Love Letter

It was storming. Lightening flashed through the little hand painted curtains in the breakfast nook and I picked up another one of Nana's cheese straws, crunched down hard, and spyed intently over her shoulder. She had the winning hand. She scooped up the pennies, nickels, dimes with her knotty oak tree hands and slid them to the tables edge. "Penelope" she beamed. I scribbled it on the yellow legal pad under her name. She was winning. Penelope was right behind Prudence. We were naming a baby.....

And then she was here. I wore patent leather shoes and was in charge of Kimbies in the lobby. Curty Boy was with Nana at home....waiting. Every magazine had a Norman Rockwell picture on the back. Kimbies stood with her face pressed against the glass of the dirty aquarium. She stood on her tip toes, stretched, wanted to put her fingers in the green water and "pet" the fish. I wouldn't let her. I knew that she would scoop one up and bring it home to sleep with her in the pink princess bed and in the morning Robbie would flush it down the toilet. I let her stare while I did whirly twirls on the hospital terazza, scuffing up their buff job and my patent leathers. They didn't let us see her....but the nurse with the cardboard cap came out and told us we had a sister and that our Mommy said "I've had this baby before"..... We jumped up and hooped and hollered, spun in tired circles....having no idea whatsoever what that meant....

"She looks just like you" Mom whispered to me on the phone, the eldest, in charge of getting the hoo~hah, and I beamed. When they brought her home five days later, I stared. Chinese eyes, wild black hair with static electricity.....fists punching the air, feet kicking. At night I would do my homework, scribble on my notebook, brush my teeth, say my prayers, and then sneak down the hall to stare at her......"the baby just like me, so different....I've had this baby before"....

There were ten years between us. She cooed, I said "cool". She crawled, I scrambled on my Sting Ray bike. She tried vienna sausages, I tried raw oysters. She pitched fits, I pitched girlscout tents....

And then it became a blur.....
My teenage years, Kimbies, Curts, hers....Chanty's
Our lives pretzeled, circled, quilted...

And we grew up.

Peace~love
"I've had this baby before" she whispered....

The Old Man is Snoring.....

This is what it was like in the beginning. The morning after Tropical Storm Faye arrived. Before the rains never went away. Before they had to send out boats. Before there were fish in the streets, snakes in houses, baby pictures wilted and wet, floating like yesterday's garage sale signs....

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This is Kimbies front yard rolling like a river.....And then the batteries in Olivias camera went dead and the view out the window went to sea...

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But this time....On the seventh day, the river's yet to crest. Everyday more and more homes are gobbled up by mad water, racing, running, trying to escape, but with no where left to go but up.....

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up the living room walls,

down the halls,

under the swingsets,

down the slides....

under doorways,

into mailboxes,

into the backseat of cars not moved soon enough.....

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Everyday another Detour sign goes up, and another home is wrapped in yellow crime scene tape, an obscene picket fence for the news cameras...

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My friend Shimmerings said it best,

"if only we could click our heels"......

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There's no place like home.....

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Pray for the sun....

I don't like hot beer

Ballad to Bobby Brown....

I saw you there. Inside out and backwards. 17 or 21, ID flicked, flipped, flashed.... you were a natural. I've imagined a million times what you would look like, walk like, talk like ten years, twenty, a lifetime from now. And then I saw you. In yesterday.

Toothy grin, crooked and upward, my favorite "I just had a shot" smile...Skinny legs, jeans too short, but frayed, worn, loved..."In case I meet a hippie".....Mind racing, writing Country Top 10 songs on legal pads, eyes dancing....rock and roll and punk...strobe lights flashing.....And that f'n grin....that gun it grin...race, tumble, roll....Gun it, grin...

I don't dream about you anymore. Wonder what you're doing. Tink you. But I miss you. And I saw you in yesterday. 20 years younger. Before you were you. And just so you know, I laughed....And danced ....

And when I came home,
jeans crumpled in a pile,
key in the door,
memories plopped on the kitchen counter,
I slept....
and thanked God I wasn't there in the beginning....

but was there for the end....

Deja Vue...

Hello Tomorrow

My legs were crossed, all lady like, and my right sneakered foot was just~a~swingin' in tandem with hers, crossed at the knee. We were keeping mad time together. Pacing in place. The lobby was full... Broken lives hooked to IV poles, held up by other's... faces blank, tired, scared, old~schooled. Hugs and how~to~do's were quietly passed in "shhhhhhhh.....we're in church now" fashion. I flipped through the pages of the Reader's Digest so fast and hard, it sounded like I was shufflin' poker cards, and I concentrated on making that same sound over and over again.
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And then they called her name. For a moment I wasn't sure I could walk without having my legs crossed, right one swinging. What other nervous tic could I develop that would be socially acceptable? And hide my fear..... What other nervous tic could I invent that could pass off for strength? How was I going to catch her when she collapsed? And who would catch me?
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He smiled. That handsome Doctor smile. Babyesque brown eyes, old already. Lips curled just enough to make you wonder who his Dentist was, and why on earth he chose to practice this type of medicine. Why on earth he didn't want to be a Soap Opera Star....
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She had been summoned here. To this room at this time with these people. For the news. We waited. He talked. Drew pictures. Circled foreign words on endless reports. Nodded his head up and down as if we understood. And then we did. Sweet Jesus! Remission! Gone! Poof! Not there! Unremarkable scans. Nothing here, there, over there, in that.....crawling, corrupting, eroding. Nothing!


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We stood in the parking lot, in the rain, and cried. Laughed. Hallelujahed the sky! Tried to dial numbers. Skinny's. Papa's. The kids. The boys. And then we decided to party.....
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.\And we know how to party.....
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Thursday night, Friday night....into the wee, wee hours. At 4'oclock this morning, I fell into bed. Kimbies curled up like a rolly poly on my little living room couch. Her dancin' boots in a heap, her little blue bandana

still on her noggin'.....
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And I slept like I've never ever slept before....
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In peace.
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With Stevie Ray Vaughan there in the shadows, whispering lullabyes for the soul......
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And Tomorrow, just outside the window....
Smiling...

Spooky little night....

I heard it from the living room. Over the dog panting in whispers from the leather chair. Over the air humming, rattling the vents. Over the funny sky, winteresque at 90 degrees, churning outside the windows. The ticking. The tocking. The incessent heartbeat of time. Just before the storm broke loose, I paraded into the kitchen to stare the clock in the face and bellow...."I hear you!"


And then I saw it....

The second hand chirping at seven. Over and over again. The minute hand frozen. Rickety tickety tock. Time stuck in a rut, wearing a groove pattern in the plastic face of yesterday/tomorrow/now. I stood barefooted and stared. Willed the hands to move. Lightening flashed from behind the fiesta ware. Thunder clapped. Rickety tickety tock. The second hand quivered, lingered, shuttered, slammed back into the 7th house. Just beyond midnight.


A friend called and said he had seen a ghost. Felt it. The second hand shimmied.

Every call I took or made was disconnected. My end. Their end. Disconnected.


Spooky little night....
By the time I wake up in the morning, the batteries should finally be dead. Time will have stopped and finally I'll recharge. Set the hands where I want them

and

start all over again....


At the beginning.....


the middle....


or the end....


Wherever the music plays...

"Will you be my friend?"

I layed belly to the sky, toes draped lazily over the edge of the yellow vinyl raft, fingers air drumming in the water....drifting....in circles. I never opened my eyes, pretending to know when the clouds passed and exactly how they were shaped by the heat on my eyelids.....rubber stamps of sunshine in the cool negative shape of angels, elephants on their hind legs, horses with wings.....

I listened to the wind. To the trinkets in the sky. The natty faded towels on the clothesline; a sudden parade of American Flags....exactly the same size, the same color, as my kindegarten year.....hand over my heart ....the fabric billowing, the chain clanking hauntingly against the pole. Squirrels, or rats maybe, I don't know, ratatatted back and forth across the crooked fence line, racing madly to nowhere. There was traffic in the distance, and then close. Boom boxes rattling. Gears shifting. A siren. Still, I didn't open my eyes. This was my peace. And I was gonna live it.....

I don't remember dreaming. I don't remember the 45 minutes I disappeared from earth forever.

But I remembered how I got there. Comfy cozy in the lazy round river. Waiting on the boys. Floating round and round and round....saying thank you......

Peace where you can find it....

I'm too many people. Our dictationist, Sweet Sunny Anne, had a stroke in January, and I hauled her little machine home and took over where she left off. Everyday she goes to Rehab and every night I type on and on and on.... She's learning to walk again and talk again....and maybe one day, live again.... Until then I'm typing....

My right arm, Emily, is finally on the kidney transplant list. It's her turn now. We watch the clock and wait for the beep.... "It's your turn now"..... and I pray it won't be long. She's irreplaceable, so when she retired at the early age of "I have to", I didn't even try.

Chey got offered the moon and the stars on some crazy undiscovered planet, and after 17 years, flew the coop, feathers flying. I miss her. The good Doctor misses her. The patient's miss her. And if I didn't have straight blonde hair, I could pass for her...

I wake up kicking, tossing, flinging, flailing. remembering everything I forgot to do the day before. I grit my teeth. Make endless lists that I forget to read and plop them on the empty refrigerator.

Today, my part~time help quit. She was an angel. She wants to live her life. Not spend it clockin' in..... counting change....X-ing off days on the calender for being free. She wants to be free now.

I smiled. She cried and told me it was OK to cuss her. I hugged her.

Tonight I came home and pulled out the markers, the pencils, the pens..... and colored. For the first time since hell broke out at my house , a mermaid the color of a 1000 tadpoles surfaced on the bent pages of my notebook. Her peace sign, tethered to her neck, floating up.... up....up....free....

And I remembered,
in the end peace wins....

You gotta live it, to know it....