Angel

really was her name, though she looked more like Wonder Woman, tall and lithe with large, firm breasts. She taught gym. She lived across the street from my father those two years when he was paralyzed and I stayed much of the week to care for him.

She was deeply tanned, and when she jogged, which was often, she wore practically nothing, two brief bits of cloth that left the whole neighborhood breathless. With each springing step, those two wisps covering everything that was necessary—yes, but still—did not so much cling as float. The old men, my father in his wheel-chair included, watched with all the rowdy memory of youth clamoring through their veins. The women were askance, and the children wild with the tumult Angel created in the adults with her s-t-r-e-t-c-h, s-t-r-e-t-c-h, leap as everyone marveled at her long limbs, at the way those miniscule bits of clothing rippled without falling away.

Once some out-of-town pipe layers were working in the heat, making repairs along the street. It was said that when Angel sprinted past them, five of them fell into the trench.

My father is six years dead. His house is sold. The pipes are repaired and water no longer gurgles in the street. Families have moved and some have split, including Angel’s. I feel I am growing old. Sometimes, just for the joy of it, I see Angel in that bound that would have her almost flying, the old men gawking as much with appreciation as lust, the women protecting their flocks of children from what they are not quite sure, the pipe layers tumbling into the ditch.

If I can hold the image long enough a whole lifetime of images emerge, my life on my father’s street, and more, the boys kissed, the babies held, cemetery gatherings and fragments of stories told and retold, each singular in its beauty, a kaleidoscope of colors as vivid as any Chagall vision in stained glass, while above them all Angel flies across an immense expanse of blue.

Baby Daddy--The Legacy of the Great Society

In the courtroom:

D.A. to Potential Juror Guy: How do you know the defendant?

P. J. G.: We are somewhat related.

D. A.: How are you somewhat related?

P.J.G.: He’s my sister’s brother.


Government officials, when you make laws and institute programs to help us feckless citizens, perhaps your first imperative should be, Above all, do no harm.

Nah, what’s the pay-off of that?

The Mysterious Universe

Someone who is close to me, let’s just call this person Zen, has put in his years at work and gradually spent more and more of his leisure time in his comfy chair. He told me he woke up one morning wondering why he had dreamed about his coworker Jim, who in the dream had come into Zen’s office to ask a question, just an ordinary question about work.

The next morning Zen spotted Jim going into someone else’s office. Jim was wearing a herringbone vest, a garment Zen did not remember seeing except in the dream from the night before. He knew then that Jim was going to come into his office and ask him a question. He knew the question Jim would ask.

And it came to pass. Jim in his herringbone vest entered Zen’s office and asked the mundane question about work that Zen had dreamed of.

Which explained to Zen the problems he had been having occasionally. He would think he had completed a task only to discover it undone. Obviously he had been dreaming as he had done those tasks, which created some confusion in his waking routine.

It is known to the physicists that if we travel at the speed of light, we move into the future. There are some spiritualists who believe our consciousness can leave our body and make trips on its own.

So Zen’s dreams pose for me a couple of questions.

Why, if Zen’s consciousness is capable of leaving his body at night and traveling at the speed of light, doesn’t it seek more exotic locales than his office, where he has gone for the past twenty-five years in order to pay the rent?

And:

Is it this same disinclination to go time traveling that keeps Zen from, just occasionally, taking a vacation, traveling at the speed of the interstate, and seeing something more exotic in this dimension while he is awake?

LBS (Leaky Brain Syndrome) Reversed…I’m telling you because it amuses me.

I have been reading Harriet Doerr’s Stones For Ibarra. It’s the only book I’ve ever finished and actually started reading again immediately, though I am not sure why I am doing so. The chapters, originally short stories in themselves, stop, like life does…open ended, and open to the the connections we cannot grasp. While I’m reading I’m transported to Sara Everton’s Ibarra, among the nopal and the maguey cactus, the stunted trees: the ash, the olive, the pepper, the jacaranda. One reader on Amazon complained 'All the characters in this book are very one dimensional. You "see" what they do and "see" where they live, but you don't get much below their surfaces.' As if you know your own spouse, child, parent, cousin, store clerk. As if you read the name of vegetation you’ve never seen, and know it. Still, I am there in Ibarra, waiting for that exploding moment that leaves me with nothing to cling to, that opens some essential vein in the universe.


Sometimes instead of reading, I watch television with The Boyfriend. Lately I’ve been trapped by David Duchovny’s Californication. In one episode Hank Moody takes his problematic father to the airport. “What’s this?” the father asks. “A tree?” Hank replies (the father is definitely not the only problematic character).


It’s a jacaranda, says one part of my brain. Immediately another part jeers. A jacaranda? Where did that come from? You don’t know what one looks like. You don’t even know how to pronounce it. Jacaranda? Ha!

Later in the program, after the father has died, after Hank has returned home, he asks his estranged partner the same question. “What’s this tree?” he says. The camera zooms into the ferny leaves, the clusters of lilac-colored blooms. It looks like a pine with rhododendron blossoms to us. “It’s a jacaranda,” she says, and reaches out to lightly touch a flower.

Big Box Store Story #1,127

"You look tired," said the customer third deep in the line.

"Me?" said the clerk. "I'm always tired."

"What happened to that guy?" asked the customer.

"What guy?" said the clerk.

"You know," said the customer. She lowered her voice. "Your baby daddy."

"Him," said the clerk, sounding a bit chirpier. "He broke parole. He back for 2 1/2 years."

"2 1/2 years?"

"Yeah," said the clerk, "I don't know what they're going to do about that murder charge."

postcard from a resale shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, found in a book I’ve long not read

AERIAL VIEW OF KONA’S FAMOUS LANDMARKS

This beautiful view is of Kona’s beautiful Hulihee Palace and the Mokauikalla Church.


This the church where I saw the Hawaiian (Soreau (?) parents of bride)—She had on long white lace over taffeta, by the way—typical U.S.—Her very heavy mother in vividly bright acquaish blue, full long dress, fitted at top with big ruffle around low neck & bottom of skirt, wept throughout.

Just a little fun with LBS (Leaky Brain Syndrome)

Which is what the Boyfriend and I call those incidents when other people seem to read my thoughts, even though they don’t know they are reading my thoughts. If I don’t fall off the blogging wagon again, I’m going to be writing more about this because it’s weird and more fun than television.

Eight years ago I received a small beaded coin purse from an old lady. An OLD lady. It’s the sort of thing an old lady or a strange child might enjoy, or a family member might toss in the trash while cleaning house. I admire this coin purse, and every time I use it, I think of the OLD Lady, and the people who might enjoy such a coin purse, and I always think someone else like me might comment on it, because I comment on things that catch my eye, only nobody ever has, and it’s begun to occur to me that they don’t because they think I’m an OLD lady, so the coin purse is just the sort of thing OLD ladies carry around, thus not worth noting.

This past week-end while I was at the hospital and getting weary and lacking a bit of stimulation that wasn’t the stress of just not worrying about my brother-in-law, plus so continuously running the hospital maze of halls I thought my name was Alice, I stood in front of the Cups bar and thought (very strongly)….where are my people? (don’t worry about that question…it’s on the list for later blog vagaries). I will know the next person, or rather the very first person who will have ever commented on my coin bag is a member of my thought commune.

And just as soon as this silent declaration of thoughts ended, the twentish person behind the counter said, “That’s a wonderful coin bag. I love it.”