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.

The Play's the Thing

I tried out a bereavement group yesterday. It went really well. As well as bereavement groups can go, I guess. Still, if there were a pedometer on my heart, it would have read well over 10,000 steps. I came home and did this:

Today I'm doing this:

because I feel guilty when I go up to my room and put a pillow over my head. I mean, my mom spends a lot of time in her room, and I think I should be around when she comes out. From this vantage point, I can see her immediately if she heads for the kitchen, so it's a chance to check in. I have a lap desk that makes it kind of comfortable to lie on my back and write. So yeah, here I am, flattened by I don't know what. I'm not actually sick, just...flattened.

I had an actor's nightmare last night although it's been years since I performed in a play.

I missed my entrance and heard the actors on stage making up lines and re-cuing me. I entered in my underwear instead of my costume and began improvising. It was sort of a plot to cover up my mistake  because it was my fault that I'd missed my entrance, but I wanted to make up an excuse about a stuck zipper in my costume. So we improved and got the scene back on track, all the while the three of us on stage were eyeballing one another with that actors' panic. When I exited I didn't have long backstage before my next entrance and I was so rattled that I really needed to look at a script so I could read over the next scene. I asked everyone if they had a copy and no one did. "I really need to see the scene in print before I go out there," I said. "I have to see it on paper." I said that over and over again to everyone, but all the other actors were off book and no one could help me.

At the end of yoga this morning, as I lay on the floor in savasana, it occurred to me that yeah, I would really love a glimpse of the next big scene in real life. What to say. Who'll be there. Do I stand, or sit on a pretty chair, or lie on the floor in a heap? What does my costume look like? Do I have any props? Is the play a tragedy or a comedy? Anyone? Does anyone have a copy of the script? I just need to see the words in print. I need to see it on paper. I promise I'll get up.  I won't miss my entrance.

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.

Report from Pillville: The Other Side of the Story

While things are going well with my mom (the CT scans did NOT show any cancer or tumors as cause for her weight loss,) things are going less well for the man who loves me. Still in the hospital, he's not really feeling great. However, his appetite might be making a comeback. I will take good news where I find it.

I took an early morning walk on the beach before I went to visit him and photographed from a  different point of view. You've seen dozens of pictures of the water, the waves, the islands on this blog, so how about this for a change?

view of the sand and the sky taken standing in the ocean

Years ago when I was acting, a sage director once told me it was absolutely essential to step out of the character's skin before leaving the theatre, especially when playing someone sick or dying. I frequently wonder what it's like to have the ancient body my mom possesses. My knees are 61. What do almost 90-year-old knees feel like? I wonder what it's like to "pull for breath" as my boyfriend so often says he does. I wonder about so many of the things that he and my mother are going through. I put myself in their shoes, but only for a brief moment. Then I step out again.