Tag Archives: love

Friendship, Grief, Ode to a friend

Make the call.

She called me ‘A-bomb.’

We met lumbering around in pre-natal aerobics in 1987 at a fancy health club in San Francisco we could barely afford. My mother had just died and I had spent four months in a new city throwing up knowing no one; both my skin and my soul were translucent. I have no doubt I heard her laugh first from across the room, but whatever drew us together lasted like glue for the following thirty-eight years, over thousands of miles, through serious health issues for both of us, the death of her spouse and the grief that followed.

When she beamed her light on you there was no going back. Everything she did, designed, wore, commanded was larger than life, straight-on classy and always crisp white or navy linen. I adored being in her orbit and later, as we faced our adult challenges, having her on the other end of the phone to laugh with, anger with and decompress alongside.

She sent me absurd and outrageous gifts which were somehow always just right: a waist-high hand woven basket for my yarn when I had my hip replaced. Tiny spherical etched glasses to toast my first steps. Over the years wildly impractical and sustainable skeins of yarn in — she wrote — the color that reminds me of you. In 2000 for the New Years a bracelet arrived so jingly and sparkly and joyful I still have it in a bag even though the elastic gave out long ago.

She read everything I wrote. She would call, begin at the top of her voice, “A-BOMB YOU ARE AMAZING’ then chastise me for not writing more. There are so many stories.

Losing her spouse, living alone, facing her own health challenges have been hard for the last two years. I was able to visit her many times over the decades in her various beautifully decorated nests in Sonoma, in between no matter how many miles apart we talked, texted at all hours, shared our project tips, news about weddings, babies and parents. Each call felt like I was sinking into that familiar oversized white linen couch, cup of tea in hand, our legs tucked under us.

We argued over the years as fiercely as we loved. Then we laughed harder.

This Christmas I sent her a silly little sliver of a bead bracelet and wrote her I had one too and it was to be our ‘friendship’ bracelet. We hadn’t had contact over the busy holiday season but last Thursday I checked in by text to see if she had picked up the package. She went to the post office immediately and replied that she had put it right on, then gave me a run-down on her visitors over the holidays, what she knit for everyone and what she was casting on for the next project. I sent her the links to my recent publications.

I should have called instead.

Her daughter phoned me Monday to tell me my friend had died in her sleep that weekend.

Sudden loss is an unbelievable grief. I keep wanting to call her about the wildfires in California, does she smell smoke? Is she safe? To hear her laugh and tell me everything is alright. But it isn’t. She landed almost four decades ago in an important place within my soul which has gone abruptly and irreversibly vacant. I vacillate between anger and tears. I don’t think there is an in-between anytime soon.

I have been through a lot of death and dying. For the most part I have had time to compose my goodbye, my grief, my breath. Not so here. I am still gasping.

Wow and wow this life is fragile and splendid, full of grace and heartache and it hurts, all of it.

Send the bracelet. Make the call. If you are thinking of someone it is because they need to hear from you.

Be the friend you need.

Miss you, B-bomb.

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Graduating, wedding, writing

Graduations.

June has so far been a month of unexpected and utterly amazing graduations.

Last weekend my son was married; a beautiful, relaxed and sunny wedding north of Boston, their dearest friends and family surrounding them on a bluff that hung over a salty estuary dotted with lobster boats. There were serious tears from our first row, waterworks of happiness, love and gratitude. We gained a wonderful daughter and sister that day. He is my married son. When they slid the rings on and said ” I do” my status — in an instant — changed to “mother of two married children.”

I now will take any and all suggestions on how to be a good mother-in-law.

That same weekend I received an email that I had won the Anne Dillard Creative Non Fiction award at the Bellingham Review with my essay “The Language of Flowers.” A piece I submitted last February when the sleet and snow were pelting the windows on Bainbridge Island, about planting a garden while my mother was dying. Utterly surprised, utterly honored, I have now graduated to ‘award-winning writer.”

Mic drop.

I took graduations with a grain of salt in my early years: I didn’t even attend my college graduation despite being notified of several distinctions. I was too busy getting on a plane to hike the Inner Hebrides of Scotland with my mother. And there was too much champagne at the pre-game for my Masters graduation that admittedly the day is a bit of a blur and the photos too. Both were rites of passage I expected when the educations ended. I never gave them much thought again.

But marrying a son, well, we all hope it will happen but did we know that it will rearrange our hearts — tear out little bits and at the same time fill us with happiness until our chests feel twice bigger? That we will be forever changed by both loss and love? In a good way. Growth, in one day, that has changed me.

Writers, we just keep submitting, keep writing, keep waiting for the right reader to be changed by our words and inch us further out into the world. In my case, a published and extraordinary Native writer, Sasha LaPointe, chose me. My heart is so big right right now I could burst.

I will let the newlyweds share their photos of the excellent day. And until notified how and where Bellingham Review will publish my piece they own the rights for a little while. So it’s only Tuesday — two days since this special weekend — and I have a sore arm from tossing my mortar board in the air.

These graduations will stay with me for my lifetime. May I honor their lessons well.

Until then, you get me as a sign-off; the Matron, complete with some false eyelashes that also, may I note, was it’s own noted and enjoyable graduation experience.

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Family, Father, gratitude, Handmade

Love Pigs.

Of all the holiday pleasures nothing — nothing — makes me happier than the pigs.

So long ago, before my father’s eyes were beset by Best’s disease, he carved animals from wood. I have a fat sheep and a patient donkey for the manger. On my desk lies a palm-sized duck with a beak tucked tenderly under a wing. On the bookcase, a life-sized Curlew, beak always in peril from the vacuum and small children. On the tree hangs wooden ornaments he cut from pictures my children drew for him. But nothing gives me more pleasure than the two tiny little piggies he carved, the size of my thumbnail, that I place in the Christmas scene come December.

The pigs lie in wait for eleven months, swaddled in cotton, kept safe from the jumble and flurry of the holiday set-ups and take-downs, in a small porcelain Christmas tree that flips open at the trunk.  They are my final tradition in the days before the holiday. I wait until all the lights are strung, the tree trimmed, the skating scene arranged and rearranged, the snow sprinkled; only then do they come out: I tip open the base of the tree and one by one carefully place them on the mantle. Though so small, they square up amongst the skaters and carved trees, the string of sparkle lights and little churches. Their shadows cast stout silhouettes. All that my father loved about this holiday — family, the hearth, the music, beauty created from our hands —  is in these little animals. All the love he could give me is in these half-inch tiny knobs of wood. I always cry when I step back and look at them.

I still remember the sharp points of their ears pricking me as he dropped them in my palm, this tiniest most beautiful gift from his hands to mine. Some years, I place them  around a reindeer. Some years, I place them next to a small hand carved Santa, or in the middle of three paunchy Santas, their ears and tails pointing North and East, peering at the tiny skaters frozen in their poses. Guests will lean on the mantle, stare at the scene and then suddenly burst out laughing. Tiny pigs in a skating scene is funny.

In 2011, a year after my father died, a small box arrived in the mail. My brother had set some of my father’s ashes in a small round globe of glass, the disc streaked with ash and a thin blue swirl. That year I strung the disc on a holiday ribbon, and as soon as the tree was upright, hung my father on a sturdy branch facing the room. Every year after that, he watches his little piggies stand guard and his family grow tall and I cannot believe — each Christmas —  how much of him is all around us. He is right where he was happiest.

I lie awake and wonder what I will leave my children that will stand, year after year, the test of time and love. Words, I think. Many, many words.

Happy New Year, Friends.

Piggies.jpg

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Uncategorized

After the last three days, I have renamed this blog post:”Resuscitation Is The Only Option.”

 

Angelpic

What is the first thing that comes to your mind here?

Well I stopped and stared and thought a while and this being Seattle, I allowed the possibility that this tree was rescued from demise and a neighbor was thanking an unknown… but then, no. This felt like a human rescue, a heroic passerby that knew to administer CPR, a stranger that then stepped back onto the sidewalk when 911 arrived. So the rescued painted this sign and hung it at the roundabout — which made me think bicycle wreck– and perhaps the stranger kept walking when she or he saw all was stable.

No name, no license plate, no record of this angel. Just a momentous moment of taking action.

I have a friend here in the city that was hit by a car a few months ago, a mess of braking and slamming and somersaulting and then — blacking out — an inability to recall details. Rattled passerby gave conflicting accounts, uninterested policeman wrote a one-line report, the ensuing hours in Group Health made this a lingering PTSD-like experience that has made him reluctant to take his bike out of the shed, unable to piece together what has scarred him.

What makes us good passerby, rescuers, observers and in the greater picture, responsible for others? Recently I have been unable to articulate how to take care of others in the wake of So. Much. Carnage. Since Orlando. And Medina. And Baghdad. And now, Baton Rouge. I know, with horror, I am not listing all the blood shed since June. Guns and more guns and more fire and more violence.

What do I do, some fifty-something gal working on her writing sitting in her nest so far from so much?

I start by looking closely — at myself, at the people around me, at the moss on the north side of the great tree that shades me as I type. How to take action, starting with myself?

At the coffee shop a few days ago I saw a man hunched over on the bench outside, weeping into his cell phone. Without a second thought I lay my hands on his shoulders, held him and pressed a little love into him for a few seconds. Then I kept walking.

It was my turn to make sure he knew he was not alone. It wasn’t CPR but it was action. Take some.

 

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