Loving an Alcoholic

Loving an alcoholic sometimes seems

Like having to endure that person's death

Over and over and over and over again.

One day, however, one way or another,

There will be a final day of mourning.

February 17, 2012

Today's soundscape has a new virtuoso, one I haven't heard in a long time. Somewhere nearby a woodpecker is adding his staccato percussion to the morning music.

"When You're in Debt" with apologies to Mr. Sondheim

"When you're in debt, go in debt all the way, 

From your first TV set to best seats at the play! 

When you're in debt, let them piss, let them moan,  

You can charge it all off except your student loan! 

You can't find a job, there's nothing in your bank vault; 

You feel like a slob and now the house ain't worth salt: 

STRATEGIC DEFAULT!"

Wrote this is September. I must remember to finish it before the recession is over...

January 31, 2012

It's one of those mornings when it looks like the world is wrapped in a gray flannel sheet. There is no dimensional quality to the view beyond Mare Island. The birds are silent and still except for the occasional crow. He flies along the marshes, but even he has silenced his voice in honor of the quiet morning.

November 4, 2011 on Fog and Clouds

There really isn't much left unsaid or unwritten about clouds and fog, especially here in the San Francisco Bay area. This morning, The Sleeping Maiden had covered her entire profile with the stuff. Then she turned over, sending her weightless blankets to the ground, to doze in the rays of the early morning sun. This morning, I awoke much earlier than usual, tossing aside my own downy comforter, poking the embers of creativity and warming my pen once again.  The mountain continued her slumber.

November 1, 2011

Each of the chapters of my life seems to begin with the phrase, "And so I began again, reinventing myself for the_____ time." Only the ordinal number changes, and frankly, I've lost track of which one it is now. I will never be found guilty of being sedentary or predictable, not that I am necessarily proud of that. I continue to explore the road less taken, and I rarely have regrets.

Heaven 7/21/2011

Throughout my childhood and even until today, I struggled with the idea of what Heaven looked like. I went to Sunday school regularly, so I saw all the pictures of the brilliant light in streaming pastel-colored rays piercing the huge cumulus clouds and penetrating the ether to end beneficently on the Earth below. I heard all about the milk and honey (I was never fond of either), of harps and haloes, and even subscribed for a short time to the bells and wings hypothesis. About two weeks after my husband Jeff died, I had a very clear dream that revealed Heaven as a beautiful gated country club sort of place. In the dream, he and I were floating together over a road that ran for miles and miles through a green rolling meadow. When we reached the country club, he told me that he was going in, but that I could not. I pleaded to be taken along, but he said no, and once inside the gates, proceeded to return to the form of the handsome, healthy man with whom I had fallen in love before the cancer ravaged his brain and the cures ravaged his body.

I think that, as an avid golfer and outdoorsman, the image was Jeff’s heaven, but not mine. Today, I got a much clearer vision of what Heaven looks like. This afternoon my dear, patient, thoughtful, loving, and wise Uncle Stan passed over, and I suddenly realized a very clear picture of Heaven. Heaven begins with the two deep tones of a door chime, and the sound of the door opening, and the words, “Welcome home, mija!”

Heaven, I know, is my grandmother’s hug and a cup of fresh coffee. It is my grandfather’s smile and the chuckle that begins in his ample midsection and burbles up like a well until it tumbles into the air like a gentle spring. Heaven is my uncle Lenny’s laughter, and the sound of his one heavy shoe as he strides to greet me. Heaven is Jeff’s long arms folding me to him, the feel of his foot at the end of the bed, and his smile at the beginning and the end of the day. Jeff is in my heaven, too.

Heaven is different for each of us. Uncle Stan may have entered a different Heaven, possibly located on Maui or in the Sierra foothills along a trout stream, just as Jeff entered his country club Heaven, but the really wonderful part is that we each get our very own Heaven.

I find this thought comforting in this time of simultaneous relief and sadness. Uncle Stan had been ill for a very long time, and now he is his youthful self once again. He is the man so deeply in love with his beautiful wife (“Your aunt ‘Nita could really fill out a sweater!”), so proud of his children, and whose open arms and warm laughter greeted me throughout my early childhood: “There’s my big girl!” Uncle Stan pushed the small black button that elicits that chime just after five o’clock today, and Nana just reached up to embrace him.

There will be many more people who ring the bell before I do, and now, as I face my own mortality once again, I am consoled by the knowledge that there will be so many wonderful people in my Heaven when I open the door.

Good-bye, Uncle Stan. I love you.

“Welcome home, mijo!”