Partying with the dead--reefer and potato salad

The spread from my mom's birthday party in 2012. I think there's potato salad in one of those bowls.

 A dream: Dan's daughter came to visit. I was living in a house on a hill, not unlike the first house I ever owned in the Sliver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. The slope down to the sidewalk was so steep that when people walked by you could only see the tops of their heads.  "Hey you're in town!" a friend of Dusty's said to her as he looked up and caught a glimpse of her through the open window. We cranked the window fully open and sat on the window seat as she introduced us, describing me as the woman who tried to keep her father alive. Tried and failed, I thought.

Later more friends came over. Friends of Dusty's, friends of Dan's. People I knew and people I didn't. They talked about a house they were buying together. You have to come see it, someone said.

But first there were guests to feed. Dusty went out to buy potatoes so we could make potato salad. I already had two bags of potatoes, but that was okay. We'd make a lot of potato salad. We piled the potatoes into a pot and put it on the stove on low and went out to look at the house. Dusty explained that when Dan was alive I wanted to buy him a house so he could stop working. (In real life, back in 2010 or so,  I thought about buying  a loft downtown near little Tokyo and figured he could live there if he wanted.) The house that Dusty and her friends were buying was not a house exactly. It was a former event venue. The bathrooms were huge with numerous stalls. The women's bathroom was painted fuchsia and silver. "Great for parties," someone said. Next we squeezed into a room piled high with furniture. "This could be our dining room table," someone said as we edged around a dark carved table big enough for a dozen or more. On top of it were two ornately carved boxes with dragons rising up from their lids. "This is where we'll keep the reefer," I said. (Really, I said that in the dream. Hahahaha.)

Back at my house, we checked on the potatoes and took them off the stove to cool. People and more people. Drinks in our hands. And there he was--Dan, sitting next to me. No one but me seemed to notice him. "You're chewing gum," he said. Your brothers must be visiting. You always chew gum when your brothers visit. (God, dreams are weird.) I reminded him that my brothers lived far away and almost never visited. 

"But they did visit recently," I said. "When our mother died." Dan's mouth opened into a silent O. 

"What!?" he said. "Oh dear you, come here so I can hold you." He wrapped his arms around me, and I tried to figure out how all of this worked. Was I supposed to let a dead loved know when another loved one joined their ranks? And how was I supposed to do that exactly? How did moving from the land of the living to the land of the dead work? Who could I ask? Meanwhile Dan held me, and the sensation of his black polar fleece jacket was so familiar that it made me sad, remembering when he wore it when he was alive. And that was a mystery too. How did he get his jacket back? It was given to me after he died and I wore it under my coat last winter in Minneapolis. I lost it on a bus because I got too hot hurrying to the bus stop and tied it around my waist beneath my wool coat. A block or so after I got off the bus I noticed it was gone. I went back to look for it but never found it. I am puzzling through all of this reality about the lost jacket in the dream, and I can't figure that out either. There are all these things I don't know--- the mysterious world of the dead and how they are notified when others die. How they get their lost clothes back. How they come back to visit. I can't figure any of it out. 

"I wish you'd come back more often," I said. "Come back to visit because I miss you." My face was wet with tears. (And indeed it was when I awoke.)

This Present Chaos

view from the living room window in St. Paul

Once upon a time I was married, and one Sunday afternoon the man I was married to told me the marriage was over and that he would be marrying someone else. Oh, and he and his new wife wanted the house so they could raise their new family there in the house where my husband and I had raised our daughters.

This blog was born out of the chaos that ensued, and in that time this blog had another name, which by a court order, I was required to change. I had another name then too. But my old self had plans in that time of chaos. I would leave California and live in a new place with my new name, and so I bought a condo in St. Paul, Minnesota not too terribly far from the little town in Iowa where I grew up.

Plans. Plans are good. But I fell in love with a man in Los Angeles. Love is better than plans. So I stayed in California, and first one daughter and then the other--and for a brief while both of the daughters and both their partners lived in the condo in St. Paul. Years have passed. The man I fell in love with after a first date on post-card blue sky day in Griffith Park got lung cancer and died four years ago. My mother died nine months later. Sometime in the next year I will leave the house I shared with my mother and where the man who loved me took his final breaths. My budget must shrink to fit my shrinking alimony.

Last week the daughters and their partners  moved into a house of their own. I'm not in my 50s anymore, and I do not want to live in the lovely condo on the 3rd floor of a historic building with no elevator. I am too historic to cross the icy alleyway to garage without falling down. Too historic to trudge up all those stairs with bags of groceries.

In this new chaos there will be painting, and floor sanding, and odd little fix-it tasks, and way too much cleaning. There will be too many books, and what do I keep and what do I sell, and what do I give away conversations inside my head that must eventually translate into some kind of action.

In some months, I'll start a new life somewhere else. I'm envisioning a tall building with an elevator and a view of the Mississippi River.

this present chaos

You'll Want to Have What I Had

I had two glasses of the above concoction with some ceviche and chips last night.

Dream:

Dan Paik came back from the dead, wearing a long red skirt over tight pants, a bolero, a kimono, and two hats perched at jaunty angles. He came bearing gifts for every birthday and holiday that he'd missed. In the dream, I didn't quite realize that he'd been dead, I thought he'd stayed away because  he'd broken up with me. What's all this? I asked of the dozens of colorful shoes, the chocolates shaped like animals, the watercolor paints. "It's all for you, baby," he said. The gift that beat all gifts was an immense curly-haired dog wearing an embroidered jacket that said flowers and candy in romantic curlicued script. "Is that his name?" I asked. Dan laughed and shrugged. All this while I'm thinking, uh-oh, what about Amado? 

Dan and I were sitting on the bed in my apartment and I could hear Amado whistling as he came up the stairs. I stood up to hug Amado, then turned toward Dan. "Guys, I've got some explaining to do," I said. They listened and there was some back and forth about what it meant to be dead. "It's time to go downstairs," Dan said. The three of us descended into the street and half of L.A. was standing there, necks craned upward. It was the night of the Bobbing Man, or maybe it was Ballooning Men. The sky was full of  primary colored life-size balloon men, some of them anatomically correct. When one of the endowed balloon men bobbed up and down in the evening breeze, a roar would rise from the crowd. 

Dan, Amado and I walked around in amazement. The sunset had lit  the sky on fire and torches lined the street. It wasn't long before we ran into my friend Paula and her sisters who had traveled from Arizona to witness the spectacle. I tried to explain about Dan and got confused, but Paula seemed to take it all in stride. We sat on a bench and talked, and my younger daughter who was still a young teenager came and lay across our laps and fell asleep. I thought about telling Paula that I might be leaving the Earth soon, that I felt like I was as tenuously tied to this life as one of the balloon men, but I didn't want to risk worrying my daughter, so I kept that thought to myself.

What the heck? But thanks for the visit, Dan Paik. It was lovely to see you. Coincidentally, it was my friend Paula, who appeared in the dream, that left the bottle of La Vida Bonita at my house.  What a pretty life, indeed.  But who is Amado?