Coulda-been-ku 12

12.

We endured so much.

No one else could have done it.  

I loved you. I’m sorry. 

[The Real] Rabbi Syme

    As many of you out there are reading After Anatevka, you might be surprised to know that one of the leading questions I get is whether or not Rabbi Syme (Perchik's teacher and advocate) is based on a real person. The answer: of course he is. Rabbi Syme was indeed so influential, that I felt he had to be memorialized in After Anatevka for he was my first spiritual advocate.

    Fictional Rabbi Syme is based very loosely upon the real-life Rabbi Syme—loosely because my description in the novel is not so much a literal, but more of an evocative recollection and honoring of his influence. Real-life Rabbi Syme and I only spent a collection of minutes together in 2001, but they were crucial minutes. He gave me the gift of delivering the eulogy at my father's funeral service, as well as bearing witness to it when he lead the funeral service, and above all, he gave me an hour of his time months later, reminding me of what was eternal, and chartering a map toward the beauty, strength and individuality my faith. Irreplaceable gifts one can never forget.

    The influence of Rabbi Syme proves another true-to-life maxim: that we never know the depth of the influence we have upon one another. A fleeting moment to one, might bear a lifetime of profundity to another, for better and for worse. So it is in these tiny actions that we must recognize that our influence on earth is vast, has meaning, and should never be taken for granted.

    I include this story from my memory (also included in my upcoming memoir) in today's post because the prayer Rabbi Syme references, the Shema' Koleinu, is not only a prayer that is part of the Amidah (the core of every worship service), but especially significant on the High Holy Days, which are currently upon us.

    L'Shana Tova, one and all. May your new years be filled with positive influence that you both give and receive. Here's to a brighter and more peaceful world.


*


    Two months after the funeral I went to see Rabbi Syme.

    In the Jewish community, a rabbi is viewed as more than just a life cycle overseer, administrator, Bible reciter, or spiritual leader; but also as a counselor, a true community role model, and above all, an educator. The word Rabbi, in fact, translates as “teacher." At the time I’d be willing to admit that I required all of the above from good ol’ Rabbi Syme, a man I’d known for approximately 2 hours. I walked into Temple Bel El ready to order up the “super size me” platter of spiritual needs. Plus, I felt inexplicably close to him, compelled beyond logic to spend time in the company of the sweet, wise man who had, in such a brief collection of minutes, given me the ultimate gift—the eulogy. He had been the cartographer of the map that chartered the rest of my life.

    By the time I got to his office at Temple Beth El I realized, of course, that I barely knew him, and was suddenly embarrassed at my presence there. I knew so little of Judaism, had (unjustly) railed so harshly against it for, up until then, I had only ever associated it with my horrible grandparents.  Still, I entered and sat across from him. Two almost-strangers in two tiny chairs.

    “So. How are you doing?”

What was I supposed to say?

    “Fine, thank you Rabbi.”

I wanted to tell him about everything.

    “How is your family?”

Well well well, Rabbi Syme this is all getting a bit personal! I usually wait ’til the third date to list my favorite Mandy Patinkin roles in order of sexiness, craziness, intensity, beard length, let alone discuss my batshit-bonkers family, but I suppose I can make an exception. How. To. Respond. How can a person respond when “One time, grandma kidnapped me” is, say, the sixth most dysfunctional story?

    “I… don’t really know.”

Rabbi Syme sat up in his chair and nodded.

    “I sensed as much. They were… unusual.”

Rabbi Syme’s Spidey-skills: for the win.


    We talked for a long while that day, Rabbi Syme and I, or at least what felt like it.  It was an odd discovery, but Rabbi Syme was more than my first spiritual advisor, in many ways he was the first adult who, even in the mere three hours clocked together, was more interested in my cultivation of wisdom than of knowledge. I knew that the word Rabbi translated as “teacher” in Hebrew, but this exceeded reciting the periodic table. Knowledge is information—a collection of facts. Wisdom is the poetry inside those facts. Wisdom relies on evocation more than description. It is the difference between two photographs: one that looks exactly the way it looked in the moment, the other that looks exactly the way it felt. Memory through a lens.

    “Do you know the Shema' Koleinu” he asked, as if I actually might?
    “Rabbi, I wasn’t invited to the Bar Mitzvahs or the quinceañeras if you catch my drift.”
    “I ...do not.”
    “I’m kind of a Cashew.” He stared at me blankly. “A Catholic-Jew? An interfaith secularization situation?”
    “That’s very clever.”
    “Thank you.” I continued, nervously, “Well technically I was invited to both the Steinman kids parties and for what it’s worth I played Golde in Fiddler sophomore year of high school—”
    “I—” he stopped me, kind but swift, “I understand.”

    He went on.
    “The Shema' Koleinu is the sixteenth paragraph of a central prayer of Judaism, called the Amidah, which is the core of every Jewish worship service.

    It reads:

אָב הָרַחֲמָן, שְׁמַע קולֵנוּ, ה' אֱלהֵינוּ, חוּס וְרַחֵם עָלֵינו, וְקַבֵּל בְּרַחֲמִים וּבְרָצון אֶת ‘תְּפִלָּתֵנוּ, כִּי אֵל שׁומֵעַ תְּפִלּות וְתַחֲנוּנִים אָתָּה, וּמִלְּפָנֶיךָ מַלְכֵּנוּ. רֵיקָם אַל תְּשִׁיבֵנוּ.

    "Hear our voice, O Lord our God; spare us and have mercy upon us, and accept our prayer in mercy and favor.” Hear Our Voice is the essence of this prayer—and I sense that your voice has always been heard, both of the spoken and the sung variety. The eulogy proves that.”
    “Really?” I replied, not entirely understanding where he was leading me, all I knew was that I was willing to follow. 
    “Well I believe so. What do you think?”

     No one had ever asked me anything remotely like this, and I grew hot and uneasy fearing I would offend him, or say the wrong thing.

    “I really don’t know how to respond.”
    “There is no right or wrong here, Alexandra,” the Rabbi pacified, “it’s just a simple question. One of the beauties of Judaism is this ancient tradition of the dialogic process. Of discussion! Jews recognizing that understanding comes from meaningful exchanges, from challenges, not only with one another but with God Himself.”
    “Oh! Like in Fiddler how Tevye has a kind of dialogue with God!”
    “Exactly like that. God and Tevye have a very personal relationship.”
    “I really like that.”
    “So do I,” he smiled. “So? What do you think of ‘Hear Our Voice?’”
    “We all… want to be heard.”
    “Yes.”
    “And we all struggle to listen?”
    “I think so.” He leaned in. “Hear Our Voice is a very simple request, but it indicates that we want to engage beyond ourselves. It acknowledges the desire to be heard, and the validity of that desire.”
    “Wow,” I gasped. The thought took my breath away.
    “That’s why you are here today, isn’t it? To be heard?”

It certainly was. I nodded.    
He continued.

    “The prayer continues a few lines on: ‘Renew our days, as of old.’ Almost as if the speaker  is a little skeptical: Alexandra, do you think it is possible to recover the days of the past? And I’m not saying it isn’t.”
    “No but…” And then I saw.

    If prayers were only knowledge, prayers would fail. As wisdom, the prayer was true as anything. My father was dead. That was the fact. But the poetry of that fact could continue for the rest of my life if I turned these days of pain into lessons. Yes, the past indeed is truly “passed,” it is unrecoverable, and none of us can truly live there. But the wisdom gained by reflection upon that past is why we are alive. To make meaning. To understand better.  I looked at Rabbi Syme and said as much.
       
    “Do you believe, Alexandra?”
    “I believe you.”

I did—it wasn’t an evasion.

    “You know what I’m asking.”
    “I do. I can’t believe I’m saying it but I do. I believe in something.”
    “Well, good. ‘Something’ is possibility. ‘Something’ is something.”

    I thanked Rabbi Syme and left him that day, never to see him in person again. But his impact would be ever-with me, his name etched upon my heart, and, forever synonymous with integrity. 

The Death Bed

(7 weeks on)

A week or so after the incident with the cat Grey headed home for Thanksgiving, slated to return to his creative den as soon as possible to continue work on his model for NIDA[1] .

Left alone to our own devices, Kent suggested it might be time to start thinking about changing The Death Room— to look forward.

    “A new bed, for sure” he said, “perhaps some paint, a little classic Cath-ay DIY?”
    “Great idea” Mom said, and three hours later, Kent and I returned from grocery shopping to find that mom has discovered beautiful solid hardwood floors beneath the early 90s carpet, ripped all of it up, rolled it up and taken it out to the curb. Now, she was already hard at work on the hallway, breathless, sweating and determined. All of this served to reaffirm a notion I already knew about Mom: once you put an idea in her head— there’s (possibly literally) no stopping her...[2]

The three of us spent the remainder of the night ripping up that hideous death-beige carpet and hauling it out to the curb with the bathwater. By 3am we had disposed of the detritus of our former life upon the lips of our lawn filled with an odd sense of higher purpose— we were not scavengers rummaging through the ruins of a fallen city. We were excavators! Like Heinrich Schliemann! Below the carpets lay new, undiscovered Troys and we would be the team to peel away the rubble, reveal the past and simultaneously, the future, just like the anthropologists of yore![3]

When we woke the following morning, the artifacts were gone— taken to the same unnameable place all life’s mysteries disappear to.

But we were not empty, we were lighter somehow.

The top floor of 1367 had been stripped bare to make room for new life, and we dressed that morning with a purpose— we were going to buy a new bed.

*

Art Van on Woodward at 14 Mile was the first and only thought that sprang to mind. It was constantly blaring its name on radio and local television commercials, and besides, it was on the same strip of Woodward as Dairy Deluxe, which gave it street-cred, not to mention 0% financing til 2004... Word.

Art Van as it would turn out, was above a Mercedes dealership, to be entered by sky-scraping escalator which crested onto a cavernous warehouse of fluorescently lit sofas, dinettes, media stations and bed frames (ostensibly, a well-furnished piranha tank).

Mom, Kent and I were each splayed—snow angel style—on a series of mattresses,
     gazing upward at the humming lights.
No, this was not a party at Elton John’s house— this was Art Van.

    “Too firm over here—” Kent called out.
    “Al?”
    “S’okay. A bit squishy.”
    “I’m on one of those individual coil ones over here,” Mom said, “the one from that commercial with the glass of wine and the bowling ball.”
    “Oh yeah!”
    “How is it?”
    “It’s great. It’s just right," she pronounced, “It’s a Sealy...”

Just then Mort, a short, middle-aged gentleman whose comb over, jacket, smile, and every gesture indicated that he was an Art Van salesman, leaned over into my vision, blocking my view of the fluorescent lights like a slightly-malevolent dentist, and, hands clasped behind his back, chimed,
    “Anything I can do for you?”
He smiled a slow motion smile like a cartoon drawing from the 80s.
Nobody moved.

    “We were just waiting for our porridge to cool” I said.

Mort’s smile was as frozen upon his face as our extremities were to the mattresses, only our eyes shifted, locking on him.

    “We’ll take this one” Mom said.

Throw in three bowls of porridge and a blonde girl and we’d have had ourselves a fairy tale ending.

   “Excellent” said Mort, straightening upward, eying us still. “You’re certain of the Queen?”
    “No doubt about the Queen” Kent smiled at Mom. Plus downsizing from the King-sized Death Bed felt right.
    “And we’ll take this frame” said Mom, “I like it— it looks like a sleigh.”

It did—a chestnut, caramel-stained Queen-sized sleigh.

    “I’ll draw up the papers” said Mort, as he turned on his tiny feet, hands still behind his back.

As Mort trotted away, comb-over blinding us, we turned to Mom, who was deep in thought.
    “A new bed…” I said.
    “Yes” she said, running her hand along the hip of the frame.
    “Happy?” Kent asked in a low voice.

Mom thought a moment before answering. Of course she was not happy, her one and only love was gone— gone almost as callously as the upstairs carpets. Our family was evil and the government unhelpful. She was lost, abandoned once again, and living in Detroit with a gaggle of equally lost teenagers. It all crossed her mind, you could see it in her face, and in the thoughtful hand still caressing the chestnut bed frame.

At last the hand stopped, Mom paused and clutched the wood, felt its solid weight. She focused on the bed—her brand new Queen sized chestnut sleigh bed, with thick orthopedic mattress, box spring and 20% Thanksgiving discount, all fit for a Queen.

    “Happy...” she said.

This was a step.
A Baby Step, as Bob would say,
     toward the next stage of our new life,
and that made her happy. 
That fact.



[1] The National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, Australia
[2] do not get between my mother and a power tool
[3] There was also an element of peeling off the used layer of a lint roller… But I’ll stick with Trojan excavation metaphor for now. However grand.

We do it for THAT Guy

Whenever I meet new people the question “How did you end up in the UK?” is almost always at the top of the list—and the answer, of course, is extraordinarily complicated because the winter of 2002, I experienced a very strange chapter of my life that I rarely talk about.

Thus, I do what we all do: I ‘Cliffs Notes-it—” that is, I give you the gist. Ya know: I skip over this weird four-month chapter of Twilight-Zone-Level weirdness that no one could possibly understand unless they were to be told the entire story, or perhaps, they were, by some miracle, there.

So whenever I tell what is the “Cliffs Notes story of my life” it goes like this:

    My Dad died.
    I moved to Scotland.
    SCENE.

That is… highly abbreviated. My Dad did die. And I did move to Scotland. But in between those events, I had to make a plan for the interim as if I were vaguely interested in continuing to live.

As one is want to do in a time of crisis, 18-year-old grieving Al made a series of incredibly impulsive decisions shortly after the new year.  In an attempt to “get on with things” I decided to:

    1. Fly back to the University of Minnesota, say goodbye, and clean out my dorm room,
    2. Drop of out of college 
to,
    3. grieve-but-not-grieve,
    4. Get a job. Perhaps at the mall. Perhaps at the diner I’d worked at all through high school.
    5. Maybe try out for some community theatre! Heck, I was pretty good and the Village Players were doing Our Town.

One day, while trawling the (still-baby-fresh) WORLD WIDE INTERWEB for options, I scrolled around for theatre gigs in my area to maybe “do some plays” while I worked at previously mentioned diner, got my freaking life together and I duuno like maaaaaybe re-auditioned for schools (but also maybe curled up and died— jury was out on that.)

I clicked on a link on Playbill.com: A semi-professional theatre was looking for a young woman aged 18-24 who could sing to play in their winter season— The Mousetrap, The Fantasticks and The Pirates of Penzance. You’d get $125 to build the sets, make the costumes, do all the marketing yourself, and be in the shows, and oh yeah: you got to live above the theatre for free and share a single landline phone in a hallway with everyone else who was clearly running away from their lives…Helloooo? Was the computer talking directly to me? I called the theatre and sold myself harder than an info-mercial, and 20 minutes later I had the gig.

Thus, I:

    6. impulsively moved, in January, to a little coastal tundra-town to live, and work in something (somewhat terrifyingly) called "Winterstock." The only catch? This theatre was five hours north of Detroit in a tiny little town on the coast of Lake Huron called Alpena, Michigan.

Alpena: mean January temperature 12ºF.
Alpena: where you were awakened every morning by the train that ran directly next to said theatre at 5am with a coal delivery from Cadillac.
Alpena: where the two main restaurants were Bob’s Big Boy and the other Bob’s Big Boy.
Alpena: With the weirdest, most provincial, Twin-Peaksy, and kindest gosh darn people you’ve ever met in your life.

I packed our car and drove there in the middle of the night with my also-grieving-mom who helped me move in and, miraculously, sort of…allowed me do this very, very weird thing.

And thus, once, long ago, in a mystical land known as Alpena, Michigan, several very magical things occurred that I shall never forget as long as I live.

- There were some eccentric adventures—which all took place in a very sketchy white van called “The Deer Slayer”
- I went to some peculiar social events (a few of which included babies in bars)
- I learned all about running a theatre.
- and I did three plays—two of which were sort of good.
- Crucially, I met some quirky, damaged, bizarre and totally wonderful people—all just as lost as I—and we held one another, lifted each other up in a very dark time.

I don’t know that I’d consider many of these people close friends to this day, but I do know that whenever I spontaneously run into them, or see them on social media, or come across a photograph or memory of that era— my heart swells with gratitude the way I assume an aggregate of shipwreck survivors must feel. Because like it or not we went THROUGH SOMETHING together—and those feelings and memories are ever-present. I am and will forever be grateful to the lost, rag-tag street gang who held me when I was a geiving child on the brink of womanhood, at my absolute lowest.

There were a lot of stories.
But this story?
This one was the most important of them all...


 *

I had a philosophy teacher in High School who once advised never to make life-changing decisions in February— and he certainly had a point. This? This was one of those Februarys. It was deepest February in Alpena Michigan— life was cold in every sense. The theatre had recently completed its not-so-stellar run of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, and we were all in a deep funk as we began one of the most beautiful musicals of all time— The Fantasticks.

The thing was? It was February. In ALPENA. A blue-collar town of roughly 10,000 people.
9.23 square miles.
One high school.
A lake.
Like maaaaaybe 5 restaurants.
And a set of railroad tracks.
Oh! And the World's Largest Cement Plant, wouldn’t ya know?
Who on earth was going to schlep through all that snow to go to the theatre?

But here’s the thing: in the middle of deepest February our motley little crew of broken people was bang in the middle of the doing The Fantasticks, and you know what? The Fantasticks was… good.
Really good, actually.

It wasn’t ideally cast, or sung, or particularly gorgeous to look at, but man: every single person in that cast knew what it meant to lose something, to break apart and put yourself back together. Every single person on stage knew what the heck was up with that beautiful little play, and we were giving it to you with every scrap, every single fiber of our fragmented, kalidescopic beings.

Kent flew in to play the young lover Matt so we were re-living our Interlochen magical fantasies, our professional cast of lost-but-talented-actors-living-above-the-theater were filling the roles beautifully, and we had a duet of local men playing the Dads so beautifully it evoked extreme emotions in everyone.  Something about this work felt important, and universal and like it deserved to be shared.

Basically? This production was one helluva little wonder, and we managed to play… to NO ONE.  And when I say “no one,” I mean it: there were days when there were SEVEN people in the audience—and I would know: I ran the freakin’ box office. There we all were— bleeding away, baring the beautiful nakedness of splintered souls to NO ONE, in the asshole of winter, in the middle of freakin' nowhere.

It was bleak….
…and heartbreaking.
    …and soul-crushing.
How could it not be?
No one was out there—if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise?
If seven people see your beautiful play does it even matter?
What and WHO on earth are we even doing this for?


And then one day… a miracle happened.


We had just completed a midweek matinee where we had played to our smallest house thus far— a house of six. Six people. I changed out of my costume. I locked up the office, and, as one had to do between shows, I walked through the lobby in order to exit the building and re-enter immediately next door to the resident entrance of our apartments above the theatre. I moved swiftly—after all, I had soup to make and tears to shed about the state of my life.

And there he was: a man, probably in his mid-fifties, dressed in thick winter trousers, heavy-duty boots, a buffalo plaid winter coat, and a John Deer hat. This man was a living stereotype of typical Northern Michigan GUY—what on earth was he doing sitting by the entrance of a theatre? And why did he look so pensive? Was he lost? Was he ill? I approached him very slowly and asked:

    “Sir? Hello there, can I help you?”

He made no reply.

    “…Is everything okay?”

The man shifted on the bench beside the door, eyes locked firmly to the ground, and it was only then that I could see he had clearly been crying.

    “Oh, yeah” he said in a voice that evoked one scoffing off feeling “I uh— I just had the afternoon off and I saw that this play was happening and I thought, heck, why not? I don't think I've ever even seen a play with music in it before, where people sing and dacne and all that. Something just told me to come in and so I did and uh… yeah. I guess I didn’t expect it to uhh— ya know, hit me so hard…” His voice, laced thickly with his Michigan accent was breaking, “I— I thought it was really good. It uh— it made me—yeah. I’m fine I just … I… I really need to call my daughter…”

My insides lurched. It was as if the Universe was shining a spotlight on this man, in this lobby, at this particular moment in my little life.

...Who are we doing this for...?

We do it for THAT guy.

Because reader? THAT GUY IS ALWAYS OUT THERE.
Every show, in every audience, in every part of the world.
Even Alpena, Michigan.
In an audience filled with six people.
Because that day?
That day where six people were in attendance…? THAT GUY WAS THERE.

And when I tell you I think of That Guy every single day, I mean it.

So thank you, dearest and most beloved man I will never know or see again— you were a beacon of light in the darkest of days, and shine brightly in my memory, and continue to ignite every corner of my sometimes doubting heart.

It was all worth it.
It continues to be worth it.
Because then, now, and evermore: I do it for That Guy.

Alpena, Michigan

The Cat

There are some things we just cannot explain.


It was now late October, and (despite the slow passing of each unbearable day), unseasonably warm for Michigan. The trees (which should have been mostly bare), were a glittering amber aglow in the humming street lights, made all the more lustrous by the deep cobalt blue of the sky behind them, like pieces in a velvet jewel box. There was a knowledge we could feel in our skin that the dew would be heavy in the morning.

Kent and I were on The Walk. Silent and solemn, we strolled hand-in-hand along the curves and reaches of Fairway Drive, taking in the oddness of warmth in the evening sky, the strange intensity of the colors, and an unshakeable feeling that something was happening. There was mystery in the air—we could feel it on our cheeks as the humid breezes lightly gusted. We could smell it like a spice, and could faintly taste in the back of our throats. Uncertainty hung.  And we were alone.

    —I am going to openly admit here that I do not, nor have I ever possessed a particular faith. Prior to that evening, I had never given significant thought to, what we’ll just call, the world beyond—

Kent and I walked on, blanketing ourselves from the evening. Without discussing it Kent began to sing—quiet and low, light but solid. His voice was distinctive, it cut through the dark as I linked on to the song, my own voice dancing on top and then below, weaving in he harmony that was our specialty.

—Things I did have in place:
I believed everything happened for a reason.
I believed that forces, invisible and unnamable were at work in the universe.
I knew that my mother was raised Catholic, my father’s family supper-club Jews (which I supposed made me a “Cashew”??) raised in a largely secular home.
I had gone to Jewish pre-school (and kindergarten!)
I had played Golde in Fiddler on the Roof in High School and was deeply excellent.
I had read Macbeth, and I knew not to fuck with the ouija board—

All at once there was a gust so strong I buried my face in Kent’s chest. He wrapped his arms around me, hands clutching along my back, his own face shielded from the wind within the mass of my hair.

—I believed in good and evil.
I accepted that good and evil was just how the world worked.
I was afraid of unknowns.
There was no one to pray to, there was no structured religion to comfort me, but an inner self-reliant religion of the spirit—

When we looked up, there it was, plain as day.
The cat before us was a silent ginger thing: collarless, and almost impossibly orange with white markings on his face, paws, and a bright white front as if he were wearing a formal dress shirt. He—for you could just sense that it was a he—sat looking upward, paws together, his tail curled perfectly around his feet. One could not deny—no matter how many times you blinked or shook your head—that he was smiling.

Kent and I stared in silence. We looked at the cat. Then at one another. Is this happening? our expressions whispered. My heart twisted in my chest thrusting blood through my entire body but not, for whatever reason, to my brain, which still could not fully comprehend the nature of the creature before us.

Kent crouched down and reached his hand out toward the cat. Psssst psst pssssst, he cooed, rubbing his fingers together, beckoning. The cat walked in a grand circle, making the dramatic entrance of a great actor perfectly catching his light, and approaching, he nuzzled lovingly into Kent’s outstretched hand. Kent smiled. He nuzzled back, scratching under his ginger jowls much to both of their pleasures.

Soon the cat caught my eye and stopped. What? No nuzzling from you? his expression said. I hesitated, but leaned down and stroked the cat along the length of his back. He responded differently to my touch, twisting thoughtfully and placing his head in the crook of my elbow, as if he were doing so with great, overwhelming feeling. It was so intense a gesture that it startled me. I stood, and seemingly having satisfied the cat's needs, quickly backed away and turned toward home. My feet carried me swiftly, practically running from the encounter, Kent rushed up behind me, taking my hand as we moved through the darkness. 

All at once Kent’s clutch grew tight. He stopped dead in his tracks. “Al…” he whispered looking beyond my shoulder. I turned.

It was the cat.
—In the same smiling, perfect position.
It was following us home.

We opened the door to 1367, eyes locked on the cat. He hesitated only a moment before walking inside.
    “What's going on?” said Mom, sensing something as she came upstairs to the foyer. Catching sight of the cat she stopped dead.
    “Who is this?” she asked.
As if she knew what we all knew.
We all knew.

We made way for the cat—the very real, tangible cat—as he slowly surveyed the entire house, placing his paw contemplatively upon the walls, nuzzling up against the corners, soaking the place in with his oddly human eyes. He thundered downstairs in a too-familiar tempo, then thundered upstairs to peak into the office, the bathroom, my bedroom. Finally, he stood before the entrance of the master bedroom. He stared inward through the door left ajar; absolutely still, not breathing, not twitching, frozen in a kind of resolve.

He entered.
He jumped up onto the bed of Death, circled the side that days ago had been Michael’s, and settled into the spot, head down, eyes closed.
The three of us had followed the cat throughout his house tour—down and up the stairs, and now we lingered in the doorway, agape.
No one made a sound.

    “...Mike?” Kent said—it was as if the word fell out of his mouth without the will of the speaker. But the cat opened his eyes, lifted his head, and stared directly at me.

Suddenly he bolted beneath the bed, struggled with an invisible adversary, screeching, mewing, and without any warning, thundered down the stairs and out the still-open front door, never to be heard from again. Like a comet, one moment vivid and dazzling, the next vanished; away on its own journey through the endless dark unknown.

But these things happen.
They do.
Happen.


*


Nights later, I dreamed: Dad was back, and no one thought it was peculiar or remarkable but me.  I made my way downstairs and a particularly well-fed, healthy-looking Dad was leaving the shower in his favorite green velour bathrobe. I did a double-take, stopping him on the landing with sheer joy.

    “Dad,” I cried, “Oh Dad, you’re back!”
    “Hi Al” he said, smiling hugely, neither confirming nor denying my previous statement, "It's good to see you."
    “Oh yes…” I cannot stare at him hard enough, cannot suck in enough of his smell which is so pungent, and real tears fill my eyes, “Papa, we've all missed you.”
He nodded, and with only the slightest tinge of sadness he gathered his green robe close around him and moved to make his way up the stairs.
    “Wait! Dad!” I said, “The cat.”
I had to know.
He smiled.
    “The cat, Papa. Was—was that…?”

Dad came down a few steps and got as close to me as I could sense he was "allowed."
He laughed a little,
    “Of course” he said, eyes sparkling, “but you knew that" 
I nodded.
    “I knew you’d be afraid of a ghost or an angel, anything like that. I knew you would need to know that you had seen it, touched it.  And I just had to make certain everything was okay.” He  turned to go again.
    “Wait—Papa!” I cried, not wanting him to go just yet, “Please. What’s it like?”
    “Al…” he sighed, “you know I can't answer that.”
I nodded again.

He turned to go again, but stopped himself.  Then, looking down at me looking up to him doused in the soft, warm glow of my dreams he said,
    “It’s everything you hope it is...”

I woke in tears.
Comforted.
Certain of nothing.
Certain only, that we know nothing about the world beyond.


...So why not believe?
    Why not?

Because it happens.
These things do.
Happen. 

  

Spring Reads: A List

After a long,
frigid,
blizzard-filled,
not-one-but-two-colds,
not-one-but-two-round-of-antibiotics,
snowmageddon
snowpocalypsed winter...
plus the eff-you,
thoroughly-unpredictable March climate notwithstanding...

SPRING IS FINALLY HERE.

[*Cue: Handel's Messiah "Hallelujah" chorus, and REVIVALIST-STYLE RELIEF HOWL*]

Spring is a time of fresh starts.
New beginnings, clean slates; when the last vestiges of grey sludge on the corner of February Lane and Desperation Boulevard melt away, and as the citizens sigh with relief (for they no longer have to consider 20ºF a sign that it's "getting warmer...") The farmer's market stands fill with flowers, the light lingers longer, the trees burst out with fresh green leaves, and one feels the need to clean the corners of their closet with a cotton swab...

It is time to start again. 
Renewal.
Rejuvenation.
There’s just something about this season that makes us ready to let go of the past.

So after you drag 75% of the clothing you don't wear anymore to the nearest donation center, why not crack open a brand new book? For spring is the perfect time to shake off your crikeykillmenow winter funk and try something brand spankin' new.

What better to read, during this season of renewal, than great books about the bittersweet joys of starting over? Here is a curation of ideal seasonal reading, all with lush spring settings and inspiring themes that make one feel refreshed and energized. Even when chilly breezes blow, spring never loses its sense of possibility...

So curl up on a blanket, and enjoy these in the park on a sunny spring day...

* * *

1. These are my rivers by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Springtime is all about poetry. And American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is 'one of our ageless radicals and truebards.' In his peerless 'Everyman's' voice, Ferlinghetti combines a Whitman-esque celebration of the natural world with a deep bow to a surrealist tradition, and in "These are my rivers" has gathered over four decades of poetry with the added bonus of more than fifty pages of new work.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, blazed his way onto the literary scene with the 1958 publication of A Coney Island of the Mind, marking him as one of the first and greatest "Beat" poets (though his more refined poetic sensibility showed just how different he was from what "Beat" eventually came to mean.) What followed were numerous collections such as Pictures of the Gone World, and Wild Dreams of a New Beginning among others, all expertly drawn from everyday life.

These are my rivers is a compendium of work from throughout his entire career, including 27 new poems, and reveals an ongoing interest in matters political and sexual from an ever-maturing point of view. Unlike poet Allen Ginsberg, whose 'Collected Poems' showed an artist struggling with decline and decay, Ferlinghetti seems to maintain his calm in the face of age; as well as a recognition of his connection with readers.

Even though it first appeared in Wild Dreams of a New Beginning, These are my rivers is where I first discovered what I consider to be Ferlinghetti's greatest poem "Deep Chess."


2. The Griffin & Sabine

 Trilogy by Nick Bantock

Sometimes, when one reads a book, the experience goes beyond engaging storytelling, believable characters or impressive prose.


Sometimes? Reading gets personal.


Sometimes, a book reaches up through the pages, and grips you by the throat, and says

“I know you... I am speaking to you...” 


And perhaps you would be a fool to listen to that voice. Perhaps a lot of things. But, as William Blake says, “The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” So persist I did.



When I was 16, I was introduced to author and visual artist Nick Bantock's trilogy of books (Griffin and Sabine, Sabine's Notebook and The Golden Mean), and was instantaneously moved by it in a way I had never been moved by a book before. 



The book is a boundless feast for the senses—visually stunning, emotionally stirring, mixing a touch of mystery, philosophy, mythology and even a dash of science fiction, upon the pages containing (simultaneously immaculate and chaotic) "mail art" artwork, all used to tell a story. This homage to the old fashioned post, combined with its phantasmagoric love story, were all created by Bantock himself, the product of his romantic and mischievous mind.

Depressed London artist Griffin Moss receives a postcard one day out of the blue from an unknwon South Pacific Island. It simply states:

Griffin: It's good to get in touch with you at last. Could I have one of your fish postcards? I think you were right— the wine glass has more impact than the cup. —Sabine

But Griffin had never met a woman named Sabine. How did she know him? How did she know his artwork? Who is she?

Thus begins the strange and intriguing correspondence of Griffin and Sabine. Each letter they exchange is pulled directly from an envelope attached to the pages of the book, so the reader must engage in the delightful, forbidden sensation of reading someone else's mail. Come on: that's sexy stuff. 

I had never seen a book like it.
I had never seen a work of art like it. 

But my fascination went beyond that— I had to know what kind of a person had the capacity to create something like this. Something so stirring, and evocative and true.

For years I devoured every scrap of his work that I could get my hands on in an attempt to understand it, and truthfully, him, further.
I felt as though his books were speaking directly to me.  

I’m sure we’ve all felt something similar. 



Yet I had never even met him.

And then one day, I did meet Nick Bantock.

I was terrified, not because I felt intimidated, but because I was afraid I might be wrong about him. It is always crushing when an idol comes crashing down. So I was relieved to discover that I was exactly right. 
We have become very dear friends. 


Sometimes it truly is enough to know that people like him are real. 

They do exist.


3. Un abril encantado or, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

A recipe for happiness: four women, one medieval Italian castle, plenty of wisteria, and solitude as needed.

The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other—and the castle of their dreams—through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don’t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy.

Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete.

The book is stunningly penned, but a faithful and glorious film adaptation was made in 1991 that certainly deserves a viewing of its very own.


4. Howards End by EM Forster

I first read Howards End under the expert inspirational tutelage of “Lady” Judy Chu, my high school British Literature teacher of such remarkable influence. I read it in the spring, when every blossom and glittering dappled leaf seemed to beckon me to the country estate. It is the perfect time of year to this classic. My work, lovingly thumbed high school copy still sits upon my adult bookshelf—complete with my 17-year-old scrawl penning such comments as:

"Well: London sounds dreary."
"Note to self: sign every letter 'BURN THIS...'"

and my favorite:

"Oh! All of this LOVE!"

Like all of Forster’s early novels, Howards End concerns itself with Edwardian society. As a member of the upper-middle class, Forster had keen insight into its attitudes and social mores, which he expertly rendered in the novel. But it was his profoundly humanistic values and interest in personal relationships that made all his books truly universal.

The major themes of Howards End are articulations of such philosophies: connection between the inner and outer life, between people, the future of England, and class conflicts; and above all connection-connection between private and public life, connection between individuals-and how difficult it is to create and sustain these connections. Howards End has been called a parable; indeed, its symbolism reaches almost mythic proportions at various points in the novel.

But the magic lies in the novel’s remarkable heroine Margaret Schlegel—without question the literary heroine I first “recognized,” and prayed resided within my own soul. Margaret is a font of love, intellectualism, imagination, and idealism, and the shimmering inner life of her mind is all shared with affection by the (charmingly biased) Narrator (quite probably the voice of Forster himself).

But it is Margaret’s “battle cry” that makes Howards End a masterpiece of the heart.

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

This, one of literature's greatest "children's novels" is among the most stirring tales of family, belonging and the healing powers of nature in the English speaking language.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in Manchester, England in 1849. Her father's work as a silversmith and master of decorative arts kept the Hodgsons in relative affluence until his death in 1854. The consequent decline in the family's fortunes only worsened in the ensuing years, as all of Manchester found itself suffering a severe depression brought about by the American Civil War. The Hodgsons, facing poverty in England, immigrated to America in 1865. There, they traveled to a small town near Knoxville, Tennessee, in search of a moneyed American uncle who had promised to support them. That help never materialized, however, and the family was forced to take shelter in an abandoned log cabin.

The move from industrial Manchester to rural America greatly affected young Frances, who was then only fifteen. Though she had always been captivated by storytelling, it was only in America that Burnett began to seriously consider writing in order to supplement her family's meager income. The cover letter she sent with her first published story, which appeared in Godey's Lady's Book, described her goal most succinctly:

"My object is remuneration." 

She received it: thirty-five dollars, which was, in 1868, a nearly princely sum. She became the family's chief means of support, writing five or six stories a month at a time when it was exceedingly rare for a woman to have a career.

Burnett was one of the most commercially successful and widely-read authors of her day. Her book Little Lord Fauntleroy was possibly responsible for keeping a generation of boys wearing ruffles and mauve velvet knee breeches. Her other novels (including The Little Princess) were wildly successful, but none was more instantly beloved than The Secret Garden, which was heralded as a classic upon its publication in 1909.

In The Secret Garden, the events of Mary Lennox's early childhood mirror those of Burnett's own:

The Secret Garden opens by introducing us to Mary Lennox, a sickly, foul-tempered, unsightly little girl who loves no one and whom no one loves. At the outset of the story, she is living in India with her parents—a dashing army captain and his frivolous, beautiful wife—but is rarely permitted to see them. They have placed her under the constant care of a number of native servants, as they find her too hideous and tiresome to look after. Mary's circumstances are cast into complete upheaval when an outbreak of cholera devastates the Lennox household, leaving no one alive but herself…

Mary is sent to live in Yorkshire with her maternal uncle, Archibald Craven. Misselthwaite Manor is a sprawling old estate with over one hundred rooms, all of which have been shut up by Master Craven who has been in a state of inconsolable grief ever since the death of his wife ten years before the novel begins. Shortly after arriving at Misselthwaite, Mary hears about a secret garden (that belonged to the late Mistress) from her good-natured Yorkshire maidservant Martha. After her death, Archibald locked the garden door and buried the key beneath the earth. Mary becomes intensely curious about the secret garden, and determines to find it…

Both Mary and Burnett experienced the death of their parents followed by a reversal of fortune, as well as a great sense of dislocation upon being taken from the country of their birth to one utterly foreign to them...

The novel is not merely autobiographical; it was written while Burnett was also very much under the influence of the ideas of the New Thought, theosophy and Christian Science movements; and Burnett's idiosyncratic fusion of these philosophies held that the Christian god was a kind of unified mind or spirit, with whom any person might commune. This spirit was held to be present everywhere, and especially in nature. Proponents of the New Thought also extolled the power of positive thinking (the fervent contemplation of what one hopes will happen), and held it to be a form of communion with the divine spirit. One could ostensibly cure oneself of illness through this kind of magical thinking, or change the character of one's fortunes.

Such ideas had a profound influence upon the writing of The Secret Garden—particularly as the inspiration for what Colin and Mary call "Magic." It is, of course, also visible in Burnett's depiction of the landscape (as represented by the garden and the moor) as having healing or restorative properties.

This book was deeply woven into my childhood (as was the almost perfect award-winning musical penned in the early 90s by Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon)— for the message of a young girl who, through nature, tenacity, and the power of her thoughts alone could heal the sick. A message probably more profoundly affective than I realized at the time—this story spoke to the displaced little girl, whose greatest and most fervent wish, was to heal her father of illness...

"Come spirit, come charm, come days that are warm. 
Come magical spell, come help him get well..."

5.   As You Like It by William Shakespeare

If you are to visit any single piece of Shakespeare in the spring, one should look no further than a visit to the Forest of Arden—the setting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and chosen home of the banished daughter (of an equally banished Duke), the utterly sublime Rosalind.

Arguably Shakespeare’s greatest heroine, Rosalind is the woman whom scholar, Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom describes as “the first real lover in all of modern literature.” Rosalind is strong, sensitive, wise, raunchy, romantic, witty, profound and petty. She is the first to make fun of love, and also the first to let herself be fully embraced by all its joy. But perhaps her greatest quality is her wise, accepting, trenchant, and at times almost peaceful self-awareness. As Bloom says "Rosalind is unique […] in Western drama, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate and share."

In the spring of 2001, I played Rosalind as a final farewell to Interlochen Arts Academy—the location of, without a doubt, the happiest and most influential days of my life thus far. I was also desperately in love— with the young man that would become The Love of my Youth. I spoke Rosalind’s words to him from the deepest corners of my heart. And he spoke Orlando’s back to me. This was love at its purest, at its most innocent and delicate. Laced with trees, and warming light, and Shakespeare’s most romantic words.

It was everything that one ever hopes, and dreams,
and should ever be so lucky to have
when you are seventeen
and truly in love for the first time
and it is Spring.


Happy reading.

     Happy Spring. 

The Laugh

(3 seconds after the reception)

The Funeral Reception of Doom did—eventually—end.

dessert at Fran's: WORD.

After an hour or so, our numbers dwindled. The remainder of our group (which included my mother’s friends, as well as a handful of mine who had gotten the entire weekend off from college), piled provisions and headed over to The Steinman’s house for what could only be described as an epic dessert wake. It was time to cut loose at our very own “Second Funeral Reception,” which eliminated the crazy people and included everyone’s very favorite thing: dessert.

 Those Upstairs People needed to get lost before we all kicked off our Sunday shoes right onto their shiny Cadillacs. Before a rogue Sunday shoe knocked some ancestral luminary over and broke a hip. I quashed the impulse to shout, Look, I know all of these bozos came to this funeral thinking they were going to corner me and force me to apologize, but I’m not going to do that. 
Furthermore I actually need to go somewhere. 
Somewhere important. 
Like Fran’s house for cheesecake...

That evening at The Steinman’s was the reception I will always choose to remember—when everyone relaxed and smiled and celebrated not only Dad’s life, but life itself—friends gathered together from every corner of the country, eating delicious food, telling stories, recalling memories, and performing parlor tricks as only theatre people can. If one had looked into the window of The Steinman’s house that evening, to see our faces you never would have guessed it was a funeral—exactly the kind of party Dad would have hosted.

But that had to end too.

After we helped Fran clean up and pack away the treats, everyone had to head back to their hotels, schools, or lives, and only a remaining few of us ambled back to 1367; full, and numb, and literally everything in between.


*

With our numbers dwindled and our bellies full of flambé, the remainder of us at 1367 gathered in the very seats the Enemy Forces had occupied hours earlier.

After a while we decided we needed “real food.” So Mom made guacamole. (What? That is real food.) Utilizing thirty or so avocados, she whipped up her—pardon the expression—killer recipe and put it in a giant salad bowl (accompanied by two bags of donation tortilla chips someone had given us), and we inhaled this all on the hand-painted Haitian coffee table my parents acquired in Port Au Prince circa the late-70s.

Besides Grey, Lilly and Kent, only Jessica and Jeremey were to remain at 1367 for the night. Jeremey was occupying the place with a sense of real ownership—I suppose at the time he knew the place far better than anyone. He belonged there.

Jessica did too—she was the unofficial 'Mayor' of our inner circle and my other dearest friend. Jess and I had a proclivity for long journeys taken together deep into the night. The previous summer we’d roomed together while working at the Interlochen summer camp, and had driven to lakes for midnight swims, to the “E-Z mart” for emergency Popcicles. No to mention a magical drive to Honor, Michigan where we stared at the stars on the hood of her vintage pickup truck.

We decided to take a walk in the oddly warm October evening. It smelled of first fires and Michigan musk, the kind of evening that makes you think you are within the pages of a nostalgic novel. The sky was like a painting—deepest purple at the edges with a brick-colored moon, and leaves dried, glittering like precious metals of gold, amber and ruby. In hindsight I think Jess was trying to give me permission to let go with her, to give me safe passage away from the public stage of grief and family and even our friends.

But the truth was, even if I had wanted to let it go I didn’t know how.

Saying as much, she took my hand and we walked in silence before coming upon the local High School Homecoming dance, which we promptly went to (for about twenty minutes), laughing our heads off at the oddity of it all before turning back. To this day, we fondly recall the night of my Dad's funeral where we...ya know, went to Homecoming.

Last to arrive home were Grey, Kent and Lilly— they’d dropped everyone off at their buses, airports or various hotels.
     “We come bearing more food” Grey droned. They entered holding enormous bags of food from their various drop-off points, though no bags larger than the ones beneath their eyes, “luckily the German couple down the street also plied us with fancy 17% alcohol lager which I will now be setting a direct I.V. up to if anyone else is interested…”
     “Me...” muttered Kent, and the boys withdrew to the kitchen to do exactly that.

Lilly was silent as she entered the front doorway, soundlessly removing her clogs, sighing as she tucked her short hair behind each ear with her precise wood-winder’s fingers. She made her way up the three little steps from the entrance to the main living room. She looked exhaustedly over all of us, looking exhaustedly back at her. No one spoke. It was hard to discern what Lilly was about to do.
Then, in her own bewitching way, Lilly did something that in hindsight seems so achingly inevitable it is a wonder we ever hesitated to wonder otherwise:

She laughed.

It started modestly— a little chortle in her distinctive way, all charm and delight and Virginian sunshine fed by exhaustion, sorrow and utter disbelief at all that had transpired. The look on her face as the laughter escaped her open mouth was brighter than any sunlight, and it flooded through the living room, drenching us with its radiance. Lilly laughed and laughed, hysterically cackling into her hands until she ugly cried.
How could we not join her?


Something had tilted. This was it— the end of the line. You are here the imaginary sign proclaimed! We had reached it— this burnt out, fully smoked, nothing-left-but-the-filter, cigarette stub of this raw, preposterous week had come to an end.

Lilly’s laughter spread, and caught us all. The room erupted, everyone clutching at the arms and legs of another member of this ragtag crew, not ceasing, but growing, the sound of it mounting as tears flooded down our faces and we hit our chests in a desperate attempt to breathe.

     “What’s so funny?” the boys asked, entering from the kitchen.
Soon they were guffawing too. Overwhelmedness took us over, and, in safe company at long last we were free to share in a seismic earth tremor of sleep-deprived hysteria.

We all knew we were gathered for a sober purpose, but holy hell did it felt good.
Even at the end of this horrible day, we found a way to laugh.
All together.
To eat guacamole.
Because that is how any day should end— whether it be a funeral, a hanging, a luau, your quinceañera or just Tuesday.
And though I have never been part of a street gang, I would wager that this kind of camaraderie felt pretty close— the kind of feel good we-sure-weathered-that-storm-together type togetherness that put one in the mood to play chicken and steal a stop-sign.


I never would have believed it, but as I rolled on the floor, face aching, lungs positively burning from the sheer strength and necessity of the laughter, I knew:
     somehow,
     someday,
     it was all going to be alright.

Opa

Everyone needs a place like Greek Islands Coney Restaurant.

You know—a local “joint” that’s the just-right balance of casual and quality, so you never have to worry about whether the food is gonna be any good, or, critically, what you have to wear. A place where they know your family, your “usual,” and where “everybooooody knows your name…”

Hand-painted murals grace the walls of Greek Islands. One (in “section five”) is a parody of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel only God and Adam are reaching for a Coney dog. Another (which blazes just above the entrance) is of The Last Supper painted with Greek gods instead of Christian disciples.

I knew every person that bused the tables, waited them, cooked the food, and ran the register. I knew the ins-and-outs of their lives. I knew the neon lights. I knew the menu backwards, and what was better on Tuesdays (go get the Greek Islands Special Salad with the signature dressing, but start with saganaki cheese). When they light the saganaki on fire after smothering it in brandy, the waitress will yell “OPA!” before dousing the flame with a fresh lemon.

Mere words fail to describe not merely the love, but the enormity of time spent in "G.I" (as we all eventually came to call it), from eating there every night we “decided” not to cook, to working there for years as a teenager.

Greek Islands— as described in the full title— is a “Coney” Restaurant owned by a local Cypriot family. Its main (and original) branch is located in Birmingham Michigan, right in the heart of Downtown on Hamilton Road (between Maple and Woodward) in a building that used to be a carpet and tiling store in the mid-90s (Dad helped GI with a few legalities in fact). Their current location is right behind the Palladium 12 multiplex cinema that used to be a department store. Not to be confused with the Birmingham 8 Art Cinema down the street that used to be a live housing theatre—the town has changed a lot over the years. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Like all towns, everywhere.

Well. What better place to eat the day after the funeral?

Sleepless, haggard, and unable to face opening the refrigerator full of goulash and leftover deli-meat, the five of us piled into the Jeep and drove to Greek Islands, eating slowly, silently, unable to quite tell our friends behind the counter, at the register, bussing the tables, why Michael was not with us. Was no longer with us. Why he would, in fact, never be with us again. Never to share the Special Salad, or joke and laugh aloud with John (the owner), or smile at Shauna (the hostess), or ask if he could take an extra strawberry-flavored Dum Dum lollipop after paying the check to give to me.
The place was quiet, for we had come after the dinner rush, and the warmth from the people and the kitchen, along with the bright neon lights that lined the ceiling only served to emphasize the darkness both outside and within.

We sat there prodding at our food in a state of awful quiet.

Then, in a rush of lightning-quick, burning grief, tears burst from within my mother. The force of it was shocking, the kind that makes one choke. Catherine—in the same lavender coat she wore over the lavender dress at the funeral—quickly caught herself, tears leaking from her face. She reigned it in with the left hand which glittered still from her wedding ring in the impossibly cheery neon lights.

We all looked at her, and Kent, placing his hand gently atop her arm silently said We are here Cathy. We were. She nodded, and placed her hand on top of his own—in gratitude. And though we returned to our food, no one was hungry.

Our GI Family glanced over—Eleni the matron waitress consoling her children Paul and Theresa in the distant corner over in section five. Mercury the bus boy, Tikko in the kitchen— they all exchanged looks of disbelief. You could almost see their hearts sinking.

That night, dinner was on the house.

Baby Steps

(1-3 weeks on…give or take…)

“Dr. Marvin…You can help me…for the first time in my life, I feel like there’s hope…”
—What About Bob?

*


What About Bob was on.
Of course.
It had been on, solidly, for a week.


[On screen:  We are in Dr. Leo Marvin’s fancy Midtown-Manhattan office. There are awards on the wall, sleek metallic lamps, a large window overlooking the city behind the small, and a bronze bust of Dr. Sigmund Freud that surrounds an arrogant psychiatrist wearing a navy jacket and red tie. After listening to Bob Wiley—his newest patient for only a matter of minutes—Dr. Marvin recommends the following…]

    Dr. Marvin: Bob, there is a groundbreaking new book that has just come out— ah!

[Dr. Marvin selects one from dozens of copies of the same, completely visible, book…]

    Now not everything in this book, of course applies to you, but I’m sure that you can see, when you see the title, exactly how it could… help.

    Bob:  [reading the title] “Baby Steps?”
    Dr. Marvin: —It means setting small, reasonable goals for yourself, one day at a time. One tiny step at a time.
    Bob: [wonderstruck] …B a b y  S t e p s…
    Dr. Marvin: For instance, when you leave this office, don’t think about everything you have to do in order to get out of the building, just think of what you must do to get out of this room, and when you get to the hall, deal with that hall, and so forth. You see?
    Bob: Baby Steps!
    Dr. Marvin: Baby Steps.
    Bob: Oh boy…


Baby steps…
    deep, right?
Hilariously deep.
And agonizingly accurate.


*


Grey had moved the television from the master bedroom into the upstairs office across the landing. The master bedroom having a kind of force field around it at this juncture—invisible and undiscussed. I think all of us were aware that we did not want to be those people, whoever they were. Those people—the ones that got all histrionic about the loss of a loved one. As if that were somehow not okay.

Mom and I spent a lot of time wondering if we were reacting “normally.” Grey, Lilly and Kent spent a lot of time wondering the same thing. What do you do when you are eighteen and nothing this devastating has really ever happened to you yet? You can’t say things are “okay” or “allowed” or “understandable” because you have no idea if they are or aren’t— you are eighteen. You are a fetus.  The closest you have ever gotten to death is the class guinea pig dying in kindergarten.  You do not yet realize what you do not yet know.

So, in that vein, we did not actively close off The Room of Death. No. We just operated under a silent agreement that all would be quiet. We’d keep it light. We could and would pretend that all comings-and-goings to and from The Room of Death were nobigthing. Look at me Death, our silent attitude would manically screech, check me! Check me as I casually use the Master Bathroom as a legitimate alternative to other household bathrooms! I am using it because there is a shower/bath, and because it is a valid option and therefore should be utilized as such. The ‘someone died here like 5 minutes ago’ thing? Yeah. It is nobigthing.
It was.
It was a big thing.
So despite the odd gesture to waltz in and out of the room like dingbats, it pretty much remained untouched.

Hey-You-Guy-Brenda and Kent had gotten to work on the master bathroom (or, The Bathroom of Death, if you will--and I hope you will)— sorting through every pill, tube, catheter, plug, prescription bottle, and machine and, without a great deal of ceremony, threw all of it away.
    “We disposed of the disease” Kent said after returning from wherever these trinkets had been discarded, “and left the man.” Indeed—the gold watch, the spare loose coins he always counted as he thought and calmed himself, the scraps of paper covered in his signature all-caps scrawl, the distinctive cologne that smelled so much of him it pierced directly into my heart.

Those days were full of harrowing little tasks like that.

The death-sheets were cleaned and folded, the bed made anew, the room scrubbed down, the machines carted away—as if none of it had ever happened at all. Mom’s friends, along with mine, took on the duties that would eventually create The House of Death we came to know after the act itself was long past. All that could remind us of the horrors of terminal disease remained burned in our memories alone.

But the absence of objects is, too, a kind of silence.

No one could have prepared us for the pulsing soundlessness that perpetrated every waking moment, that the lack of Michael, along with the lack of his artifacts (both of the life and the lack-of-life variety) would in fact leave us with no touchstones to our anguish, no weapons with which to dig out emotions trapped so deep within our chest cavities only crude surgery could release them.


*


Dad’s office across the hall already had a small twin bed in the corner, and was now doubling as, what could only be described as “Mom’s Temporary Place of Sleeping.”

At the time we had one of those late-90s TVs with a built-in VHS player. It would swallow the already war-worn copy of Bob, and every time it reached the end of the tape it would automatically rewind, eject, and the VHS tape would sit in the open mouth of the TV, awaiting instruction—a blank face with its tongue sticking out.

Before a second of silence could go by I would panic, rushing to the machine to push the cassette back in. There are no words to describe how much I loved the way it swallowed the tape with such efficient, satisfying obedience, and adored the sound of the pre-digital cogs churning within, of each electronic stage it took to bring Bob’s infinite wisdom back to me again.

    Dr. Marvin: Are you married?
    Bob: I'm divorced.
    Dr. Marvin: Would you like to talk about that?
    Bob: There are two types of people in this world: Those who like Neil Diamond, and those who don't. My ex-wife loves him.

And again.
Bob— with his judicious ability to ask for exactly what he needs.

    Bob: [to man on bus] Hi, I'm Bob. Would you knock me out, please? Just hit me in the face…

And again.
Bob— knowing there is soundness even in folly.

    Dr. Marvin: I want some peace and quiet!
    Bob: Yeah, I'll be quiet.
    Siggy: I'll be peace!
    [Bob and Siggy burst into giggles]

And again.
Bob— reaching through the screen and speaking the truth directly to me…

    Dr. Marvin: Why are you always wearing black? What is it with you and this death fixation?
    Siggy: Maybe I'm in mourning for my lost childhood…

It was in this period that I came to know Bob beyond reason or sanity. In that week I exceeded being comforted by the light, harmless comedy. Not surprisingly, in fact, I did not laugh at all. I watched because it comforted me. I watched it because the “this moment,” and every moment that clicked along, really sucked, and it reminded me of life, of everything, before it.


Bob— on endless loop.
Bob— more comforting than any therapy (be it “Baby Steps,” “Isolation,” or “Death” therapies) or friend or food or love.

*

I would jolt— Dad and Bill Murray always shared a kind of “cadence,” particularly when Bill Murray went into his “child-like comedy” mode. “HA!” Bob would burst out, and I would jolt upward, certain Dad was back before I remembered, and sank back into myself, and the bed, once more. If I kept it on, somehow Dad would come around the corner any second and join me.

After a few days a family friend came over and into the room. She stood over me and glanced over my particular state of wretchedness and attempted to conceal how much the sight of my despair turned her stomach. She caught herself mid-shudder and plastered a frighteningly cheerful smile on her face,
     “I see we are doing a little too much sitting in this bed and not enough getting on with things?” My eyes moved toward her but my body remained motionless too dazed to be embarrassed, and, with the concern and temperament of a toad, my eyes peeled away form her and back toward the screen, not even daring to respond. She sighed and left the room slowly, unable to stir me.

She was trying to help.

Was she trying to tell me that my love of Bob was wrong? Because if Bob was wrong, then I didn’t want to know what right was.

*

I had been in the bed for a week. Pajamas filthy, hair matted, and Bob on a bender of inexhaustible re-runs. I did not know what time it was. I did not know the day. All I knew was that it was dark. In every sense. And that I was alone.

But Bob was there, and the blue flame from the small television flickered, more comforting than a fire.

I opened my eyes to discover Bob helping little Siggy to dive...

My beloved Bob approaches the dock to discover Siggy, dressed fully in black and all alone, sitting on an upright wooden post, red bicycle discarded beside him, despondently playing a hand-held video game. Siggy’s father Dr. Marvin has insisted Siggy learn to dive despite Siggy’s paralyzing fear, and earlier on, dropped Siggy in the water without warning. Bob is elated, having just returned from his first experience of sailing, and is still draped in his orange life-vest which he has left casually untied atop his bright blue shirt that reads “Don’t Hassle Me, I’m Local.”

Bob gazes upon Siggy and approaches slowly.

Bob: Notice anything different about me? 
Siggy: [he contemplates Bob for a moment] No. 
Bob: Do you sail? 
Siggy: No. 
Bob: Well I just picked it up. Heh! [He chuckles] Wonder what I’m gonna pick up next? 
Siggy: Try diving. [He retorts sarcastically, returning to his video game] 
Bob: Alright, diiiiiving… 
Siggy: I know a great teacher. [He sighs. Considers for a moment, before venting a confession to Bob] I mean, my dad just dropped me in the water. Without warning me first. I mean, I nearly drowned! My whole life passed before my eyes. 
Bob: You're lucky you're only twelve. 
Siggy: It was still grim.

I knew exactly what he meant. 

Siggy [cont]: I mean what is it with him and diving? What’s the big deal? 
Bob: Well…[Bob walks out further onto the dock and, seeing the depth of the water declares] WHOA… [tying his life-vest on tightly before continuing] ...He probably just wants to beat it, that’s all. You know, he probably just wants you to dive, because you’re afraid of diving. 

Siggy rolls his eyes as only a twelve-year-old can, but knows Bob is right.

Bob [cont]: Did I tell you? I sailed on my first try! [Bob extends his arms like a proud child] …I just let the boat do the work that was my secret. But with diving, what’s the thing? What’s the trick? Siggy: I dunno… it’s supposed to be easy… Bob moves his feet around, revving them into the ground like a nervous foul. 
Bob: well… can you give me a handle on it? 

Siggy puts down his video game and comes over to Bob at the end of the dock.


...I don’t want to go into more detail.
I don’t want to get into the hows and the whats of the next few moments, because I want you to see the scene for yourself.

All I will say is this: Siggy dives.
And he dives because Bob helps him.

Does Bob realize he is helping? I don’t know. Every time I see this scene I change my mind again—no, I think, Bob is innocent, he doesn’t know he is the most profound man alive, an all-knowing guru of almost spiritual depth. The next time round I think yes, Bob knows what he is doing, he may not be able to help himself, but he can help this little boy…
I don’t know.
I like that I don’t know.

What I do know is this: Siggy faces his greatest fear. And he does because Bob helps him.

I burst into tears. Which was odd, because I had not yet cried. Not once. And there I was weeping into the strange un-used cushions of an unfamiliar bed in my father’s old office, across the hall from the room in which he had died what felt like both moments and ages ago, and all I wanted was for Bob to reach through the screen and help me.

The “Hogwarts Incident”

Birmingham Palladium Cinema

[In which Lilly drove up five hours in a minivan from Oberlin only to be instantaneously whisked away]

*

[At rise: Deepest winter. Al, Mom, Kent, Grey and Lilly sit around the dining room table discussing various life events. All but Lilly have been in the house solidly for nearly six weeks, contemplating existence as well as preparing their various college re-auditions, but mostly obsessively reading the first four Harry Potter books, attending the local premier of the first film, and then re-attending it every-other-day or so, particularly after going to Greek Islands diner because the movie theatre is right around the corner.]

Lilly: So Grey, you’re applying for a school in Australia?
Grey: Yep. I want it.
Lilly: That’s amazing!
Grey I just wish we could all go to school at Hogwarts.
Al/Kent/Mom: [in unison] T O T A L L Y. 

[Pause.]

Lilly: …Um…What’s Hogwarts?

[—Record scratch—crashing pause—mouths agape—plates are dropped.]

Grey: [deadly serious] Lilly get in the car.
Lilly: —What?!
Grey: [action movie, Bruce Willis, intense] —GET IN THE CAR!!
Lilly: [laughing a little, albeit nervously] Where are we going?

[Everyone begins standing, moving mechanically, like a car service team at the Indy 500]

Kent: [taking her by the arm] We’re going to the movies—
Grey: —Taking care of a serious problem.
Kent: Jesus!

[They are at the door]

Al: I’ve got her coat.
Grey: Good.
Mom: [calling from the driveway, honking, already in the car] WE CAN STILL MAKE THE 8:30!!
Kent: Buckle her in. I’ll lock up.

[They drive off down the street getaway-car-style, and “christen” Lilly to her very first Harry Potter experience. A trip we would repeat dozens of times before the winter was out. Phew. Crisis averted.]

Portrait of a Friend: Lilly

land of the stately pines [de-dah-de-dah]

I remember, probably more vividly than any other call, the moment Lilly heard the news. Kent and I were seated on my bed, still in pajamas and both totally stoic. I remember wanting to “be” there when he told her, but not wanting to do it myself.

So he told her.
I don’t recall what he said, what I do recall was the depth and ferocity of her wail, and how much I envied it.

She loved him. Everyone did.


*

Meet Lillian Townsend Copeland.

No, she is not related to Aaron Copland (though she enjoys referring to him as “Uncle Aaron”). Townsend is her mother’s maiden name.
Lilly is from Virginia.
Her parents are both doctors (her Dad, in fact, saved my eye from extinction in 1999 when a corneal cut turned into a very infected corneal ulcer and I nearly lost the whole darn thing…but that’s another story…). Her little brother William is a swimming sensation.

Lilly and I met at Interlochen Arts Camp in 1996, we weren’t always close but we were around one another a lot (in fact I think we took a Modern Dance class together somewhere in the mid-nineties). We became close Junior year of High School once we’d both made the leap from spending our summers in the North woods of Interlochen to attending the year-long Interlochen Arts Academy full time, Lilly majoring in oboe performance and I, in Theatre. By the end of Junior year we had resolved to fill a four person suite in Thor Johnson House, the senior girls dormitory, with two of my fellow theatre majors (Chrissy and Katie).

Thor Johnson House (also known as “TJ”) was shaped like an “L” and divided into six areas— four dorm hallways named according to their location— Lower Short, Lower Long, Upper Short and Upper Long. There was enough friendly rivalry and Hall Pride for a Big Ten Conference (and by 'friendly rivalry,' I mean, 'a total lack of tension,' and by 'Hall Pride,' I mean ‘none’). Still, we presided over the mustering of a you’re-in-boarding-school-now-ladies kind of enthusiasm that some eating dancers and/or people who weren’t in a practice room for seven hours a day, appeared to enjoy.

There was a main lobby with a front desk, a toaster (with a magically endless supply of toast with all the fixings), student cubby-hole mailboxes, and fluffy sofas some people sat and spoke on well into the night. There was also a downstairs greenroom where we would have our house meetings, complete with an “adult approved” and “highly voted upon” television for movie nights and the watching of “Friends,” and off this downstairs area were two long corridors of practice rooms and the offices of the woodwind and accompaniment departments.

Lilly and I were both the über official “HAs” (as in, Hall Assistants) for Upper Long. At this, we inarguably left a little something to be desired. I'm not saying we were abysmal or anything like that. I am merely saying that one could take a convicted arsonist, and give them a pack of complimentary matches, escort him to the log cabin of his childhood nemesis where you are to be spending the night,  instruct him to “have a good time,” and your predictably charred evening would be preferable to having Lilly and I be responsible for you in High School.
That's all.

We were likely candidates I suppose, returning “lifers” who “bled blue”— terms used for students that had been at Interlochen as long as anyone could remember, and thus bled the uniform colors— light blue on top (with a visible collar), navy on the bottom (the intricacies of which became more and more creative as the school year progressed). As HAs Lilly and I were supposed to make certain everyone was comfortable, felt at home, felt like they had a place to talk if they needed to. That was the part we were good at. The social, caring big sister stuff. The helping to plan the hall party stuff, the making sure the Chinese piano major who doesn’t speak English gets everything she needs in order to find her way to class (in classrooms located in the forest) on Monday stuff, the “I-just-moved-from-South-Africa-and-my-childhood-boyfriend-and-I-are-apart-for-the-first-time-ever” stuff.
That stuff.

But we were also there to attend HA meetings about house life, we had to make certain everyone in our hall attended the big school “community meetings” held every Thursday before lunch. We had to clean things and organize community service. We had to make sure everyone was “there” in a fire drill. We had to attend the fire drill.  We had to have not pulled the fire alarm ourselves. We had to be good examples. We had to be quiet. We had to obey the freaking rules—all of them. And that part, we were crap at. Lilly and I, after all, shared with Chrissy and Katie, both of whom were really, really fun, and the four of us were cool, and boisterous and had an illegal television (with a VHS player!) hidden in a giant Tupperware that we watched movies on after we were all supposed to be in bed.

One time [1], in a rousing flurry of Senior-itus, Chrissy and our next-door-neighbor Essie decided to
    1. paint their naked torsos with tempera paint
    2. Walk around the entire dorm (during school hours—so even teachers and boys might see them) and
    3. Video tape it.

And who video taped it? Lilly and I.
And who tagged along? All of Upper Long.
And how does this video tape end? With our (incredibly cool, but also incredible adult) Dorm Leader (and fabulous human) Angela Duncan, staring deadpan into the camera and simply saying

    “Um: NO.” Then she looks at Chrissy and Essie and our entire entourage and repeats, “NO—no no no.”

And it cuts out. Oops.

Five minutes later we are all in our room, the sun is setting on Green Lake outside our window. Chrissy and Essie have on both t-shirts and looks of mild shame. Katie is crumpled into our womb chair in the corner and Lilly and I are standing, military-style in front of Angela as she explains that she knows we have 6 weeks of Senior Year left but we all really need to get a freaking grip on ourselves.

    “I love all of you so much but seriously: COME. ON.”

We all nod. It is ridiculous.

    “Additionally: Alexandra Michelle and Lillian Townsend you are HALL ASSISTANTS!! You are supposed to be leaders, set examples, you are supposed to be the first line of defense when all the parents paying thousands of dollars and visiting from Asia for the four concerts this week alone want to know where on earth they have sent their children.”

She was right. Double oops. Actually, quintuple oops— for good measure.

    “I can’t believe I am about to say this, I literally cannot believe I am about to say the following sentence but; PLEASE, dear women of Upper Long, please do not cover your naked bodies in paint, roam the public hallways during working (OR non-working hours for that matter), and above all, please, please do not video tape it.”

We nodded again, with even more shame.

    “Dunc?” Chrissy said, lifting her head. “Please, there is just something I want to get off my chest.”
    “Please: say it is not your shirt.”
    “Yes!—I mean no! I just—” she grappled, “we’re sorry.”

We were. [2]

    “Accepted. We all got it?” she said, her hands in the prayer-position, “I’m gonna go now.”

Remember the last five minutes of every sports film in the history of cinema where you are inexplicably filled with the exultant joy of a game well played and a life well lived in a those-sure-were-the-best-of-times sort of a way? —We felt the opposite of that.


But man, did we have a great year. Some people might be intimidated to share their dorm life with three boisterous theatre majors, but not Lilly. Lilly was honorary, she was drama and flair, she was theatrical and powerful and loved it. Sure, sometimes she didn’t want to talk about Tennessee Williams anymore. And the sounds of Chrissy and I warming up in our communal shower must have been unpleasant at times, and I’m certain there were times where if she heard us talk about Theatre Department politics one. more. time. she was probably gonna kill us. Oh alright, and sometimes she had to explain the basics to us. Like the time Katie stared at “The Beeping Box” in total, wonder:
    “Listen guys” she said, shoving her face ever closer, “…it's like Morse Code…"
Lilly just stared, eyebrow cocked, voice ever-patient.
    "Actually, it's called a metronome…"
But if she ever truly contemplated roomaticide, she never showed it. "Do your theatre stuff" she would say, and Lilly just kept on making her reeds and doing her homework and more often that not, joining right in—picking out our outfits before auditions, expressing her monologue preferences, and, most memorable of all (with her signature scrupulous exactness), helping me learn every single line and lyric as I prepared to play Amalia Balash in She Loves Me. Lilly got so involved in the process she would often ask to “work” long after I was memorized, she would talk through the notes I got from the director.
    “I think you need to be a little ‘sobbier.’”
    “Lilly, if I got any ‘sobbier’ I'd be Meg Ryan."
    “Well then sob away—you’d have a cute haircut. And quite a career.”
Oh how she belted “Where’s My Shoe?” with all her heart! How she melted just like “Vanilla Ice Cream,” and how she detested the title song (which she referred to scathingly as the “Well, well, well” song— Adorable).

How we loved her. And how could we not? Her bewitchingly piping voice, her short hair she sometimes wore in spriggy little pigtails that looked something like a cross between broccoli and the thing on top of Bam-Bam’s head, her Southern accent that only came out when she was exhausted, how much she hated making reeds but dutifully made them anyway. She was a foreign creature to us theatre people and we were happy to be amused by her music-major culture.

In the first week of school all of the auditions for the coming year take place— theatre majors audition for the first two shows of the season (in our case, Lysistrata and She Loves Me [3]), voice majors get placed in their studios, dance majors are placed in their level classes and cast in the coming Winter ballet (Coppélia our senior year. Snore), and most stressful of all on our predominantly orchestrally-minded campus, all of the instrumental majors audition for the entire week for their “chair” in the orchestra.

I suppose this is the point where I tell you a little secret: Lilly is so insanely talented a musician, and so gifted at the oboe some might call it unjust. To listen to Lilly play is like listening to a person sing— actually sing through their instrument, with all of the individuality and soulfulness of a raw, vital, pulsing human voice which manages to capture the beauty of existence just as film captures an image. Or honey captures light. One can hear her own expressive soul come through the instrument and, though I know I am biased, I have never heard her bettered. Listening to Lilly play is like watching Ann Reinking dance next to other dancers: flat out unfair to others.

So it was no surprise to the rest of us the day the chairs were posted. Lilly lay in, buried in her duvet distraught that she had “blown it,” thus ruining her senior year, her chances at getting into college and possibly her entire life. The rest of us woke up early and looked at the posting for her—certain.

And as we screamed and celebrated in the main lobby, jumping up and down in characteristically un-music-major-like fashion, we flew upstairs, burst in and jumped on Lilly screaming like the lunatics we were
   
    “First chair, Lilly! First freakin' chair!”

Lilly sat up and beamed. She laughed her Southern sun-shiney laugh and eventually, after Chrissy decided party music (in the form of Simon and Garfunkle’s "Cecelia") was “called for,” joined in our carousing dance of celebration.



Lilly might have slept through her concerto competition final were it not for Katie and I keeping track of the time, throwing her in the shower and running her to the recital hall with minutes to spare.

And (prepare your thesaurus) just imagine what our respective language lexicons would be like were it not for the nocturnally concocted memory tricks we cogitated for every word of Mr. Hintze’s notoriously (some might say opprobriously) formidable vocabulary assessments?

And maybe we all went to MORP [4] on a great big yellow school bus.
Chrissy and I chose vintage picks.
Lilly in a Catherine Silber original.
Katie made her own dress—out of duct tape.

Yes, we had a lot of adventures.
And it was, without question, a collection of favorite memories I shall hoard forever, like jewelry, or marbles, or the very last Double Stuff Oreo.


But all this being said, Lilly was something else.
Despite not being a theatre major, Lilly “played a different role:” She was my very closest friend.
She was the only one I really spoke to about my Dad’s increasingly concerning illness when the going got tough.
And it did.
Get tough.

Dad started out the year with his fifth (or so) round of regular ol’ chemo (in nine years). If there is such a thing. A bald head was the only giveaway, Dad was an ox: six foot three inches of pure, Herculean, I-have-cancer-but-remain-symptom-free-for-a-decade type strength. No one saw the end coming. No one.
That somehow made it all the more ruthless.


Previously-mentioned virtuosic musical gift aside [5], Lilly is rife with what I like to call “goods.” And I will now list them (because as we know, I love both Lilly and lists). It doesn’t take a genius to notice that Lillian Copeland has the biggest, most gorgeous hazel eyes you’ve ever seen. But let me tell you something else: this girl is compassionate, capable, and feisty. She looks right at you and waves sneakily with her oboe during the orchestral bow when you are standing and screaming for her solo (…from the front row of the stalls…with signs…) She is delightfully kooky; for example, she doesn’t refer to her oboe as “the oboe” but rather as, “Oboe,” the proper noun, as if “Oboe” is “his/her” name [6] — both delightful and kooky, you see! She is the just right amount of perfectionist and sees the great virtue in “being cute.” Yes, OKAY, fine: she has killer legs with perfect ankles that look amazing in heels.

But reader?
Lilly is the kind of solid you only think is possible in prairie people. With a sense of empathy so intuitive it makes you ache.


She would drive to-and-from Ohio more times than anyone could count. [7]
She would entertain the less-desirable members of my extended family. [8]
She would visit me in every exotic city I would ever come to live in. [9]
She would hold me while I couldn’t cry.

This is one phenomenal friend.

*

Of the central circle, Lilly was the last to arrive.

She arranged a leave of absence, caught a Greyhound Bus up from Oberlin the following morning set to arrive around lunch time, though she didn’t arrive at the house until dinner time because despite our Black-Ops-worthy planning, somehow, we forgot to pick her up. For hours.
    “I’m so sorry,” Grey said when he finally arrived in his Rav 4 after driving nearly 150 miles that day alone, “I don’t know how we missed you Lil. We had everything planned down to the mili-second.”
    “It’s okay,” Lilly laughed, tired, but not even the tiniest bit irked, “I understand. I was just a little freaked out.”
    “Because you were young woman alone in the Detroit Greyhound Station? No worries there.”
    “Right” she said. Even her laugh was still sunny and Southern. [10])


Lilly rang the bell at 1367.
    “Hi” she said “I brought Oboe.” Obviously Lilly was going to play at the funeral. Obviously.
    “Come in” I said. And she did.


We arranged the sleeping situation: Grey and Kent opted to sleep downstairs in the lower guest room (which had previously doubled as my mom’s design studio)— it had its own bathroom (which seemed to be a masculine virtue), a dark window facing the Rouge River, and a trundle bed below the day bed we bought when we moved to Michigan because I had seen one once on “The Price is Right” and thought the overly enthusiastic models made it appear outstanding. Lilly and I shared my room— also on twin trundles amidst what suddenly felt to be the fragmented souvenirs of a now forever-lost childhood, and Mom, felt understandably un-enthused about sleeping in The Bed of Death and thus took the spare bed in my Dad’s former office (an office he hadn’t used in months as the disease took full control of him), which Mom would remain in for weeks, until we all sojourned out to Art Van to get her a new bed.


Lil and I settled into my room, she put her bags down, pushed the hair off of her weary face and sat next to me on the bed.
    “Al?” she said.
    “Yeah Lil?”
There was a pause so gorged with meaning the air almost went opaque. Her voice was quiet. Sure.
    “I’ve got this. We’ve got this.”
    “I know…” I replied.
    “You’ve got this.”
    “Thank you, Lilly.”

She hugged me. That said it all. 
We immediately went downstairs and got to work.

There was  an entire extended family of unhelpful people to play offense with. There were 7000 people to pick up from Wayne County Airport, The Greyhound station (which we later discovered to in fact, be three Greyhound stations, all sixteen miles apart). There were people to call, housing to arrange, people to feed.
And of yes: a funeral to plan.
And three eighteen-year-olds would do it all.
All of it.

Because some people can plan funerals when they are eighteen.



[1] at band—school? Literally…
[2] Stir-crazy iiiiiidioooooots.
[3] Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s glorious musical take on The Shop Around the Corner
[4] the Interlochen version of Prom—MORP is “Prom” backwards
[5] …like it can be placed to the side. But you if you will, I would like it, for now, to be placed to the side
[6] I am not certain if Oboe has a gender.
[7] Now that’s love. Plus a lot of unnecessary time on The Turnpike…
[8] Often.
[9] Including Alpena. That’s real love. More on that later.
[10] Okay, we actually were