The Mystery of the Wine Thief, Some Wisdom from Ancient Rome, and the Rabbit in the Moon.

The Last Senate of Julius Caesar :: Raffaele Giannetti

The lovely M was in Margaritaville (her presence alone is enough to transform this place from Pillville to Margaritaville) this weekend. She arrived with plans to take me off to the theatre today, so from the moment I awoke, I began working toward our 11:30 departure time so that we could drive back to the L.A. area with plenty of time to make the matinee. One of my first tasks was to take last night's nearly full bottle of wine upstairs (I forgot to do this last night.) But the bottle of wine was gone. This discovery fell into place with the fact that I found my mom roaming around the kitchen and laundry room last night at 1:00 a.m. Aha, I thought, she's swiped the wine and hidden it somewhere in the laundry room. M looked for it. I looked for it. All the while, I wondered if I hadn't put it somewhere for safekeeping downstairs instead of juggling it up the steps with my glass of water, my phone, my book, my laptop. Maybe I tucked away somewhere. But where? All through this self-doubt though, my mom is my prime suspect. But off we go to the theatre.

The play we are going to see is Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar (probably the definitive play on power, politics, and war.) M, with her knowledge of the classics, plays podcasts about Julius Ceasar for us as I drive. We hear about Ceasar's return to Rome after his conquests in Gaul and over the Germanic tribes. So there Ceasar is, riding in his triumphal chariot with a slave standing behind him. It's the slave's job to remind Ceasar to look behind you because the future comes from behind. I insisted we hit the pause button right there. M told me about the Roman god Janus who has two faces, one looking forward, the other back, and we drove in silence for a bit before we went on to finish the podcasts.

M as Julius Ceasar at age 11
We happened to have dug out this photo album because of the visit from relatives last week.

 It was a fabulous production. Completely riveting, our brains swirling with past and present wars and political intrigues.

Then I drove back to attend my Sunday night dance class. I had a hard time focusing at first, but eventually my feet and my brain got together. The dance partner was entirely good humored. He's just happy to dance.

Afterwards when we walked out to the parking lot, the moon was a big yellow disk hanging low in the sky. He asked me if I knew about the rabbit in the moon. I did not. I'm 62 years old and I've never heard about the rabbit in the moon. I have, however, always felt that the future comes from behind. So, I tonight I saw the rabbit in the moon. And my dance partner gave me some beautiful homegrown lemons.

When I arrived back home, I was famished. And I wanted some wine. And there it was. On the dining room table just where we'd left it, untouched.

"They Say That In This Life Every Meeting Is a Reunion"

The title to this post is a quote from the movie "The Grandmaster." When the two martial artists in the above photo meet, the sparks are blinding--and not from the punches and kicks they deliver.

When I was first dating Dan, he seemed so familiar to me that I would sometimes wrack my brain over it. Who was it that he reminded me of? It was like a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn't quite utter. At the same time, all I could think of was how different we were, and why could he possibly be interested in me when we were really into very different things. And of course there was my wreck of a life that I was dragging behind me. All we really have is right now, this moment, he would tell me. Just be right here.

I don't really watch a lot of martial arts movies, but if "The Grandmaster" is any example, there are a lot of shots of feet. Our feet let us know where we are right now. And of course, they're very important in the martial arts.

Tonight I went to a T'ai Chi Chih (not a martial art, but a moving meditation) practice in a location that is not my usual one. We had just begun when a homeless guy walked in. He was staggering and looked a bit out of it, but he joined the circle, waving his arms around, not really following our moves. "Yoga," he said. Then "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo." (A Buddhist chant)

"You're welcome to join us," the teacher said. "Or sit and watch. But we're going to do our practice." So we did. The guy stood in the circle with us, but mostly did his own thing. Not too disruptively.  I put my attention in the soles of my feet. About half-way through, he left the room and later reappeared in the lobby. I had the perfect vantage point from which to see him perusing the various pieces of literature. (We were in a church.) Pretty soon he walked out the door and staggered across the parking lot as he made the sign of the cross.

Reunion? Perhaps. We never know for sure, I guess. Every encounter holds something way more mysterious than the fortunes I keep on my kitchen windowsill.

Pillville: Population 2 (and an elderly cat)

Today went by in a whirl--the last few hours with my son and his family. It was too windy here to be outside so we went into an arcade and shoved $5 bills into token machines, held out our hands and let the children pluck them at will.

Arcades might be among my least favorite entertainments in the world usually, but I tossed that attitude to the wind.

I feel a little like these places are training kids for Vegas, but what the hell....today I might have even bought them candy if they'd asked...

...just kidding. But the time was sweet. And Zoltar says our futures look sweet, too.

But really, we have no idea. Though I do hold somewhat to the idea that we can choose sweetness.

At lunch, my 10-year-old granddaughter wanted to know where she was during the time my son and I were on a trip to Europe in the 90s. You weren't anywhere, I told her. She asked the question again. I told her she wasn't on the planet Earth yet. That she hadn't yet been born. She furrowed her brow and laughed. I love how kids always have trouble imagining their parents before the beginnings of their own lives. Our pasts are to them as mysterious as the future.

And sometimes my own past is mysterious to me, too.

But here I am right here, right now in Pillville with my mom talking to herself as she crochets in her room. Piper the ancient cat has not ventured out yet from her respite under the laundry room sink. I just had a long talk on the phone with my friend Paula about the mysteries of dating. I have to decide if I'm serving leftover spaghetti for dinner again. What does the future hold? And why did the past roll out the way it did? How much control do we have over any of it?

What a Difference a Decade Makes

my color-coded life a decade ago

I remembered it was my birthday the moment I opened my eyes this morning. At the foot of my bed is a trunk that once belonged to a great or great-great aunt, and I knew that inside I would find a stack of my old day-planners. I wanted to know what my life was life 10 years ago when I was turning 51--well, I have some idea what my life was like--but I wanted to see the minutiae of it on paper. My life was color-coded!!! I have no fucking idea what the colors meant--urgent!!do this or die, fun vs. not fun, fuck you I'm only doing this if I feel like it. I really can't make sense of it now.

But from reading through the notations a bit, I see that I was taking M back and forth to an array of doctors for a mysterious and scary ailment that eventually got around to resolving itself. That she had a broken a finger playing basketball again so there were doctors for that too. C was driving her own self here and there, but I was shuttling M to a billion things in addition to the doctors. There were law firm events, and lots of nights out to Clippers games and the theatre and a certain amount of stress as to whether the Someone could actually take the time to go to these things. I was going out with friends and doing theatre myself, and my, my, my life was a whirl.

My calendar today as I turn 61, has nothing that needs writing. The daughters (one with a husband!--now that's a momentous change from a decade ago, no?) are both here and we will go to the farmer's market. There is a birthday dinner being planned (hooray for the daughter who married a man who loves to cook AND bake,) and I really should go to the supermarket because my mother is almost out of gin and vermouth. Mom really ought to have a martini on my birthday, don't you think?

I saw the sun rise on this day that I turn 61, and gave thanks for being here to see it. And as the water turned pink I read this:

 “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.” In that sense, forgiveness is really not about someone’s harmful behavior; it’s about our own relationship with our past.

Okay. Happy Birthday to me. Good-bye 2003, etc. I'm closing your cover. Back in the trunk you go.

Friday Night Dream, Remembered and Receding

Dream:

We stood in the corner of a pasture. Or a yard given over to shagginess. A rock, a fence post, a tree--trunk gnarled with branches bending low. "Here," someone said. And we went in like Alice, the fall not like a fall at at all. When we arrived at this place below the earth the sky was still blue, the grass still green.

My 23-year-old daughter was a child of five or six again, her hair its childhood golden hue as she ran by holding the hand of a friend. "Wait," I said. "I want to look at you." She obliged just for a moment, turned and laughed. Then she ran forward to her future from this place in the past where I had been allowed a visit.

photo credit: The Someone (taken by him, but edited by me)

Graveyards and My Long Dead Past

I buried my past.

The summer after my freshman year of college I returned to my hometown because my mother was in the hospital, but that was my final summer in the town where I grew up. Six months later I came back again for my father's funeral. After that there were a few scattered  Christmases. Some hurried stops on summer vacations.

No one recognizes me now. The raven waist-length tresses and apple cheeks are gone. Both my maiden name and the married name that some might have heard of are now erased. I call myself by my maternal grandmother's maiden name, and it would take a certain amount of explaining to make people understand why I required this self-made rebaptism. 

Sometimes I feel as worn and askew as the grave markers in the old town cemetary when I think of the water that's coursed beneath my personal bridge. Many of these monuments are almost 200 hundred years old, and the names they once bore have been scoured into oblivion. The town's founding father merits a shiny new tombstone, but I was disappointed to find no trace of the original stone that marked his grave.

Presumably his bones still lie beneath the earth, but the headstone feels to me like an impostor. I ask myself if I'm an impostor, too, but it's more complicated than that.

After all these years if I somehow met my past self, I would take her by the hand and lead her into the present. I barely remember you, I'd tell her. But we have some catching up to do.

Leaving the City of Angels

It's stalking me, this feeling. This feeling that leaving L. A. is bigger and wider than I want to admit. The city where I've spent nearly two-thirds of my life is about to become a pinpoint of the map of my past.

It was sweltering the day I arrived, sweating in the passenger seat of a 1966 Dodge Coronet. No one would recognize either of us now--the lanky blond boy that became my husband a year later, or the round-cheeked girl with dark hair falling to her waist. They inhabit the past, too.

And they inhabit the present.

Last night I thought about the way things end. How, in my choking grief after he left me, I told everyone I was already over it and moving on. It wasn't a lie. It wasn't the truth. "I'm over it," I'd say, sometimes laughing. Sometimes weeping.

I'll drive out of the City of Angels alone. I know I'll look back. There's a lot to see. But I'll be looking forward, too.

Here's what I saw from my patio last night:

Love, Money, and Mink

I recently took my mother back to the apartment where she used to live with her sister until health problems forced them both to move a couple of years ago. Because the place is in the basement of my cousin's house a lot of their things are still there, time-capsuled as if they might someday return and resume where they left off.

"Do you suppose this gin is still good?" my aunt might ask as she leans down from her wheelchair and peers into the cabinet.

"Of course it's good," my mother would respond, opening the fridge. "But I don't know about these olives." They'd discuss the pros and cons of a martini without olives then, but they'd make the drinks anyway and sit at their table, a cumulous cloud of smoke forming under the low ceiling. They'd sip. And talk about how good it was to be back. 

Could happen. But probably not. My aunt lives in a nursing home now, both legs lost and her memory chasing after them.

What did happen was that my mother opened every drawer and each of her  little wooden boxes (many of which most likely came from thrift store or trash picking treasure hunts.) She looked through her closet and her jewelry box and stood in front of her bookshelves . "Take this," she'd say when I exclaimed over something. "It needs fixing, but..." We found earrings that have been in her jewelry box ever since I can remember. She still had the little golden expandable chignon-style hair clasps that I used to set on top of my head as crowns when I played dress up, her father's watch chain, and the crystal rosary in the pouch personalized with her name in gold across the white leather that her mother presented to her as a wedding gift.

I thought I was familiar with each and every one of my mother's treasures, but there was a surprise. "Is that mink?" I asked. The fur was soft as a kitten's, not marred at all by time, although the satin rose was maybe a bit faded with a hint of fray.

"Your father gave that to me for Christmas the year I asked for a mink coat," she said.  

My parents never had any money. The way I remember it, the only thing they ever fought about was money, and that was because there wasn't  any. I was touched by the story because my father heard what his young, poor-all-her-life wife wanted, and with, I imagine, a rather stylish sense of humor, he delivered mink.

And now the mink and satin rose is with my mother at my brother's house where she lives with him and his girlfriend.  My father has been dead for almost thirty years, and my mother looks back almost as much as she looks forward. Tucked-away treasures bring the past and the present together. I like that.

Intersections

Tonight at dinner I found out that one of the poets in residence here was  an art model at the University of Knoxville during the couple of months that I was modeling  there in 1974.  She also sold blood plasma at a storefront collection center, as I did, and had a similar experience that left her on a gurney most of the day while they tried to get the "leftover" blood back into her veins. Friendships often start on these pieces of common ground and this small wedge of the past seems like a bridge to something more. We plan to do a reading together sometime later this week and I'm very excited to hear what she's working on. She's been a regular breakfast and dinner companion these past few days and we've done quite a bit of laughing together.  I'm mystified by coincidences like this, and I always find myself asking,"What are the odds..."  But maybe the odds of the past intersecting with the present are pretty good.  Unless you enter the witness protection program, the past seems to have a pretty good chance of meeting you in the present. After this latest coincidence, I spent a little time googling things like "nude+zebra rug" wondering if I'd find a picture of myself on the internet. Thankfully, that piece of the past seems to have disappeared.