24 Hours

This is the So Cal talk of the town this evening. But not for me.

I slipped out the door yesterday morning, simply telling my mother that I was off to an evening of theatre with old friends. (M is here.)

It was a much bigger day than that. It was a drive through the past, recent and not-so-recent, in a grid-lock through L.A. way where you have time to inhabit years of your life, taking it all in, remembering this and wondering if you'll ever forget that.

I had lunch with my dear friend Elizabeth, a friend I know "in the memoir way." You want to get to know someone? Take a memoir writing class. Write down your story. Read it. Listen while they read some pages from their story. Repeat, repeat. Thereafter those words will always hover between you. They are the basis for how you know them. How you trusted them with your story. How they will always be able to trust you with theirs. Sprinkle some of that over your Greek salad.

She and I went to the memorial service for the husband of the beautiful and fabulous women who taught that first class we took something close to a decade ago. This must be hard for you, Elizabeth and other friends said, acknowledging my own recent loss of the man who loved me. A dark place I chose not to step into. One cannot go to the service for another's beloved and wail. T'ai Chi Chih has taught me to place my feet flat on the floor, to feel the earth beneath the floor, and connect with the energy there. To breathe. To recognize my t'an tien. Your friend's grief is not your grief. All grief is all grief, said the voices in my head. Both are true. So I let those voices just talk it out while my feet stayed flat.

There were prayers, and poems, and remembrances. One learns so much at a memorial. Memorial. Memoir. Both peel open the story. The music, performed by the church choir and a soloist from the Los Angeles Opera was probably the most stunning I have ever heard at a church service. The soloist, a beautiful young soprano, was from South Korea. Dan's face seemed to materialize from her face in the moments I felt most transported. There he was in front of me, my beloved.

Then came the driving. I drove through one old neighborhood after another on surface streets, crawling along in traffic that seemed just one car short of gridlock, contemplating the three decades of my life with a man who discarded me like I was nothing. How incredibly lucky that was in the bad luck good luck sort of way. I shuffled my plans around to this and that as if all the time travel was unhinging my brain and after, a stop at a favorite museum, ended up in the new incarnation of the very restaurant where, for years, I ate dinner nearly every Sunday night with The Someone, Finally, I went to the theatre with friends and saw a play that I performed in myself forty years ago. I slept at the house of those dear old friends who gave me oranges and almonds this morning that I ate in my car with a perfect latté I bought at an old-haunt coffee shop.

It was a lot to think about.

And 24 hours later, an empty cup in my cup-holder, I was back. Not singed from the re-entry, but warmed.

The Years, Oh the Years

I can't really remember when my mother last visited California before she came to live with me at the end of August. There was a time when she came west regularly, and her stays were lengthy and leisurely....until they weren't. Memory correlates events in weird ways, and it is thus I know that the week in 2007 when the racehorse, Barbaro, shattered his leg was also the week that my mom's twin sister lost her leg. Their trips to California had already ended by then, but it would take a page by page search through photo albums to determine when, exactly, the last trip was. It would require further unearthing to figure out what health crisis or incremental decline ultimately clipped the wings of the two sisters who were always willing to come spend time with me and my family. My aunt has since lost her other leg, suffers from dementia, and now lives in a nursing home. My mother plunged into her own swift  decline as a result of lung cancer in 2009, but she's spreading her wings again, flying solo nowadays. After a drive to Maine for C's wedding last October she realized she could travel, and this summer managed a two-stage move from east coast to west.

For her 88th birthday, we had a small party Saturday with a half-dozen friends that my mom remembered from her past visits in California. Everyone arrived at once, and the shock of all the years and the way they've changed each of us unleashed a momentary confusion. For a minute, it seemed to me that my mom remembered no one, and that my friends could hardly believe that the tiny woman next to me was my mother. I probably looked more like the mother from their memories than she did. But we all stepped through that threshold from past to present, and there we were eating and drinking and talking.

I'm not sure what my mom wished for,  but if I could have a wish, it would be that next year all of us are well enough to remember this party, to recognize one another no matter how time has changed us.

Flush

Denver and full of glee at the prospect of 3 days crammed with writers, readings, books and friends at AWP.  Lunch in the Cherry Hill neighborhood with a friend after she met me at the airport. Cherry Hill. Familiar. Oh, yes. Mr. Ex worked in Denver on a case for a few months right out of law school. He stayed with his cousin who lived in...Cherry Hill. I came to visit him. We went to the Denver Museum of Art. And because it was shortly after he'd found out that he passed the California Bar Exam, we went together to the Denver courthouse where he was sworn in--or whatever it is one does after passing the Bar. Me at his side for the momentous occasion. I chased the memory away.
My friend drove me to the Hyatt. "You should go into the Brown Palace and take a look around," she said as we rounded a corner and came face to face with a historic red stone building.
"I've stayed there," I said. I remembered the room Mr. Ex and I had shared. If the Red Queen had gone to design school and had a little more sweetness & whimsy in her personality instead of pure aggression she would have had a room in her palace just like it. The front desk clerk gave our daughters bowls of goldfish when we checked in. We had a wonderful dinner in the restaurant. There'll be no more dinners like that.
Good-bye glee. Please come back.
Which is not to say I want Mr. Ex back. I want to be rid of him, memories, joint assets and all.