How I Spent My Mother Vacation and.....Waffles.

I've done a lot of things since I dropped my mom off at my brother's house in Maryland. Mostly, I feared that these two months would be filled with procrastination for the real life tasks I'd planned, and that I'd spend way too much time curled into a fetal position with the occasional foray into the kitchen to make popcorn which I would then return to bed to eat. I feared I might walk in circles around and around my house, wailing and tearing my clothes, or burrowing into Dan's ashes, begging for an answer to the unanswerable why. Okay, I did some of that.

But I also road-tripped to a niece's wedding with my daughter C. I flew to Hawaii for two 50th birthday parties on two different islands, and visited one of Dan's friends on a third island. I went to a T'ai Chi Chih retreat in New Mexico, and spent a week getting accredited as a T'ai Chi Chi teacher in Santa Barbara. I drove north 5 hours to my godson's wedding and drank a barrel of wine with two of my oldest friends. I've had lunch with friends, drinks with friends, dinner with friends, long talks with friends, gone to various plays with daughter M, proving, I guess, that an introvert can socialize when  it's a matter of life and death.

The domestic-doer me threw it into high gear. Kitchen and patio deep-cleaned. Bedroom decluttered--which involved shredding seven or eight bags of paper. (Didn't I just do that before I moved two and a half years ago? Why, yes I did. And yes ,I still have the six document boxes of divorce documents in my garage, thank you.) I got a new book shelf so all my T'ai Chi Chih books and Dan's T'ai Chi Ch'uan books can get cozy together in an organized sort of way. I cleaned out my closet. Again. Honest to god, I'm at one of those mid-life (Ha--why do we say that?-- Last quarter of life) junctures where I loathe all of my clothes.

I shopped. This is big. I bought two nice dresses and a pair of shoes that are not flip-flops. I bought a red toaster/toaster-oven combo that I hope my mom will love because the previous toaster was a pain in the ass and I'm not sure why she or any of my house guests put up with it. I bought this: supposedly handmade by a local artist. I hope it is.

And in my never-ending quest to make my house brighter and more colorful, I've ordered fabric to have my dining room chairs recovered.

Because, well....this is what my living room looks like after I went berserk in there a couple months back--except now the tray is bright turquoise. Stay out of my way; I still have some of that paint left. Didn't Monet paint everything redder and redder as he aged and began to lose his sight? I want everything to be orange.

Oh, and I wrote stuff. And stuff got published. And well, I wanted to write about waffles and about what the yoga teacher said this morning, but I have to go now. Tomorrow. Waffles. I promise. 

Namasté.

Report from Pillville...as delivered by a dream...with a tightrope and a hamster

Dream:

I'm in some kind of improv performance. But not as a professional. I'm a volunteer from the audience. It seems that the point is to select a group from the audience, and then after an orientation with the director, we perform.

The performance space is car wash/gas station. One of those big places with a lot of things for sale so they can triple the cost of what you pay for the car wash when you shop while you wait. They have a little bit of everything, and since we are supposed to use what's in our environment as fodder for the improv, I  hurriedly note the possibilities. There's pet food and greeting cards and car stuff and some minor hardware type stuff. 

The only really interesting thing is a novelty entertainment that consists of a tightrope that runs around the perimeter of the room at ceiling height. Along the tight rope is a variety of characters that either bicycle, unicycle, or walk in perpetual motion around and around above our heads. I'm panicking, trying to think of something clever or some funny way to incorporate this. I'm not really able to hear or focus on what the director is saying. 

To add to the confusion, the audience who had already been seated on folding chairs in a sizable empty section of the room, is now being asked to file out for a few moments so we "actors" can finish our rehearsal/orientation with the director. The audience is annoyed and I am annoyed that there's all this milling around with people talking. I'm grumbling to myself about what a stupid arrangement it all is. Why have the audience come in and gotten comfortable if we now have to chase them out so we can rehearse or whatever you call what we're doing. 

The place looks different when they're gone. There's a big garage door visible now. Maybe it leads to some kind of service bay where they change oil or put your car on a hoist to clean the underside. These big doors have opaque glass in them and through them a glowing  light is visible. It's the only attractive part of the room. Better than the kitschy tightrope. Better than any of the product displays. These squares of light seem to promise that there's something on the other side. Was the director saying something about the doors? I couldn't really hear her. I don't know what she expects of us. I'm nervous. The audience will be returning, and I want to come up with something clever so I began to work on some kind of line where I say something like,"Oh look (pointing to the tightrope and it's characters circling overhead) don't you think our pet hamster would like that? He could run along the tightrope with them!" I don't think the line is very good, even though it does kind of follow the instruction of utilizing the environment.  I have a sinking feeling. This is going to be awkward.

And now for my improvisational interpretation. Here's the tightrope: the hearing loop--which in a home installation can run around the edges of the room at ceiling height. In the dream, I'm my mother--confused, unable to understand because I can't hear. Yesterday the guy from Caption Call came to our house with the new FTC (you'd think we were about to breach national security with her close-captioned phone) paperwork. I was telling him how difficult it is for my mom to hear--that the hearing aids don't help much, that the captioning on the phone is slow and not always accurate. He told us about the hearing loop technology, and about a smart phone app called TalkTranslate. 

The timeline is too short to get my kitchen, living room and dining room looped before Thanksgiving--darn, but I'm hoping for a little help from TalkTranslate so my mom can enjoy the party. This looping thing seems affordable and simple. It's quite widely used in public spaces in Great Britain and Scandinavia, the Internet says. Sounds like a miracle. Anybody out there ever heard of it?

As for the hamster, there's this....

Actor's Nightmare in Margaritaville

I've been dragging around Margaritaville recently feeling as though someone has stolen my tequila and taken an ax to my blender. Stuck in some kind of negativity hangover, I haven't had much luck at clearing my head. But my fiesta of funk might be leading me somewhere. I'm so fucking bored, I said to myself last night, what I need is a week of theatre-going in New York--like the old days. Of course there's no chance of my getting away now that my mom lives with me. The self-pity danced me around a bit, and then the thought occurred to me: I'm in the wrong play.

I am living the classic actor's nightmare. If you've ever been on stage, you probably know what I mean. It's the week before the show opens or maybe the first week of the run, and you wake panting like a racehorse because in your dream where you're waiting to go on as one of the witches in "MacBeth," you see through an opening in the scenery that your fellow actors are in the deep south, drawling out Tennessee Williams lines on a vine choked veranda. That desolate heath that you're dressed for was last week's play. Or maybe the play is right, and you're there in some overstuffed drawing room with your frilly cuffs, your accent just right, the lynchpin dramatic moment about to occur when the book shelves topple and the lights crash down from above splintering at your feet.

I see life's problems as something meant to be solved. I've raised children, managed a chaotic household, kept the home fires burning behind a husband with a high-powered career. A child with a lisp? Speech therapy. Crooked teeth? Orthodonture. Entertain the new partner? Sure. Roof leaking? Get it fixed. While it would be a ridiculous revision of history to say I managed all of these things gracefully, I did them. I fixed what needed to be fixed, did what needed to be done or at least tried my damnedest, perhaps going wrong (sometimes repeatedly) before choosing a solution that provided at least some relief.

So here I am in the fix-it play, chauffeuring my mother from one specialist to another. Googling into the wee hours to ascertain if it's one of her medications that makes her groan constantly, of if there's a diet to improve circulation or prevent flatulence. I've gotten her new shoes, new hearing aids, a cane, a this, and a that. But there's no fixing what she's got. She's old. She's not going to wake up tomorrow and be 70 again. Or even 80. I am in the wrong play.

And worse yet, there is no play. No script. No stage directions. It's improv. All improv. All the time. With a sad ending. I suck at that.

Escape from Pillville

Thanks to the presence of M who has been a regular weekend visitor, I drove away from Pillville on Saturday afternoon. The man who loves me and I met for dinner wherein we devoured a stack of panini and went to see my friend, the famous actor, peform in a show. I then had my typical anxiety attack while driving at night, nearly hyperventilated on the 2 South, and was actually relieved to be lost for a quarter of an hour in the man who loves me's hillside neighborhood. Nobody died. And I strengthened my complex love/hate relationship with my nav unit. "Turn right," she said.
"Are you fucking kidding me? I am not turning on that dark and narrow winding death trap of a miserable excuse of a city street. Figure out a different way to get me there, bitch."

I got there eventually. Nobody died.

When we were first dating, the man had to come get me after I'd tried to drive to his place and ended up on a street called Valley of the Moon or something like that. It was on the edge of a cliff and had no guard rail--and may have actually been on the moon. I was so freaked out that I felt as if I was bounding, gravity free, around those hairpin curves.

But it was a lovely respite, this Saturday night and Sunday morning, despite the hyperventilating and the getting lost, though I think the man who loves me would have, these three and one-half years later, come to retrieve me again. I believe he told me this very weekend, that he not only loved me, but that he liked me. Which is nothing short of amazing because, if I may be so retro as to dip my toes into the waters of Divorceville for a moment, it's worth noting that Mr. Ex neither loved me nor liked me.

But I no longer live in Divorceville. And I'm not sure I could even find my way there from here at this point. And if I tried I would, most probably, hyperventilate.

My respite also included breakfast with excellent coffee, perfectly toasted toast--which is always more of a miracle when someone makes it for you. Why is that?

I returned to Margaritaville/Pillville late Sunday afternoon to find everything in good order. There was leftover homemade lentil soup that M had made for dinner the night before. I heated it up, added quesadillas, and smoked trout, and there I was back in the rhythm of my regular routine. Just like that.

Today M left to go back to school. "I miss her," my mom said tonight at the dinner table. Yes, Monday is brim full of missing. And this particular Monday is also full of moon.

Money, Theater, Cancer and the Radiation Vacation or What To Do if You're a Millionaire

I've been freaking out about money this week. 


I have an immense attorney bill. Apparently, they forgot my  DIRECTIVE of a few months ago.


I have other big bills to pay this month, too. And I'm taking my mom on a "radiation vacation." We're going to stay at a hotel in Baltimore while she gets treatment for the new spot on her lung. I'm going to see if some of THE PLACES she used to work are still in business. I want to hear every story of hers that she feels like telling. We're going to go to the Inner Harbor and look at the boats. Have a drink while we stare out at the water. Stroll in her old neighborhood. Whatever she wants.


I'm doing it, damn it. I'll get caught up. There's a person I CAN'T WRITE ABOUT, and this quote was frequently uttered by that person because way back when I was doing set-dressing for a play by Thorton Wilder called The Matchmaker. This is a line of dialogue from the play:


The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous...and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.


Which is exactly what I thought when I took myself out to a play on Sunday afternoon. I had to go, I really did, and I was feeling crappy about the splurge. But when I got there, there was a sign on the door---something about, "economic stimulus," and all the tickets where reduced to $5.00. That's right.  THIS THEATER COMPANY does this $5.00 thing once per run--so you can't see this show for five bucks, but you could see a future one. But even if you paid full price for Heavier Than...it would be worth it.  And so next month when I have extra money again, I'll have to make it up to them because I really didn't expect to get a theater ticket for five bucks. I mean.... see quote above. 


So, dear millionaires, now that you can be pretty certain your taxes won't be raised, how about donating some money to the arts? Or cancer research? Or something.

The Performance

I'm back in Mr. Ex's house again. But he and the Little Missus have moved. They're living in some kind of luxury apartment with a plaza and city lights outside. Directly across the plaza is a theater with a hot new show, and I have four tickets. I'm not sure who is supposed to go with me. M. is there, but she seems to be babysitting for her dad's Kiddo who's stretched out on the sofa table next to a lamp that's teetering and about to fall. Everyone but me is oblivious to the peril--to both the Kiddo and the lamp. I'm on edge. What the hell is the Kiddo doing? He could get hurt. I'm on edge about the tickets too. They cost a fortune, and we had plans to go--at least M. and I did, but no no one's budging. I'm upset. I have to go back across the plaza anyway. I left my credit card and three twenty dollar bills at the pricey restaurant where M. and I had lunch. For some reason we were in a hurry when we left and the Maitre d' is waiting for me to come back. Finally I announce I'm leaving, and off I go alone.

Standing on the corner as I pass are Mr. Ex and the Little Missus and a half-dozen of their uber-couture-let's-wear-all-our-money-on-our-backs friends. The Little Missus has a new haircut--a curly bob and it's hanging in her eyes. When she sees me she covers her head with her shawl. I ignore all of them and rush first into the restaurant to sort things out there and then into the lobby of the theater. Having four tickets is a hassle, and I'm embarrassed that it's just me when I hand them to the usher. But once I'm seated, I realize I'm in the play so the extra tickets are the least of my worries. This piece of theater is something new. Part improv and part scripted. An audience member  gets put into the play each night--and tonight it's me. My seat is near the set and a spotlight is focused on me when I have something to say. I'm a wife in the play, and my husband is played by my old boyfriend, Billy, who has decided to take an acting job even though he's an award winning writer now in real life. There's stress in our marriage--our pretend theater-piece marriage.

Or maybe the stress is between Mr. Ex and me.
Real life and the play get mixed up at this point in the dream.

Billy The Husband is sick or he's an addict while Mr. Ex has to have some sort of surgery that is supposed to be minor but isn't. There are letters on the top shelf of a living room armoire addressed to me in the event of my husband's death (whoever he is--Billy or Mr. Ex,) and I wonder if the Little Missus knows that her dying husband is writing to me with his last wishes.
Somehow I survive the First Act.

During intermission, I offer to babysit for my friend Elizabeth's boys so she can see the rest of the play. They are little boys--maybe  5 and 3, and there's a special room that the usher tells me to take them to where they can be put to bed. The room is raked like an Elizabethan stage and the floor is padded. There are two antique beds that look like they've come out of theater storage. I get the boys settled in a corner and cover them up. They are  wearing matching sets of pajamas, but they're uneasy. They miss their mom. Still they seem receptive to me. I'm trying hard to make them happy.  I'm fixing them up a night light but it can't be too bright because there's an actor in the room trying to sleep before his next entrance. At last I settle on a flashlight that I rig  up by clamping it to the drawer of a large desk. The drawer is full of things that a lighting technician might use--gels and gel frames, a wrench. The flashlight projects the night sky onto the ceiling, and the boys are suffiently comforted to let me leave.

When I enter the theater, the show is not in progress. There's  a warm up act or some sort of improv going on. When I arrive the audience begins to murmur. They seem excited that I'm ready to begin, and then it's silent. They are waiting for the Second Act. Lights up. Billy The Husband enters. "You look like fuck-all," I say. "You're a fucking addict, and  I don't care who knows it." Billy The Husband looks awful. His honey-colored curls are dirty, and there are immense dark circles under his eyes.  I begin to cry and the audience gasps. We are all suffering.

My Pinteresque Marriage

I just read John Lahr's piece on Harold Pinter and his play,"The Homecoming" in the Dec. 24th & 31st 2007 issue of The New Yorker. Okay, so I'm a little behind. It was the week I started grad school. Five months after Mr. Ex dumped me. And I wasn't reading much due to an inability to concentrate, an inability to comprehend a more than a sentence at a time, an inablity to breathe in and breathe out. Not a good state of being for a student in an MFA program in creative writing. Oh well. That was then.

I loved Harold Pinter. He, along with Edward Albee, were the playwrights of the moment when I began college in 1970. A word about the pre electronic-connectedness time warp of the era; it took time for what was new and hot and interesting to work its way from England to the American Midwest. Unlike the Beatles, Pinter didn't do the Ed Sullivan Show. (Pinter joke: And if he had, they probably would have edited out the pauses.) "The Homecoming's" New York debut occurred in 1967, and John Lahr, who was a schoolteacher then, writes, "I didn't quite know what I'd seen; I knew only that the play's spectacular combination of mystery and rigor had taught me something new about life, about language, about the nature of dramatic storytelling."

I'm sure I couldn't have put it that articulately, but I knew something was up. Pinter's plays frightened me--and they also made me laugh. But like the first director of "The Birthday Party," I wanted someone to explain to me what they were about. "The weasel under the china cabinet," I remember reading in some interview with Pinter back then. That made me laugh too. Lahr writes in the New Yorker that Pinter refused the director any explanation. But Lahr quotes something Pinter did write about his work, "We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility of verifying the past. I don't mean merely twenty years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What was the nature of what took place, what happened?" This is what Pinter's plays ask the reader/viewer to figure out.

And there are those famous pauses Pinter wrote into his scripts. "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear," Pinter wrote. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place."

It's not that I didn't hear Mr. Ex's ruthless indifference. I just didn't want to. Anymore than I'd want to admit there was a weasel under my china cabinet.

Theater Tonight

Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo is a play populated by ghosts. Fraught with the tensions of war, the first
killing occurs within moments of the play's opening. Kev kills the tiger he and his fellow soldier
Tommy have been charged with guarding when the tiger (played by a human actor wearing tattered
clothes) bites off Tommy's hand. Tommy lies in a pool of blood, and the Tiger dies center stage but continues to speak as a human, and lets us know that though dead, he is still here. Welcome to the spirit world created by playwright Rajiv Joseph--and a stage where the unseen becomes seen and the dead still suffer in a place that--to a former Catholic--seems like purgatory.

Nearly every scene produces a ghost. Kev is haunted by the tiger and the war, and kills himself by trying
to saw off his own hand. He comes back to haunt Tommy who has returned to Bagdad with a Robo-cop
prosthetic hand, pissed off that he didn't even get a purple heart. The translator with Tommy and Kev's unit is haunted too. Once a talented gardener who specialized in topiary, he created a fantastical garden at the palace of the Hussein boys. He is visited by two ghosts--his young sister who was tortured and killed by Uday Hussein--and by Uday himself. Uday appears carrying the head of his brother in a plastic bag--a sort of double haunting. Already dead himself, he looked for the body of his brother everywhere, he tells us, but all that turned up was the head. Now he is a ghost carting around the head of a dead man.

In this realm of death  and war the tiger is the play's philosopher, and he ponders all the big questions. Where is God? Why do so many horrific things happen? How can a tiger be expected to rise above his murderous nature when God created him as a tiger in the first place? There's nothing new in the questioning, but the very presence of a  talking tiger from Bengal out of his element in  wartime Bagdad, dead but still sentient, puts a fresh context around the questions. 

Pretty much everyone suffers from a sense of dislocation in the play. The soldiers are in a foreign land longing for pussy and cheeseburgers. The translator can no longer practice his art. The tiger's camouflaging stripes meant for the jungle are worthless in the desert. The Iraqi characters we meet are lost too. Their once familiar world has been rendered unrecognizable. Even the beautiful beasts sculpted by the gardner at the behest of Uday don't belong. Green vines left untended in a desert are certain to perish.

The gardener/translator, who survives the various doses of Bagdad mayhem that unfold in the course of this play, seemed to me to be the character I cared about the most. Practically everyone hurts someone in this play (whether the hurting was intentional or not) and is haunted because of it. Even in peacetime, it's impossible to get through this life without wreaking some havoc, but when we hurt someone we love, the suffering can be worse than death. It was the gardener himself who brought his dear sister into the Uday's sadist realm and lost her although her brutal demise was never his intention. He is so tortured that he can't see his way clear to pulling the trigger on Uday's looted golden revolver that has passed from Tommy's hands, to Kev's, and finally to his own. 

The idea that fascinated me most in this play is that death need not halt our personal development. The tiger strives to be less violent and even dabbles in vegetarianism. Boneheaded Kev learns to appreciate the depth of Middle Eastern culture and becomes fluent in its languages. Tommy clutches his golden spoils of war as he lays dying, but sees they won't do him much good after he's dead. It's only the evil Uday who doesn't change. With his brother's bloody head in his hands, he seems forever destined to walk the afterlife as the most heinous of villains.

The play did not have a satisfying ending in my opinion, nor did its various dynamic scenes hang together as a whole, but there was plenty of good writing nonetheless.

La Meme

I've been tagged by an excellent blogger, Elizabeth Aquino at http://elizabethaquino.blogspot.com  Her blog a moon worn as if it had been a shell is nothing short of remarkable.

This is one of those question things like they do on Facebook.  I'm supposed to answer them and then tag more people who will do the same etc.  I like the title of this one--La Meme is French and translates to "the same."  We are all more alike than we imagine, I think.  Plus, I guess La Meme  is also a brand of absinthe, which sounds really good to me right now.

Here goes:

What are your current obsessions?

The man I'm dating but very rarely see these days. The indelible mark that seems to have been left on me by my divorce.

Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?

White silk pajamas

Last thing you bought?

2 wallets--for my mom and for her twin sister for mother's day

What are you listening to?

Birds singing & one of my dogs breathing deeply in her sleep

Favourite kid's film

Lady and the Tramp

Favourite Holiday Spots

southern Greece, anywhere in France, Rome, New York City,Cambria on the central coast of California

What are you reading right now?

I just finished Pope Brock's American Gothic and am about to start a book that mysteriously ended up in my stack--I think because someone (I can't remember who) said I had to read it.  It's called The Living End by Stanley Elkin.

Four words to describe me: 

moody, struggling, grateful,sad

Guilty pleasure?

kahlua in a glass of milk at bedtime

Who or what can make you laugh until you are weak?

So many things...I once could not get up out of my seat after a performance of Noises Off that I saw on Broadway.

First Spring thing?

I planted a lemon tree and a kumquat tree on my patio.

Planning to travel next?

Minnesota, Iowa & Greece--all in the month of May!

What do you wish for most?

Other than world peace, etc? My one true love.

Best thing you ate and drank recently?

A made to order tofu bowl from Whole Foods

When & with whom did you last eat dinner by candlelight?

3 days ago with my daughter and the elusive man I might still be dating.

Favourite ever film?

Cassablanca .

Care to share some wisdom?

Asking for help is very difficult, but sometimes necessary...and very, very...helpful.

If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be?

I would never ever think of my ex-husband again.

What's your motivation for starting another day?

My dogs have to be walked or they'll eat my couch and tip over the dining room chairs.

Rules of la meme:
Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question. Add one question. Tag 8 people (I'm tagging only four)

I tag:

Barry at http://www.schwumpdumps.blogspot.com

Julie at http://www.julesarose.blogspot.com/

http://tovadarling.blogspot.com/

 Musings of the Lame

Ghosts

I went to the theatre twice today--a matinee of the Martha Clark dance narrative, Garden of Earthly Delights, and tonight, Blithe Spirit. Garden of Earthly Delights, based on the Hieronymos Bosch painting, traces humankind's fall from innocence into corruption and then ultimately into an ascendancy or transfiguration back to our higher nature. That was my interpretation, anyway. But I'm not sure if the choreographer/director wanted her audience to consider the possibility of achieving this last transformation on this earth or after we leave it. It's a question, oddly enough, that carried over quite nicely to this evening's performance of Noel Coward's farce, Blithe Spirit, in which a husband is faced with the ghost of his dead wife who comes to visit him after a seance and causes havoc between him and his second wife. Love, the absolute pull of it, is what brought her back, the medium explains, and the ghost herself admits that she missed him terribly. The ghost is the same charmingly troublesome person she was when she was alive and ends up inadvertently causing the death of the second wife who comes back to haunt the husband as well. It's all very funny, of course, but the moments where we see the longing that reaches from one world into the next and where husband and wife carry on  their quarrels even after death are more than just farce.

I thought about depravity this afternoon after the matinee--about the way people destroy one another in both large and small ways. I felt profoundly sorry for my Mr. Ex. He hurt the people who loved him most and it may be a very long time before he's again regarded with love and respect. And I thought, too, about what a losing game revenge is and how hard it is to lay down that sword and shield--and how heavy it is if you keep carrying it.

Tonight, I thought about ghosts and the two that I've experienced. My father came for a quick look at my older daughter a couple of days after we brought her home from the hospital, and my father-in-law (whom I never met in "real" life) came to me in a very vivid dream welcoming me into the family the night our second daughter was conceived.  

In these post-divorce months, I've never been more convinced that Love is a life-altering force. Love is so strong that it can pull our ghosts back to visit us, and it's what saves us from destroying each other and ourselves.  Without it, we are doomed.

I walked back to my hotel after the play tonight--16 blocks and I took it slow, trying to notice the people and the sights around me, and think about all the times I took those after theatre walks with my husband.  Over the years, he and I saw more than 100 plays in New York City, but now the curtain has come down.  It's an odd feeling--a little bit ghostly--but I'm having a wonderful trip without him.

When the curtain came down after Blithe Spirit tonight there was a ghostly image of the playwright lightly hovering on its surface.  A wonderful directorial choice,  and I left the theatre contemplating what I'd like to leave behind in this world,  and what I'll be dragging behind me when I "cross over."  I hope it will be lighter than the giant suitcase, I'll be rolling to Penn Station tomorrow. 

Year of the Hiker

Thanks to my friend Carol, I saw a really good play last weekend.  It's stuck with me all week. Set in a small town in Ireland, the play takes its title from the nickname given to Lacey, the husband and father who abandoned his family to fulfill his wanderlust. His cruel departure which left his wife with two young sons and a baby daughter was such a shocking event that the villagers have been known to mark time by it-- "Ah, that horse died the year the hiker left." When the play opens, the children are grown and twenty years have passed. Lacy returns in the second scene and he's an old man with liver cancer who's come home to die and of course his reappearance opens old wounds for all of the other characters.  The wife says that, at first, after he left she missed him like the beating of her own heart.  And then that feeling was replaced by ferocious anger.  It was years, she says, before she could think of him the way she thinks of a hundred other people. There's some pretty amazing reconciliation at the end.

It's at Theatre Banshee in Burbank.

Serendipity

I'm having dinner tonight with my friend, Suzanne. Then we'll go to see a play that our friend, Larry, co-wrote and is performing in. These are the moments that keep me going. Little by little the giant hole in my life is being stitched up.  My previous dinner out was with a new friend I made in Athens.  We were strangers until we ended up on the same tour bus to Delphi. When we had our dinner later that night a little girl came to our table selling flowers.  She was irresistible. He bought two red roses and gave them to me. "Remember, serendipity could be just a bus ride away," he wrote in an email a couple of days ago.

It was serendipity that brought Suzanne and me together.  We had a mutual friend who kept telling each of us how much we'd like one another and that he'd have to get us together.  Before he managed that we both got cast in the same play and have been friends ever since.