reasons I embarked on my genealogical journey in 2000. Piece by piece, and never with ease, I've reassembled and claimed her fragmented life story. Dates, names, places, from France to Québec, New England to New Jersey. Found the love, and the sadnesses too. Made my family whole.

 The poem I wrote about her a few years ago came out of me like water wrung from a cloth. It needed to happen, but it wrenched. I'm posting it now because this wound keeps getting seared open, and the poem is as close as I can come to wailing: STOP. Let her rest. Let her be Hazel. Give her back to us.

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Grandmother, Lost

Fingering the corner of a faded photo,
I find myself in Hazel:
eyes that light and scrinch with grins,
appled cheeks, shy teeth,
chin, softly doubling,
dark wavy hair.

I've been told she feared aging
yet laughed uproariously and kidded often—
sardonic bend of her Jersey voice teasing,
sway of ample hips knowing as she walked away
carrying a loaded tray of food and drinks,
serving at a country club.

Dad kicked us out when I was four months old.
A family in shards, swept up,
discarded; then I was
shielded from everyone sharing my surname,
that lingering verb: Burns.

So Hazel dwelled in handlebars, silver as a mirror,
on the gleaming blue tricycle she'd given me
(only, living in the city, I maybe got to ride it once)—
cool sheen of the handlebars' curve
under my baby-plump palm, a tricycle
hopelessly parked indoors, new black tires
ready to move.

Today I move a smooth mouse, pointing
on the Internet, finding
an image when I search on her name:
the window of the Lafayette Bar and Grill, 1966,
"Rheingold" spelled in neon script
with a bullethole in the upper corner,
glass cracked like a twinkled star.

That's Hazel's bullet, one of five
that pierced her and left her for dead,
blasting from shotguns wielded by strangers.
And I am one of ten grandchildren:
a club that never met.

The viewing

It was a viewing at the funeral home, on a drizzly and chill gray morning. The family walked in nearly on tiptoe, their footfalls further hushed by bland carpeting and sympathetic wallpaper. They were almost comically all-sized, from the eldest sister--equal in height to her mother--to the next in line, whose towering awkwardness mimicked his father's, and then the two youngers, one suddenly a head taller than the other. Semi-formal clothing constrained their movements to jerkiness as they sought to relax in the somber glow of the room.

The room tunneled to an endpoint where their elderly cousin rested, in view, pastel colors all around her. The children did not want to approach the casket, and their parents were not about to insist on it. As they all milled about, a safe distance away, they saw a lone figure approaching by the sprays of flowers. His movements were made tentative by his age and deep sorrow. In front of him, laid out in peace, was his sister, the last direct family member in his line. He had never married; she had never married. For awhile, the children had thought that these two relatives, who welcomed them so fondly with each visit, were another set of grandparents. There had been no need to disavow them of that, back then; the simple mistake brought universal joy.

The family found a semicircle of seats in the room's entryway and sat. A few hushed words were exchanged back and forth, and the younger ones leaned on their parents' jacketed arms. As the weight of minutes passed, and cousin Bill remained near his sister Dottie, the older son suddenly began to weep. Then the older daughter, the younger son, the younger daughter...a chain reaction of raw grief. The mother saw it happen, abashed by the intensity of their mourning. She dispensed hugs to each, stroked their hair, whispered reassurances; their slender shapes were warm in her arms, but disconsolate. A Kleenex box was passed, and the four children's reddened faces were shielded as they tried to stem the tears. How extraordinary, their mother thought, and how foolish that she had not anticipated this emotional surge.

The children cried because they knew, all four of them, what a sibling bond means. How no one will ever know you the way your sibling does. How you will do anything for a sister, a brother. They knew from their parents' conversations all week that Bill had been tasked with making final arrangements for a woman who had once been a girl, whose toys he had shared, whom he'd teased and probably exasperated--he being the youngest. And even from a distance, they could see that the face in the casket was not anything like the person they had known...she was truly gone.

First cousins of Bill and Dottie began to arrive; there were not many of them left. From the entryway, watching her distant relatives greet each other in front of the coffin, the mother saw how much these men and women resembled the previous generation: their parents, her great uncles and aunts. Seeing their faces in profile, eyeglasses glinting in the light, it was uncanny. This branch of the family was slight in stature, and though they wavered and hesitated with age, their pride remained fierce. She was witnessing time, manifested. Her own mother was once one of them.

This was the weekend that her decision to come to Maine, to retrace her mother's path, became right and true and fixed. Her place, her home, her people. How much she had gained...and now, her children, too.

Legacy

My family tree program is called Legacy. On it, I have logged 44 men named Joseph "Joe" Pinette. One of them is my direct ancestor: my nana's father, whom I never knew, but whose life was made vivid to me through the storytellings of those who knew him well.

 

One of those people who knew him well was also named Joe Pinette: my nana's nephew; my mother's first cousin. Indeed, named after the original Joe. I wish I had known him sooner, but my mom had 29 living first cousins on the Pinette side, and we didn't live near any of them. Only as an adult did I become a Mainer, and that placed me in proximity of many people I had not known before, even though I knew of them.

I met this Joe Pinette after I had attended a funeral for a different first cousin in 2003. I'd been conducting family tree research for three years, and was beginning to get to know Mom's generation over time. Joe Pinette was not at the funeral, but his wife and sister were. I will never forget the moment when they approached me after the service, both of them literally peering into my face, squinting--and then one of them exclaimed, "Now, she's a Pinette! Just look at the eyes!" We talked at the luncheon, and Joe's wife told me that he would be interested in my genealogy, and would be calling me.

His voice was gentle and manly all at once. There was an endearing catch to it, an occasional throat-clearing. The friendliness streamed right through the phone. He said that he had some information to share with me: Joe was the eldest of six siblings, and there had been eight others from his father's first marriage. Mom always had trouble relaying their names to me; now I was hearing it from the source. Did he ever have information for me! But quickly, my connection to Joe Pinette transcended mere data. In fact, it took my breath away.

We had something in common, Joe and I. Something strong as steel, invisibly massive, life-destroying and life-affirming all at once: We had both grown up in households where upheaval, alcohol, and shame reigned. We knew, deep in our souls, what it felt like to go to school and excel, forcing ourselves to behave in an upstanding and amiable way--while hiding a strange, distorted homelife that no one in our school worlds could possibly comprehend. We had both transcended. We had, in fact, soared. Our parents' marriages had blown apart, causing financial hardship and chaos; our fathers had been horrible drunks; and yet we completed higher education, we chose solid careers, and at the age of 25, we each married our soulmates.

Talking to Joe brought me to a place of level solace in my genealogy. It felt like a unified circle to meet someone of a completely different generation who knew, deep down, what it had taken to survive. And Joe, like me, retained immense fondness for all of his family members regardless of mistakes they had made or pain they'd caused--even for the small town that had stepped deftly, sometimes indifferently around his family's secrets.

Soon, we visited Millinocket together, that small town--my mom's hometown, too. We took a walk around a part of town called Tin Can Alley. This was where the poorest families lived, too many kids to feed properly, and in many cases with a dirt floor. This was where Joe grew up. He brought his street to life--told me about a family who'd lived across the street over there, others over here; showed me the low fence that had demarcated his world. Joe was not allowed to go past it as a little boy, so he stood at it and watched cars, other houses, other people, wondering. Behind him would have been a house with two toddlers and a baby...noise and conflict and worry. Here, he stood alone, a five-year-old already beyond his age in what he saw and knew.

We left that street and walked the half-block distance to the river that divides Millinocket. In Joe's youth, the Penobscot was not a clean river, as the paper mill discharged effluent into it routinely. There was undoubtedly a foul smell, and sometimes, unusual colors swirling in the ripples and current. Joe reminisced about goofing off, walking along the river with his pals as an older boy--and as he said that, we found ourselves standing underneath an old apple tree.

Joe looked up with a grin and saw ripened red apples hanging there. He joyfully reached up and plucked one and explained that for a hungry kid from Tin Can Alley, this tree was one of the best spots to visit. And then he ate the apple with a satisfied smile.

Joe was like a grandfather, father, uncle, and friend all in one. I knew instantly that I was loved by him, and he inspired that same devotion in me. This afternoon, his wife Gloria, who has been married to him for 52 years, since she was a girl of 18, called to let me know that Joe died a few hours ago.
My tears are sharp and insistently welling. You see, in the past 15 years, I have lost a grandfather, a father and mother, a treasured uncle, and a lifelong best friend, all of whom I am still grieving. And now, the man who helped me to sustain those feelings and connections has joined them...after giving me so much of himself. I can tell you that Joe knew how much he gave me emotionally, because that's the connection we had.

And my genealogy--that never-ending, joyful journey of discovery and familiarity--henceforth I dedicate to him.

God bless you, Joe, beyond the fence.

 

Every day

Last year was so crammed full of experiences and emotions that I actually needed a theme song...something to put it all into perspective and make me feel understood every day.

Every day..."Every Day I Have the Blues." That was the song. It so happened that all of my losses concurred with the emergence of the John Mayer Trio as a touring unit. I had seen my mother die, literally. I had presided over the dismantling of my childhood home and placed countless mundane objects in my own house like talismans. Had spoken with everyone Mom loved, all her friends, many of whom had never even known she was sick. Their older-familiar voices made those conversations even more poignant. By June 2005, every nerve ending in my body was frayed.

And so, bruised and saddened, I pounced on the JM3 ticket presales like a tiger uncaged. I scored every show ticket I wanted. And I plotted a four-day woohoooo road trip with my dear friends Lobsta and Rappa.

When the JM3 tour finally rolled up its carpets, I had seen them six times. Five out of those six times, I'd waited for hours in line to be as close to the stage as possible. To say this was wish fulfillment is an understatement--along with the Trio, I have an arms-long list of other bands for whom I gladly would have done this in the past. So JM3 stood in for many thwarted years when I could never have gone off on a toot like this.

Seeing the same rock artist for many days straight is a gush of Almost Famous ennui, combined with I'm-with-the-band hubris. Hotel after hotel after hotel, city upon city upon city, you start to understand the bizarre otherworldliness of being in a touring band. Nothing's rooted. Nothing matters, and what if it did? Except for the stage and everything that happens there. That's it, distilled. The rest is restlessness.

Every Trio show began the same way. John Mayer, usually in a lush velvet jacket and grungy jeans, standing with his back to the audience in front of Steve Jordan's drum kit. No music...just the restless gray roar of a waiting crowd. If you were close enough, you could see that on the darkened stage, Mayer was moving his hips, ever so slightly, to the beat in his head that he was about to explode into. This moment became one of the greatest examples of antici-SAY IT-pation I've ever experienced.

Then--jolt--the song would begin with a hammering blast of two chords, over and over, insistently. Standing in the crowd, a few feet away, the pounding driving beat put shape to my pain. Then Mayer would step up to the mic, breathy and raw at the same time: "Every daaay, every day I have the blues." Oh yes, I'd think, head banging to the beat, I do. You know it. Each night that song plunged me into a blue pool of all my sadness and dire memories, then it pulled me out.

The JM3 arrangement of "Every Day I Have the Blues" moved a traditional blues number onto a different shelf where Pearl Jam and Stevie Ray reside. Ragged around the edges, dissonant, yet with solos slicing sharp and keen. I reveled in that song every time I heard it, that's all I know. And at the last gig in New York, I believed the song's power would fade, because its work here was done.

I was totally wrong about that. The John Mayer Trio just played a gig in Tempe, Arizona...the final spin of the Trio carousel, as it were. Henceforth, Pino Palladino will melt into the Who, Steve Jordan will kick Eric Clapton's rhythm section into the sky, and John Mayer will reassemble himself into John Mayer, solo. As if to announce the new day--and, for me, as if to close the book on a cataclysmic year--the Trio debuted a new arrangement of their signature opening number in Tempe. When I first read about this revision, I sighed, assuming the song would have been denuded, and in the process, made irrelevant to me. Last night my friend Allie linked me to a youtube video of the "Every Day" performance, and I clicked it with a skeptical flinch.

Ah...but instead, the Trio shook out the wrinkles, funked up the backbeat, scrambled the jigsaw, and Mayer rammed in more notes than I ever thought the song could hold. Contrary to its title, "Every Day I Have the Blues" has become an assertion of sinewy joy. A statement: this is why this band exists, to sound just like this. To live.

I needed a new theme song, evidently, and there it is. "Every Day I Have the Blues," and they will not conquer me.

One year ago

Exactly one year ago right this minute, I was in the Boston Greyhound station, impatiently waiting for my connecting bus to New York City. Frantically rushing to my mom's side, because after a few uncertain weeks of tests and questions, the doctors had finally honed in on ovarian cancer as the cause of Mom's illness. The oncologist was due to visit Mom the next morning at 6:30, and I had to be there. Science writer, daughter, friend, I had responsibilities. 

My bus deposited me at Port Authority at 4:30 a.m., and I snagged a taxi uptown, dragging a suitcase that was weighted with the uncertain length of my stay. Mom had already apprised the Lenox Hill security staff of my unusual arrival time, so in I went at 5:15, when the hospital was still and gray with dawn.

Thank God I got there when I did. Other than some annoying symptoms, Mom was fully herself. She'd been crossword-puzzling, watching the city from her windowside chair, chattering with her roommate about the other people on the floor, red hair as resplendent as it could be under the hospital circumstances.

She waited for me expectantly in her chair. I'll never forget the sight of her leaning towards the door, her face yearning. I was yearning too. As we hugged, her mother-scent enveloped me and I felt young in a heady moment. That was all too fleeting, because with the arrival of the oncologist, I became mastermind interpreter and keeper of the medical details...roles I held firmly, with fire in my eyes, until the day she died.
 

That day came too damned soon. The woman I first saw at Lenox Hill, while slightly impaired physically, was cognitively and emotionally my mother. However, once chemo treatments began, everything about Mom faded and paled...except for one thing: the keen, unbearable pain. Soon she would never sit in that windowside chair again. Soon she would require a walker to get from her bed to a commode. Soon she would not be able to get to the commode in time at all.
 

I did not intend for this entry to become a catalog of Mom's illness, because having lived it, I would just as soon erase it. An impossibility: I will bear the images, the memories, and the extreme emotions of those three months forever. But what I was trying to convey was the rapidity of my mother's decline. Bizarrely, in the midst of it, each day crawled, twisted, and distorted. However, with that year thankfully in the rearview, I now find myself stunned at how quickly Mom's sickness became a life-threatening wrestling match. And how stacked against us it all was--when I was in New York, that thought truly didn't sink in. I pushed every resource at the fight because I believed.

 

I am a fan of believing. In fact, despite the overarching, soul-threatening suckiness that was 2/05-2/06, I remain an optimist. Kind of my trademark, I guess. And it's exactly what Mom wanted from me: not only in the hospital, but throughout our entwined lives. Hard to convey what a profound realization that is for me. Makes me cry, surfacing it.

 

When this blog began to take shape, iTunes tossed this song at me. It says absolutely everything that I'm feeling on this unwanted anniversary (not to mention the wrenching minor-key accompaniment). 

 

Hello, how are you.
Have you been alright,
through all those lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely nights?
That's what I'd say, I'd tell you everything,
if you'd pick up that telephone.

 

Hey, how you feelin'?
Are you still the same?
Don't you realize the things we did, we did
were all for real--not a dream,
I just can't believe
they've all faded out of view.

 

Doo wah, doobie doobie wah, doo wah doo lang
Blue days, black nights, doo wah doo lang
I look into the sky
(the love you need ain't gonna see you through)
And I wonder why
(the little things are finally coming true)

 

Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight
Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight

 

Okay, so no one's answering,
Well, can't you just let it ring a little longer, longer, longer....
I'll just sit tight, through shadows of the night,
Let it ring for evermore....

 

Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight
Oh, oh, telephone line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight

 

From 1982 on, my relationship with Mom was primarily conducted by phone, pretty much daily. We were each other's checkpoints. 

First Mom blog. My friends, this is a huge milestone for me. I miss her to the point of tears every day and had begun to fear I'd never get anything said. Muse, inspiration, whatever it is...now I know the words will come. The other thing that Mom always expected of me.

To honor D.J.

This is partly blog as catharsis, and partly my need for the world to know someone whom they will never know if I don't write about him. It's raw and soaked in tears. I apologize.
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How do I miss thee? Let me count the ways.

 

I miss your raucous, scratchy, knowing laugh, roughened by smoke and years of wicked humor.

 

I miss that you called me "doll" and "darling" and "baby" and "honey" and "bitch". Words I am not likely to hear spoken in reference to myself again.

 

I miss the way you knew my every instinct, my failings, and the way you cheer-led every positive thing about me. I believed those things through you. Now, I am unsure, lonesome, more shrill in my need for guidance.

 

I miss your knowledge of soap operas. Dammit, who else would crow like me: Noah and Scorpio are BOTH back on GH!! Can Anna be far behind?! Are you engineering this from the beyond?? If not, dear God, I hope they have SoapNet up on those clouds.

 

I miss the TV shows you would select for me, tape and send, because you perpetually worried that I didn't get enough down time. The reality shows that we mocked. The dramas that we became hooked on (and dished about, as if those characters lived down the street). The Kathy Griffin outrageousness that was just an extension of our own. The porn you threatened to provide, but never made good on.

 

I miss talking to you about our friends and our families. Sharing the good stories, or raking over the coals as merited.

 

I miss telling you when Peter and I have had ecstatic sex. Eagerly. And I miss that you're the one whose encouragement helped me get to that suggestive self who still entices the man I love.

 

I miss describing women's health issues until you beg for mercy. And my triumph that you actually had a boundary that I crossed.

I miss the fucking phone. Honest to God, no one ever calls me. I guess I crammed in a lifetime of seated, hours-long, receiver-clutching conversations with you.
 

I miss worrying about you, because I desperately wanted to help you get healthy enough for obesity surgery. And worrying was hope, after all. I also miss giving advice that you would gleefully harass your doctors with. Makes me proud, e.g.: I advised you not to take Fen-Phen. Now, when I read about improvements to bariatric surgery, or about some promising finding in a lab, I'm pissed off and thwarted.

 

I miss blabbing about the 70s with you. We both had the exact same outlook on that ridiculous, wide-collared decade. And our worlds both got shaken up by the decade that followed it. Only you know how much.

 

I miss complaining about my mom to you, because she's gone too, dammit, and I'd give anything to have something to say about her, to anyone, but especially to you.

I miss the relish in your voice whenever I told you about my diva Lydia. I know your spirit of impish rebellion and fashion sense has passed into her, but I wish I could update you on exactly how that's manifesting.

 

I miss the New York tang of your voice. The impatience of your tone, keeping the dang conversation moving. The microwave beep that meant your tea was ready. The intake of breath that meant your cig was lit.

 

I miss your advice. Fuck that, I crave your advice. How can I possibly contemplate my future without your input? How can I know if I'm totally crazy thinking something, without you telling me so? Because, honestly, most of the time when you told me that, it was news to me. My psyche needed your take on it.

 

I miss you reading my latest anything. I hate like hell that this blog phenomenon emerged after your passing. I wish you could have started one, too.

 

I miss hearing about your exploits. Your sense of daring outstripped anything I could ever imagine, much less would have ever attempted (or wanted to).

 

I miss the pride in my voice when I told someone about my "best friend." Because you were that, from the first time we met. Remember when we chat-roomed about that a couple of years ago? I saved it, baby, because it made me feel so good:

 

DJ: I thought you were stunning, and lest we forget you were wearing those boots the night we met...grrrrrrr

Nessa: Those boots, the Lil Abners!?

DJ: You were wearing these sort of mohagony colored boots up the knee....
High boots drive me wild....I'm sure I commented that night

Nessa: I have NO recollection of them! Oh man. Did they have spurs? I had spur boots with a spike heel back then....
But they were not past the knee. I never would have been allowed.

DJ: No spurs to my memory, but there were boots and those pants....what were they called?

Nessa: Gauchos??

DJ: No, to the knee

DJ: YES!

Nessa: I wore gauchos and boots. Geez, maybe I was a babe! LOL!!

 

It was like this: I walked up to you on 37th Street. It had rained for hours, and the evening streets were steamy and misty with it, making the orange streetlights glow brighter. We had never seen each other before, but your friend Tom was my burning crush, and I desperately needed intel.

So initially I had cold-called you, which scared me half to death at age 15 (I never did stuff like that). And we talked about music--always my raison d'etre--and you said you loved disco and hated the Beatles.

"WHAAAT??" I yelped into the phone, mortally offended. "What is there about the Beatles that anyone could hate??" (You didn't know it then, but they were my heroes.)

And you didn't back down to impress me, get flustered, or try to be cool. No, you said right back at me over that tinny Queens phone line, flatly: "They can't sing."

Such hubris. No one I knew preferred disco to the Beatles. And your VOICE. It was mesmerizing, dear. Even then, you could have hosted a radio show with that purring, opinionated, bitch-masculine voice.

And so we had decided to meet. And my anticipation was palpable. My hands shook, my heart pounded, I wore my fave of-the-moment clothes (see above). And while there was girl-guy electricity as we drew nearer to each other, coming into focus the closer we got...there was moreso a sense of relief, souls in the same orbit, yin to the yang. A conversation began immediately, no hesitation, and it was a shining thread that never ended until November 3, 2005.

 

Ahhhhh, life goes on, hon. All the ways I miss you are blunted by the busyness of my days. I must nurture my kids, work at a desk for pay, and deepen my love for Peter (an ever-renewing resource, as you well were aware). And I must be the person you always knew I was. Because I am. And I love you forever because you found that person in 1979, and walked with her into the future on a foggy, mysterious spring night.

When you least expect it...

...grief.
 

I was sitting in a work meeting this afternoon, when suddenly a poem took full shape in my psyche. Just like that. I scribbled it in the margins of my notes for the meeting (looking officious for a few moments, I'm sure). This poem says so much to me—I mean, its substance is what I have been feeling for months, but could not quite get my mind to say. Well, my mind found the words. And my heart felt them as soon as they arranged themselves.
 

Intensive Care

I touch the scarf
and I'm at your bedside
where I knitted it—
fluorescent, persistent
hospital light
machines that beep and flash
hours of uncertainty—
while flowing through my fingers
pure soft real wool
a strand to the outside world
forming warmth
in honor of
the warmth of you,
now lost

NBR 12/30/05

Eulogy: Daniel D'Antonio, Jr.

I am honored to tell you about my closest friend, D.J., and his extraordinary life. First and foremost, he loved, fiercely and protectively.

He was outrageous and mischievous, yet in his heart, he was traditional and old-world, his father’s son.

D.J. was devoted: as a son, as a brother, as a father, and as a friend. He was generous in every way.

Time and time again, he willed me to believe in myself—and I’m not the only person for whom he did that.

I marveled over the years of our friendship at how strong and positive he was. Even when he was young, he was an advocate and a guide to his friends.

He was an incredible hair stylist—and a great listener while he practiced his craft. You could rely on him to make you over and lift your spirits.

He could make a donut shop feel glamorous, a place to see and be seen.

I can think of no better way to while away an afternoon than in his company, eating pizza, drinking soda, half-watching TV, and talking about everything.

D.J. was a magical writer, and no matter how many times I told him that, he waved me off. But he was. His writing was all heart, all honesty.

He was also a savvy observer of Hollywood, with an amazing head for trivia and pop culture. He’s the only other person I’ve ever known who could sing every word of every Partridge Family song. Proudly.

His all-time favorite movie was Xanadu. It’s improbable, glossy…a time capsule from our teen years. Mostly, though, that movie is about the timelessness of love. One of the songs says, “I only have to close my eyes, dear, and suddenly I’m where you are.” It’s always reminded me of D.J., always made me cry. Now I really know what it means.

I refuse to stop missing him, ever. And I will not say goodbye. He will be here with us, part of us, unforgettable. Because love is timeless, and he knew that.