The Korean Tailor and the Golden Tortoise

Dan had a jacket he wore a lot. He was wearing it the first time I met him. I kept it and another one similar to it, and for months, both jackets sat neatly folded on my closet floor. They were way too big for me, the shoulder seams halfway to my elbows, the sleeves half-again too long. I finally decided I'd have them tailored and asked around for a recommendation. Rome Tailor, someone said. That sounded spiffy. I imagined the tailor would look like an older version of this, and that he'd do a meticulous job remodeling the jackets to fit me :

The tailor did do a marvelous job, but he was Korean. According to the Census bureau, this county is only 7.3 percent Asian. I would imagine that the Japanese and Chinese ethnicities far outnumber the Koreans. Of all the gin joints. 

The tailor couldn't imagine why I'd want a couple of not very remarkable cotton jackets altered, so I explained. He nodded rather gravely and had me step up onto a platform and then circled around me, marking out his plan with chalk and pins.

When I stepped down and went to his counter to pay, I saw the array of carved turtles/tortoises stretching across it. Big wooden ones, little brass ones, some made of stone, probably one of jade. I thought of a dream Dan had when he was almost recovered from his surgery and thinking about moving out of my house back into his own place.

In the dream he was in an antique store and spies something he likes: a golden tortoise. What follows are Dan's own words as he wrote them to journal the dream:

"...... I ask the cashier the price of the tortoise. She says "it's a designer piece of (gives a woman's name) so the price is $24,000. I smile and dismiss the idea..

Then I'm in a house, guy knocks on my door. I answer,someone I vaguely know is talking about something and then asks if I know who the vigilantes are the yard. No, I say and I look out to see four good old boys who are sitting in an open car with their seats reclined to the same angle, looking at me and smiling. I know that they are from the store and are there to do me harm. I rush inside, grab the tortoise and toss it to them, cognizant as I go inside that I still have a beating coming. I awaken, eyes wide open scared."

The dream left a very vivid impression on him. He couldn't stop talking about it. He even posted it on Facebook.

We exchanged a lot of texts and talked on the phone a bit as he rode the train back to L.A. that morning. We exchanged some links that might explain the tortoise as a symbol. I scrambled and unscrambled the letters in the words golden tortoise to present a variety of messages. As I recall, the one that got the biggest laugh from Dan was "Lo! Go rt. to Denise. I was, at the time, trying to talk him into continuing to live at my house while he got his chemo and radiation treatments.

So. The Korean tailor. The tortoises.

The same night he had a second vivid dream. Also Dan's own words:

"Dream 2: last night, I'm made aware that I have somehow received a gift of great material wealth. I'm seeing it as a cloak or a curtain, perhaps with valuable coins sewn into it. I accept it with quiet pleasure but go on with another activity, as though wealth was given me every day. Later, on closer examination the cloth seem to be wrapped around me. In fact the wealth beneath the cloth seems to actually be my own body. I awaken."

Now the cloth, the jacket, that Dan wore will be next to my skin. Having it on feels like a sort of wealth.

Signs, Proof, and the Buddha Makes Lemonade

This is proof.

That this happened this weekend.

And this.

But I have no proof of what I saw this evening when I went for a walk around the block. Looking in my patio window, I saw my mother reaching behind my cookbooks where I stash my unfinished bottle of wine. Her martini glass had been drained just minutes before, and I mistakenly thought that her body had forgotten the sea of alcohol that it had been afloat in for so long. Of late she's been congenial about her two-ounce martini. She might have seen me. But maybe not. The bottle of wine was tightly sealed with one of those vacuum corks, and when I returned (just minutes later,) it was still sealed. "That sure was a short walk," she said. "It was," I said.

And this novel I'm reading, "The Debt to Pleasure," by John Lanchester---SPOILER ALERT---overwhelmed me with its darkness this afternoon. I have no proof, but there are signs that our narrator is a psychopath who has murdered his parents and caused the death of  perhaps two household employees. The book is a feast of language and wit and actual recipes. Not to mention a banquet of arcana that regularly sends me on a Google tangent. BUT. Either I've figured out on page 111 where this story is going or my prediction of where it all will end is a sign of my own darkness. 

And I'm not sure what's going on here in my iPhoto as it interfaces with Blogger, but for the second time in recent months, a photo that I have not selected--a photo from months ago--has appeared in this post. It's a photo from Dan's memorial. I'm going to call it a sign. 

Day of the Dead

After visiting my favorite dia de los muertos exhibit at The Folk Tree last week, I bought some supplies and made my own altar for Dan.

I dreamed of him a couple of nights ago. We were camping on a big fluffy air mattress tucked in between some boulders in a canyon. The sky was still blue, but we were already  in bed, watching the clouds, marveling at the blue wide-openness. A cop pulled up on his motorcycle, asking to see our permits. When I rifled through a box of stuff, he saw our clump of pot. "It's medical," I said to the cop. "Show him your scar," I said to Dan. Dan didn't pull up his shirt. He smiled and shrugged. The sky turned an even more brilliant blue.

Notes from Margaritaville, Pillville, and The Love Shack

the love shack a.k.a. my bedroom

It is big deal to sleep next to someone you love when that someone is in pain. Somehow you are asleep and somehow, simultaneously, you are awake. You hear the moans and winces and whimpers, and you are sorry and disturbed, but you realize until that moment you have been sleeping pain free while the person next to you has not been so fortunate, and you ponder life's big questions until...you don't. You wake long enough after the next moan to wonder if you should wake him and ask if he needs a pain pill or the heating pad or should you try digging your fingers under his shoulder blade, but you think better of it because he's silent now. You hope he realizes how completely happy you are that he's next to you despite the way things are currently because it's pure comfort to know what is going on first-hand and not have to imagine him in his own place alone and guess at how that's going. When he sits up for a second sometime in the middle of the night, knowing you're awake too, and he asks you if you're sleeping okay, you want to try to explain what comfort he's providing you by being there and how it doesn't really matter that you've been waking up between stretches of sleeping quite well, but it might be too long of an explanation and then maybe neither of you will get back to sleep, so you just mutter something positive. But later when you are in the middle of a nightmare in which your mother hands you an bloody apron and a pair of gloves and says, "These are the ones that were used in the murder," and she gives them to you like you are supposed to do something--what, you don't know--wash them? Bury them? You don't know, so you scream and scream. Then he wakes you so your terror can stop. You thank him, and you think about terror and pain and how they're alike and different, and somehow you both sleep again.

Readers, you may feel that you have missed a blog post, but you have not. I have been rendered silent (for about as long as I have ever been silent here on this blog) by the fact that the man who loves me has lung cancer. There will be surgery. There will be chemo. Right now there's pain. And in as much as this man and I have endeavored to maintain our separateness throughout this love affair we've been having for the past 5 years, I cannot say how much I will write about the part of this story that is happening to him. But it is a fact that some small part of it is happening to me. So, I will go back to silence or write about that part.

And as for the regular proceedings of life in Pillville, my mother has a stronger pain pill that required giving up her martini for a few nights. That dream recounted above--well, I think it was probably me she murdered and just to really let me know how much she detested my delivery of the no alcohol tidings, she not only murdered me, but also asked me to clean up the mess. She had terrible back pain after returning home from the hospital, but it has abated and tonight, due to the tapering off of the meds, there will be a martini, she has just informed me. As for me, I think a glass of my favorite cheap red will go nicely with this.

And in Margaritaville today the sky looked like a pile of cotton balls.

The fishing was easy. If you were a heron.

Due to my inept photography, you can't see that the heron has a large fish in its beak. The seagull wants it.

And the guardian of the neighborhood was in her usual place, watching over all of us. Or at least the rodents in the empty lot. Blessings upon all of us is what I hope for. Even for the heron's fish. Even for those rodents as they feel the prick of talons as they are swept skyward.

Devices, Dessert, and Other Good Things

There are three main indicators that my mom is feeling well: 1) She heads for the coffee pot immediately upon waking. 2) She has a martini at 5:30. 3) She spends a lot of time at the kitchen island reading the newspapers on the iPad. Her iPad (well, mine actually) is behind the Kleenex box in this photo of the goings on after dinner last night. If you look past the ice cream and the cake, you'll see her not-quite-finished martini, but she did indeed drain it sometime after dessert.

It was a pretty fine weekend here in Margaritaville. We didn't just stare at our respective screens all weekend.

There was beach walking.

And coffee-talking at  a quaint place with crocheted table legs.

On Friday I installed some of the crochet-work of my mom's that we brought back from the East Coast.

my bathroom window

the bedspread

All in all, it was a more than fine weekend with the many good and sweet and amazing things over -shadowing the alimony mediation that swallowed a portion of Saturday. My mom is recovering. M was here all weekend. And the man who loves me managed some extra hours in Margaritaville too.

If this past weekend in Margaritaville were an actual Margarita, it would be one of those fishbowl-sized ones.

It's Monday afternoon, and I'm still woozy with the wonder of it all.

White and whirling cloud of terns,

The man who loves me watching the white and whirling cloud of terns,

and later, gathered around the kitchen island, friends, wine, and ice cream with espresso poured over the top.

Over. The. Top. 

My Life as Expressed by Signs

My brain reads this sign as "stark reality." While there are some parts of life that do feel rather stark currently--today, well, not so much.

The man who loves me is here, and we visited the local farmers market where we saw a turquoise ling cod.

The fish was for sale, but was whole so we purchased a regularly pigmented ling cod that was already filleted. The fisherman swore that the meat of the turquoise fish is actually turquoise.

We had a cup of coffee in a neighborhood where there appears to be a guerilla crochet artist on the loose.

We prowled the Ventura swap meet where, for a brief moment, I wondered if Margaritaville might need a kitchen appliance called the Margarator.

But tomorrow I will call my attorney, think of a certain Someone, and as I ponder the recent goings on, I'm likely to share a certain sentiment expressed by a Chinese restaurant that the man who loves me visited recently. Now there's a stark reality for you.

How I Awoke with a Stepladder and an Empty Vodka Bottle in My Bedroom

2:27 a.m. And my smoke alarm beeping. Every 30 seconds. Cheerp. Cheerp. The man who loves me is in my bed next to me, dug so deeply into dreamland that he doesn't even stir when I get out of bed and stand directly under the offending device. In the dark, I stare up at the ceiling wanting to be certain it's this smoke detector and not the one in the hallway or the carbon monoxide detector downstairs. It is.

There's no possibility that I will get back to sleep unless I can stop the noise, so I go downstairs to the laundry room and pull out my plastic box of batteries. There's one 9-volt battery in the box and it's in a package that's been opened. Please be a good battery, I whisper as I head for the garage to get the ladder.

This should be pretty simple, I think. Back upstairs, I position the ladder, setting my iPad, in flashlight mode, on top of the ladder. I'm a 12-foot tall woman in jeans and a black lace bra in a spotlight and the man who loves me is still sleeping. If he wakes, I think, he may die of fright. Battery out. Battery in. Cheerp.

I stand on the ladder in the dark, typing "my smoke alarm won't stop beeping" into the Google search box. There are a variety of  remedies, but first I have to ascertain if my alarm is AC or DC. I'm guessing it's hardwired since my house is newish, and that's probably required by safety code, but I can't tell by looking, so I haul the ladder into the guest room, close the door and turn on the ceiling light to look at the smoke detector in there. I'm thinking it should twist off easily if it's just a battery device. It doesn't. 

The troubleshooting instructions insist that I must cut the power to the smoke detector, take the battery out, push the reset button, turn the power back on and re-insert the battery. Shirt on. Down to the breaker box on the exterior wall of my house. Each breaker is carefully labeled. None is for upstairs. There must be another breaker box upstairs. I can't find it. Unless it's in M's room. She's sleeping, and given her insane hours and her 65-mile each way commute to her job, she will probably kill me if I awaken her at 3:00 a.m. Cheerp. I'm thinking maybe that's not so bad.

Back to Google. Maybe if I just take the battery out entirely. Nope. Cheerp. Cheerp. Back downstairs. I recall that there was an extra smoke detector in the laundry room drawer when I moved in. If I can examine the device by holding it in my hands, read the white on white Braille-like lettering, maybe I can figure this out. There's a reset button. "Push to reset. Hold to test," the tiny letters say. How long is a push vs. a hold? Should I risk actually setting off the alarm? My mom will wake up. M will wake up. I'm not so sure about the man who loves me, but I'd rather poke out my eardrums than push that button. Standing upstairs in my closet with the extra smoke detector in my hand, I practice taking the battery in and out of that one, checking to see if I could have wrongly inserted the battery in the beeping detector. No. What if I push the button on the unattached smoke detector? It's not wired in. If the alarm sounds, I can rip out its battery. It beeps. Then beeps again. Now there are two smoke detectors cheerping. Good-bye battery. Cheerp. What??? The thing is cheerping and it has no battery. I stuff it into the pajama drawer in my closet and close the door.

It's almost 4:00 a.m. Google. Be sure the battery door is completely closed after you change the battery the umpteenth website says. Back up the ladder. Coax the cover. Wiggle it. Silence.

I have some booze on a pretty tray with a couple of glasses in my bedroom. Grand Marnier. Bailey's. A nearly empty bottle of Polish bison grass vodka that is so good, I have been reluctant to drain it. Now is the time. I sit in the big white easy chair in the dark, the bottle on the window ledge next to me. It's so quiet I can hear that lovely man in my bed breathing. Is he dreaming? Wait! What was that dream I was having?That dream just before I awoke. The Someone and His Someone. There were nefarious financial dealings. Blackmail. And….something. Some secret that explained everything about my divorce…but now it might as well have gone up in smoke.

Herons call over the water in the dark. The vodka bottle is empty. Back to bed.

In the morning, the moment he wakes, the man who loves me smiles and kisses me. When he sees the box of batteries on the bathroom counter, he says, "I guess you were up in the middle of the night." Later, over coffee, he tells me he slept well. And that he dreamt of Harrison Ford.

Books and Brie

Thanks to the presence  of daughter M, I went away for an overnight.

First there was this.

A reading at Flintridge Books by one of my favorite writing teachers.

This book includes snippets of writing by a few of Barbara's students. A half-dozen of us were there last night and we read, too.

Then I spent the night with the man who loves me at his place. 

Dinner was chips and cheese and crackers. After 270-some nights of cooking dinner for my mom with the only respite being three evenings of take-out pizza, and two previous nights away, last night's dinner felt like pure decadence. Cheese. Chips. I think we ate it off of plates, but I'm not sure because there was a lot of wine involved. Maybe we just shoved our heads into the bag and tore at the wedge of brie with our teeth.

I slept with both ears closed, dropping off to the distant yip-yip-yeeeee of coyotes. I sleep well-enough at home with my mom. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm the middle-weight sleeping champion of the world. But there's sleeping and then there's sleeping.

Refreshed, my mom and I tried the various CPAP masks again this afternoon, thinking that we might have better luck if we tried a daytime practice run. 

Nope.

Last night as I stepped out my front door about to head out for a walk, I was greeted by a blizzard of blooms. 

Just a bit ago, I came across this poem by Jack Gilbert:

What do they say each new morning 

                                               in Heaven? They would 

weary of one always 

singing how green the 

green trees are in

 Paradise. 

Surely it would seem convention

 and affectation

 to rejoice every time 

Helen went by, since 

she would have gone daily by. 

What can I say then each time 

your whiteness glimmers

 and fashions in the night? If each time your voice

 opens so near

 in that dark 

new? What can I say each morning

 after that you will

 believe? But there is this

 stubborn provincial 

singing in me, 

O, each time. 

And tomorrow I will take a workshop with one of my favorite writing teachers.

And after I will see the man who loves me.

Somehow, in my brain this all fits together wonderfully.

Put Your Arms Around Something as Big as the California Sky

It's not unusual for the man who loves me to pull out his notebook and jot down a line or two for a song. We might be cooking dinner when the notebook appears or sitting with a glass of wine, talking. Quite often, as it did last night, the notebook came out when we were getting ready for bed. I was already under the covers as he stood in the dark, scribbling at the dresser in the corner. I never peer over his shoulder at these moments, never ask "What's the song about?" I wouldn't especially like to answer questions like these when an idea for a story or an essay first occurs to me. I've witnessed quite a few lines being recorded in the notebook over the past four years, and only a couple have been shared with me.

As we lay in bed this morning, I told the man who loves me my dream, admitting that I'd dreamed of The Someone. The dream had an incoherent narrative. Something about a car and a pair of shoes. And my concern about my real-life recently reduced alimony played against a backdrop of some dream-world global impending financial crisis. In the dream I was trying to ascertain if The Someone's finances were going to hell, and my own fortune, shackled to his as it is--was I destined for ruin, too, and would this happen before or after the financial apocalypse? It was still dark when I woke just enough to realize that I was pressed against one man while dreaming of another, and how absurd that was. I made myself stop the dream and go back to sleep.

This morning as the man who loves me and I stood pulling on our clothes and talking about coffee, the notebook lay open on the dresser. "Look at this," he said, "you'd think I wrote these lines this morning, but I wrote them last night." And in the notebook, was the beginning of a song about a man pulling his lover back to him although he knew she was dreaming of another man.

I can't get my arms all the way around this intangible thing any more than I can put my arms around the California sky. But there it is.

photo note: The man who loves me took this picture in his neighborhood. Don't you love it?

Hoooo-ooooo are you?

Dream:

"Don't tell me you're surprised," he said.
"I'm not surprised," I said. "Just confused." He went on to tell me there was nothing to be confused about. His marriage was over, and he wanted us to get back together. 

We were somewhere with his relatives. We were hanging around together--but mostly surreptitiously. We were talking in his hotel room. It seemed a given. That we should just paste the pieces back together. I couldn't think of any other reasonable way to approach the situation. "Have you told your mother that we're getting back together?" I asked. 
"Not yet," he said.
"Then don't," I said. "Because there's a man I love, and I can't live without him. 

Holy shit. Right? The wind howled like a maniac all night long. Musta been an ill wind that blew that dream to me. It's howling again. Styling those palm fronds into a brand new crazy do. It was so windy yesterday that when I rolled down my car window to talk to my neighbor who happened to be in the next lane, that I got dirt in my mouth. My  chewing gum was so gritty, I had to throw it away. Right now, however, the wind is blowing from the east--opposite of what it was doing yesterday. Blow a sweet dream to me, Mr. Wind. Real sweet.

Thanks for the Love

I've eaten nothing but pizza for more than 24 hours. Prior to the pizza binge I consumed mostly  coconut cake. But what's really sustaining me is family, friends, and you, dear readers.  I have been lavished with well wishes, reaped the benefits of your physical labors, baked for, and served a fabulous breakfast the morning that the movers arrived (my only nutritious meal in recent memory.)

I'm lying in bed with the heating pad on my back as I type this post, but  I feel drenched in sweetness.

Thank you.

I Could Drink a Case of You

Saturday night after the super moon refused to show its face, there was more darkness. I pulled the mail out of my mailbox to find a "letter" from my attorney which wasn't a letter at all. What is was was a photocopy of the judge's ruling on my motion to recover attorney fees. Denied, it said.

 I'd been waiting since our day in court on March 2nd for the news. I'd emailed my attorneys asking for an update a week after the court appearance. The judge was out of town, they said. So I waited some more thinking I would email the attorneys again after the weekend. Maybe the beginning of Spring would bring good news.

Or not. But it wasn't the bad news about the money that was the worst thing. Instead of days of waiting, I could have used a prompt email last Tuesday when the ruling came down. Or a phone call. I could have used a tiny slice of personal communication--something like, "Dear Denise, We're sorry to be the bearers of bad news, but don't be discouraged, and here's what we'll do next..." I could have used a scrawled post-it note stuck to the corner of the blurry photocopy with some kind missive like "hang in there"--or even a crude little drawing of a frowny face. Nope.

I admit to dark thoughts. I have them. I'd been having them less. But Saturday night the dark thoughts had a party. They wore black and carried knives. They looped ropes over beams. They made tea and reminded me that the deranged husband in Tim O'Brien's excellent novel  In the Lake of the Woods killed his wife with boiling water while she slept. I didn't sleep Saturday night. I sat in my bed frozen with dread. I emailed Mr. Ex. I texted him. Then the sun sort of rose--or did what the moon did the night before--lurked somewhere behind the clouds while doing its job in a less than satisfactory way. And that's what I did Sunday. I skipped a good friend's fabulous First Day of Spring party and drank mimosas in my pajamas with M. while we watched basketball. Then I crawled to bed and slept the day away.

When I woke I felt stupid and lazy and realized I had a house full of people whom I love. I cobbled together dinner, took a shower while the chicken was in the oven, then lit the candles and sat at the dining room table like a human being. And somewhere in there I'd talked on the phone with the man who loves me. He was wrestling with his own First Day of Spring demons. "You'll know what to do," he said. "You always do." Or somethin' like that.  Maybe not, I thought. And maybe this thing between us could be going a little better.

I was putting the last of the dishes into the dishwasher when the brass door knocker that nobody ever  uses announced that someone was at the door. Yup. "Someone's at the door," the daughters said without moving as if they knew it was for me. There he was, the man who loves me standing in the rain with a little cluster of daffodils in one hand and a case of wine hoisted onto one shoulder. You read that right. Not a bottle. A case.

I'm still on my feet.

Loss, Coincidence & Consoling

My condo complex is resurfacing its interior streets so, for the second day in a row, I had the choice of being held prisoner for several hours while the "slurry coat" dried or vacating the premises before 7:00 a.m.  and staying gone. Yesterday I let myself be held hostage. Today I chose freedom.
I had an elaborate plan--a sort of "me morning." Breakfast out with my laptop, jazzercise, a pedicure, and then downtown to spring my dogs from boarding, which I elected not to do yesterday due to fearsome visions of eight paws and a set of sneakers tracking fresh asphalt into my condo and simultaneously incurring the wrath of the H.O.A board.

Things were going well as  I took the last bites of my Starbucks veggie panini while emailing my attorney. Then the phone rang.

It was Stephen, the guy from the dog boarding place, telling me my dog Lola was completely uninterested in getting up this morning. Lola is old. She has a heart condition. She nearly died when I was out of town visiting my mom in August. But she rallied and had a great month at home with me before it was time to visit my mom again last week. I told Stephen I would meet him and Lola at the vet.

It so happens that the Starbucks I chose was the one in my old neighborhood--the suburb where I lived for twelve years with Mr. Ex.  It was difficult backing out of my parking place at 8:15 in the morning on the busy street that leads to the Freeway. But after several cars zoomed by someone gave me a break, and I proceeded to the onramp, calculating which route would get me to the vet the fastest. It was a second or two after I merged into traffic that I realized the big fat Acura TL in front of me was none other than Mr. Ex.

There we were, Mr. Ex and I, crawling west in tandem while Lola was in yet another car heading for the vet. I thought about calling Mr. Ex. "Hey, I'm behind you right now," I might have said. "I'm really sad. Please talk to me because Lola is dying, and I'm on my way to her." I was thinking about making that call. I really was. Mr. Ex was always the dog guy at our house. The walks, the feedings, the runs to Petsmart. Mr. Ex and our daughters and I went to the dog rescue place together and adopted Lola and Layla one February morning five or six years back.  Then the four of us drove back downtown to pick the dogs up after the rescue folks had groomed them for us. All six of us rode home together, the scent of fresh dog shampoo nearly inebriating us while we discussed names.  Helena and Hermia? Bianca and Kate? This was what I was thinking as I crept through rush hour behind Mr. Ex.  But my phone rang. Stephen again. Lola was dead.

I remembered then what had happened last month. I'd gotten the call that Lola was sick--very sick-- while I was at my mom's place. I sent Mr. Ex an email asking if he wanted to be there if she had to be put down before I flew home. No, he wrote back. I don't need to be there.  


So I didn't call Mr. Ex.  I called the man who loves me. He had said yes to my request last month. Of course he would be there if Lola had to be put down. But he didn't wait for that to happen. He went to visit her at the vet hospital. Hung out with her. I hung out with him this morning. Crawled into his big fluffy bed and cried.