The Accursed

 With the bus schedule, I’m going to be either a few minutes late, or a half hour early. I opt for a few minutes late, which will save me a half hour of precious sick time. 

The bus ride is fine. Check in is fine. I’m only seven minutes late. 

A man with no legs below his knees presses the blue button and speeds into the office in a fancy manual wheelchair. 

“Oh, you are remembering me? That is such sweet of you.” 

Courtney comes out and scolds me for being late. “From now on, don’t bother checking in downstairs.”

“But I thought I had to. You made a big deal when I wasn’t doing it.”

“Well, from now on just come straight up here and check in with Bree.” She wears scrubs covered with autumn leaves arranged thinner at the top and denser at the bottom, as if they’re falling in piles around her waist.

The appointment is fine. Courtney cuts off my cast with a scissors and says the wound doesn’t look too bad. I’m not paying full attention, like I’m only half there. I’m losing interest in this whole endeavor. It is, to be perfectly frank, all quite tedious. But where is the other half of me? Listening and hoping that KC swoops in to rescue me. 

But she doesn’t, there’s just Dr. Taggert, who is upbeat and says the wound doesn’t look too bad. 

“You were all healed up! You should go home more often! Whatever you do back there, you should do more of it!” I tell her it’s the healing power of motherly love. She doesn’t laugh, so I say some other things to try to make her laugh, and then she laughs. I forget what I say a moment after I’ve said it. She gives Gladys some advice about her 401K and slices off a bit of callus and flitters off. Oh I forgot, Gladys is there too. Gladys says things, Karen says things, Courtney says things as she wraps me up in another football. It suddenly occurs to me that they call it a football not because it resembles one but because it makes your foot into a ball. I also remember for no real reason that in the sport of football –association football, that is, or soccer- there is a kick known as a knuckleball, after the baseball pitch, which makes the ball wobble or move in an unpredictable fashion. This kick is also called the dry leaf, the dead leaf, or, in Italy, the accursed. I feel like my whole life is a series of knuckleballs. Or dead leaves. Or… you know. 

It’s none of those things, though. It’s not even cursed. It’s just a life. Even if it doesn’t feel like much of one at the moment. 

Goddammit, KC, I wish you were hanging on my arm blathering on about the Gauls, or Herculaneum, or Gilgamesh. I promise I would hang on every word. Or at least pretend to. 

Courtney shows me pictures of her dog, then says they don’t have an appointment for me next week yet, asks if it’s okay if Bree calls me tomorrow. When I leave I see that I only have six minutes to make my bus. I’m never going to make it. 

But surprise, surprise; I make it. 

The Light

The doors open and raucous laughter bursts from the bus as I haul my scooter aboard.

“It’s my favorite rider,” the driver who thinks she knows me says, continuing to laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone so stubborn. I never know what I’m going to get when I stop for you.” I need to reiterate that I do not have any sort of history with this woman, and that she must be mistaking me for someone else. 

“I won’t be on here anymore after Thanksgiving,” she says. I ask what line she’ll be on and she says the 72 and the 33. 

“Ugh,” I say.

“No I’m really excited. Three days a week, ten hour shifts. Four day weekends, baby!” She again erupts into wild laughter.

I ask what line she would drive if she had her pick. She thinks a moment, then says, “I really like the 2.”

“Oh you like those really big buses?” The 2 is the only line in town that uses double-sized buses. I love them myself, they’re really roomy, and they arrive every fifteen minutes. 

“Oh yeah I love those bad boys, even though –you probably can’t tell when I’m in the seat, but I’m really short. I mean, crazy short.” I ask if she sits on a phone book before realizing there aren’t phone books any more. She says she has a cushion. “My daughters are five six and five seven, though. My husband’s six two. Ex husband.”

We chat the entire way, insipid small talk about the various bus lines and the colorful characters who patronize them. We have to shout to be heard over the roar of the vehicle. She says her own car is a tiny, sleek Ferrari. “I have a really heavy foot,” she laughs.

 When I disembark, she once again explodes with laughter. “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you,” she says.

When I get to the admissions desk, the usual woman isn’t there, which disappoints me; I had been all set to practice flirting with her. A brusque woman asks me my birth date a number of times before it sticks. 

“Do you know where you’re going?” she asks. 

“I think I remember,” I say.

Bridget greets me in the waiting area. “I heard the good news,” she says. I wheel into room one and I lay my coat and hat on my scooter and she rolls it away. 

“Uh oh. There’s drainage,” she says. I sigh. I’m disappointed but not surprised; I walked a few blocks to the Schnitzer Concert Hall Friday night to see the Decemberists play with the Oregon Symphony. I took it slow and careful, but apparently not slow and careful enough. 

I feel myself start to sink into the earth, but then I think: No. It’s frustrating, but don’t let yourself give in to despair like you usually do. You don’t have to.

She wipes and prods the wound then says, “It’s very shallow. Now that it’s cleaned up it looks a lot better. I want a second opinion though.” She leaves and returns with Jenny.

“Well it’s definitely open again,” Jenny says. “That’s a bummer.”

“It’s my fault, I walked on it,” I say. “It was stupid, I know, but I thought it would be okay.”

“These things happen,” she says. “It’s not your fault.”

She’s kind of comfort me, but is really is my fault. I’ve been through this so many times that I know that I really need to take things extremely slow. How long did Taggert say it takes for the skin to be even three quarters of its normal strength? Six months, a year?

“I’m just so impatient,” I say, without bitterness. “I want to pretend things are normal, and they’re just not. They’re never going to be. I need to get this through my head.”

Jenny tells me her and her husband were at the Decemberists show as well. “It would have been so fun to see you there!” she says. She was happy they played her favorite song, Down by the Water. “I forgot how beautiful that place is,” she says. I usually find the Schnitz gaudy, but during one song they lit the walls deep blue, and I looked up toward the wedding-cake ceiling and saw that one of the balconies was lit golden yellow, with a huge sculpture of a woman’s face looking out of it. It looked truly magical. 

When she and Bridget leave I force myself to look at the jagged horizon line of where my toes once were. The skin is mottled and dry and I know it would be immensely satisfying to reach down and peel off some of the flakes. But I don’t. 

Karen pokes her head in and asks how the foot looks and I smile and give her a thumbs-down. “Aw,” she says.

Vicki and Bridget come in followed by Doctor Thompson who, having been appraised of the situation, she greets me warily, no doubt expecting me to be upset. I say hi and ask how she’s doing and she says it’s been a strange day. She takes the gauze off the foot and says it doesn’t look bad. “It looks like you had a blister,” she says. Bridget says the skin was very macerated. I ask what causes that and she says usually moisture. “Maybe you got it wet in the shower by accident,” the doctor says, as she carefully scrapes away the dead skin. “This is the fun part for me. There’s really no need for debridement, I’m just going to remove this so it doesn’t become a bacteria cafeteria. Ha, I rhymed!” I tell her she should make Schoolhouse Rock-style cartoon about wound care. That would’ve had Dr. Taggert howling but Thompson just asks me if I want another football or if I want to do a hard cast. I tell her if she thinks a football is enough then I would prefer that.

“I think it’ll be fine. This really doesn’t look bad.” 

As Bridget starts the football, Vicki reminds me that they’ll be closed Thanksgiving and the day after. “You actually get a four day weekend? Did you win that with the strike?” They laugh and I say “I’m glad you reminded me, I can’t come in next Thursday, it’s the grand opening of the new museum wing and my boss said I had to be there.” Vicki leaves to get Bree, who appears with a paper schedule. I make an appointment for Tuesday at 3:40, which will give me an extra hour of work. I realize I may be subjected to Dr. Taggert’s ministrations, but I also know that KC works that day. 

As she wraps my foot, Bridget keeps dropping things on the floor. “I guess I’m tired,” she says, throwing half a roll of batting in the trash. She asks how things are going at work and tells me her boyfriend works for Laika, the local stop-motion animation company. She says he does the lighting for their movies. “Coraline, Boxtrolls…it’s intense work, twelve hour days.” It must be fascinating, figuring out how best to illuminate all those little worlds with their tiny, incredibly detailed inhabitants.

When she finally finishes the cast, Bridget says, “This’ll be better by Tuesday.” I tell her I doubt it but she says, “No, it will.” As if there is not a shred of doubt in her mind.

Maybe. And maybe it will open up again, and close back up again, and open back up again, a light blinking on and off and on and off until it finally becomes burns out.

Unwilling to let myself get upset, but trying to make sure I’m not suppressing anything, I remain cheerfully dour to the end, and tell them all that barring any unforeseen incidents, I’ll see them Tuesday. As I head downstairs the floor does not open up beneath my wheels, the vortex does not swallow me up. I do fee that I’ve just missed my bus, but instead of being aggravated I do something I never do, and treat myself to an espresso at Starbucks. The place is aggressively festive and the staff is already dressed in Santa hats and sweaters. I don’t like their coffee but the caffeine gives me a pleasant lift as I sit in the lobby before finally rolling up the hill. 

An old woman sits beside me in the bus shelter, smelling of something rotting on the beach. When the bus arrives, I gesture for her to get on before me, and she smiles sweetly and says thank you. As we drive off, drops cover the windshield like a curtain of jewels. The sun tries and fails to break through the clouds, giving them a sickly yellow glow that is reflected in the windows of the houses and the cars, all painted blue with dusk. It’s eerily beautiful, and I want to cry because the world is awful and people are terrible and everything is going to be fine.

Dolly

    The old bus shelters in downtown Portland huge bulbous ovals with translucent bubble roofs, all brown, seventies retrofuturism at its zenith. A few years after I moved here they replaced them all with minimalist slabs of glass to keep homeless people from huddling inside them. Aside from having no character, these new bus stops are no protection at all from the rain, especially the way it’s raining today, driving sheets blown sideways by the wind. By the time my bus arrives, I’m drenched. Amazing to live in a world that hates homeless people so much it’s willing to make everyone else wet and miserable in its efforts to shoo them away. 

    I attempt to doze on the bus without much success. I disembark, roll down the hill, and stop outside the hospital to peel the thick layers of gluey leaves from my scooter wheels. 

    I get the usual woman at the counter and spew out my name and date of birth before she can say anything. “You didn’t give me a chance to guess,” she says. 

    “Next week,” I promise.

    Karen opens the door for me immediately, looking cozy in a fuzzy pink Columbia jacket. Rogue wisps of hair curl out from her pulled-back hair. She asks me how my trip was and I tell her and she says, “Hoo boy.” 

    My blood pressure is high but she says she’ll retake it when we’re done. She unwinds my poorly-wrapped bandages and says, “Huh. This looks…” She pokes at the bottom of my foot a bit then calls, “Shelley? Can I borrow your eyes?”

    Shelley comes in and says that it looks healed over. “I thought so too,” says Karan. “I can’t tell what’s under there though, so I’m going to wait for the doctor before I enter anything.” Just as she smears the Lidocayne on the foot, Dr. Thompson pokes her head in. She’s wearing her Baby Yoda cap. She asks how my trip was and I tell her and she shakes her head. 

    She leaves and the shoe guy appears, surprising me. He holds my new insert in his hand. “I just wanted to double check where the hot spots are,” he says. He holds the insert up to my foot, takes it away, makes some marks on it in pencil. He shows me how he’s made the arch extra high to take more of the weight off the front. He says he’ll see me in a week or two and vanishes as suddenly as he appeared.

    The doctor comes back in, followed by Vicki and Karen. She wipes off the Lidocayne and starts carving carefully at the callus. She tried to blow a crumb of skin off the end of her knife, bust since she has a mask on, nothing happens. She laughs. “What was I thinking?” 

Karen laughs too, and says she worked in a respiratory pediatric ward for a while, and the kids would blow out their birthday candles by undoing their tracheotomy tubes. “There’s lots of footage on TikTok if you want to see,” she says. I don’t really want to see.

The doctor cuts slowly and cautiously and says, “It’s hard all the way through. There’s no wound here.” 

    “Hooray!” says Vicki. Karen beams. 

    “So what did we decide to go with, football?” the doctor asks Vicki. 

    “Football,” she confirms. 

    “I know I was skeptical at first,” the doctor says, “But I’m glad I let you guys talk me into doing these. They really are better than those stupid soft casts.” She tells me she doesn’t want to cut too much callus because the skin around it is so raw, so she’ll to the rest next week. “I don’t want to leave it there too long though, it’s like having a stone in your shoe.”

    “Are the footballs new?” I ask Karen when the doctor leaves. 

    “Yeah,” she says, preparing the cotton batting. “We’ve only been doing them for a couple of omnths.”

    “What was wrong with the soft casts?” I ask. 

    “We hate the soft casts,” says Jenny, poking her head in. I ask her what was wrong with them but she just asks me how my trip was and I tell her. “Well whatever you did back there healed your foot up,” she says. She talks about her daughter’s new cat, and then her own cats, and then we talk about my cat. I ask Karen if she has a ny pets and she says she has a Daschund with alopecia named Dolly. 

    She finishes the football and fetches my scooter. Before I get on, she says, "Oh wait, your blood pressure." She takes it again and it's perfect. I don’t feel elated about the good news- I’m  not sure I’m capable of elation at this point- but I do feel good about it. It’s not even four but it’s nearly dark outside as I make my way up the hill in the rain, trying to avoid the sticks and acorn caps, accumulating a fresh skin of wet yellow leaves as I roll along. 

The Microphone

  We drive to Reading along route 222, just like we did countless times when I was a child to visit our grandparents. A lot has changed along the highway, of course -there are now a number of traffic circles meant to ease congestion, but so far have done nothing but cause a lot of accidents- but the basic landscape looks the same. Old farmhouses and barns stand surrounded by fields of corn, all very pretty and timeless, with rolling wooded hills in the distance. I can feel this scenery in my marrow, and I try not to get upset by the inevitable housing developments and warehouses devouring it.

Despite the signs pleading not to, my stepfather tailgates everyone who isn't going fast enough for him, which is everyone. I try not to look at the tremor in his right hand, which has not gotten any worse since the last time I visited, but has also not gotten any better.

We pass the old water park and the hill where people used to hang glide. We pass where Sittler's mini golf course used to be, with all the safari animals; I always wanted to stop there but we never did. We pass where our car broke down once and we had to wait by the side of the road for help. We pass my friend’s house, where a car drove right through her living room wall. We pass the turnoff to the discount grocery store where Jasmine and I went once, returning with a trunk weighed down with dented cans and mysterious foreign brands. 

When we get to Reading, we head to a part of town I've never been before. The care facility is at the end of a cul-de-sac lined with dilapidated row houses. There's no parking lot so we park between a dumpster and a motorboat that looks like is has not been on the water since the eighties. We're the first ones there, and we watch as cars squeeze into spots along the street. A number of people who look much too old to be my relatives get out. There are my mother's remaining three sisters and their partners, along with two of my cousins and one of their wives, and that's it. Aside from some other cousins and their kids, this is all that is left of the family. 

After the usual greetings and hugs we all file into the care facility. The staff lines up in the main room to introduce themselves and offer their condolences. I never once came here to visit my aunt. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen her. It was at the last family Thanksgiving I had attended, which I promised myself would be my last. That was nearly a decade ago. I’ve kept my promise.

We are led to the back of the building, where there is a small chapel. I'm startled to see my dead aunt there in the wide-open casket, looking very serene. Nestled in her arms is a stuffed toy of the girl reindeer from Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. I hear my mother say our grandmother insisted the coffin be oak.

I sit down in the back of the room and lean my crutches against one of the walls, which are lined with stained-glass windows with images of various saints. My brother comes in, which surprises me; he had to work and I thought he wasn't coming until later. My mother and my aunts all take turns to say goodbye to their sister. They greet the priest as he comes in and strides up to the coffin. 

"Stacie! So good to see you!" Father Pham tousles my aunt's carefully-combed hair, grips her hair, and continues to talk to her as if she was alive. He turns to face the sisters. "You know what I will miss the most about Stacie is when she would see me and yell, FADAAAA!" Everyone laughs. He beams. "FADAAAAA!" 

Father Pham goes up to the alter and invites the family to help tuck Stacie in, which her sisters do. “I just want her to keep warm,” one of my aunts says. A younger, harsher version of myself would crack a joke about there not being any doubt of her being warm where she’s headed. But the current, aged version of myself sees the value in keeping his mouth shut around his family. 

Eventually they close the lid and wheel the casket into the middle of the aisle. Everyone takes their seats and the staff wheel in the other patients from the facility; there were only five, including my aunt, and they are all wheelchair-bound. A woman who looks remarkably like Stacie is parked next to me. She grips a giant purple ring in her mouth, I assume to keep her from grinding her teeth. I smile and say hello but she just stares into space.

The priest starts the Mass, and an enthusiastic man named Keith calls out in a gravelly word after every few sentences.

"My English here is as bad as Keith’s," the good Fadda says, “But they know I am here. Most of them are very happy. They know only that Father is here, not what he is saying." 

"Amen!" shouts Keith. 

These days I only go to Mass when there’s a funeral attached, but I attended church every week when I was a child.  My parents spared me from Catholic school, but made me go to catechism classes for years. I served as an altar boy all through middle school. But while I may still know all the prayers by heart, I have never seen a service quite like this one.

Keith barks out the first gospel reading, assisted by one of the attendants. They lean the bible on the casket as they read. My mother tells me later that Keith has known Stacie since they were children and had been in and out of many of the same programs over the decades. 

The attendant does the second reading. “Even though I walk in the shadow of the Valley of Death…”

“You got it Mama!” yells Keith.

During his homily, Father Pham goes on at length about suffering, though due to his rough English it’s difficult to grasp much of what he’s saying. “Where soul? I don’t know. Heaven. Suffering, suffering. She used to sit right there. She used to say, ring the bell, ring the bell!” He pauses, looks down, then looks around. “There’s nothing good in the present. Eating, sleeping, suffering. Look at them. Look at them.” 

When he finishes the homily, he begins the ritualistic consecration of the host. As the priest raises the thin moon of the wafer, Keith screams “Ring!” The attendant rings the bell. 

After the mass they wheel the coffin out through a side door, then everyone else files out to the main room for lunch. I wait until everyone else has gone, then take a seat on the end so I can get up easily. One of the staff helps me carry a plate of food from the kitchen. There is spaghetti and pizza but I just take some meatballs and salad. My brother sits next to me and my mother sits across from him. Across from me is a very pretty young woman. My mother talks to her as if she knows her and the woman starts to cry. My mother squeezes her hand. This woman loved my aunt more than I did. All of these people had more meaningful relationships with her than I ever did. 

Most of the people who stand up to eulogize her are caregivers, with the exception of my uncle, who gets up twice. He repeats the line I keep hearing my family say, which is that they didn’t expect Stacie to live past nine. The truth is that people like her with Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome tend to have a normal lifespan, provided they get good care. My aunt was born just a few years after the disease was first named. 

I try to think of some anecdote I could share, but my memories of my aunt, while vivid and intense, would not make for interesting stories. Should I talk about how our grandfather would bring her along as he led us in long walks around the neighborhood, or hikes through the local suburban woodlands? About how the two of them would take naps on the bed together after the family’s epic junk food banquets? Because that is how I picture her. Should I get up and describe in detail her room, where my brother and I spent many hours when we were kids, with its John Davidson and David Cassidy posters, the stuffed Muppets, the innumerable Barbies? Should I describe her belting out Frank Sinatra songs into her Donny and Marie microphone? I can picture that microphone perfectly, can feel its weight in my hand. Is this all a life is? An accumulation of meaningless, idiotic details?

A slight man in a black suit gets up and introduces himself as Bibi. He sings a gospel song, then launches into a long, meandering eulogy, much of which is incomprehensible. I find myself distracted by two very attractive women in miniskirts who are hanging out in the kitchen, eating cheesecake with plastic forks from Styrofoam plates. Just when it seems he will never stop, Bibi sings another gospel song, then suddenly sits back down. I assume he's a patient but it turns out he works there. 

The crying young woman offers to show us Stacie's room, which has not been cleaned out yet. The walls are covered by a mural of a magical fairyland, complete with a castle and a princess who has my aunt's face. The bed is completely covered in Beanie Babies. 

My brother offers to drive me to the cemetery, where they lower my aunt into the ground next to my grandparents. A few feet away is a fresh gravestone for a Korean War veteran who died a few weeks ago, just shy of his hundredth birthday. 

On the way home I tell my brother that I found the whole event surprisingly moving.

"The staff seems to genuinely care for her," I say. 

"Well sure, they don't have a choice, they're all Christians," he says. 

"I don't know, I think there’s more to it than that," I say.

"Nope," he says. 

The GPS takes us home by a different route because of a horrific accident that happened hours before. A car crashed head-on with a Jeep and was then struck by a tractor trailer. A teenaged girl and a toddler were killed.

"That priest was really something," I say. 

"Oh yeah he was amazing," my brother says. "But that food was awful."

Don't Chase

 I spend July 4th in the apartment, alternating between cleaning and sleeping. I didn’t have too much to drink at the barbecue but I still feel sluggish and worn out. I have a pretty pleasant day regardless, and by evening feel perky enough to head down to the Goose for supper. 

There are Lost Dog posters plastered all over the neighborhood, showing a moppy little mutt with the typical admonition “Dont chase will run.” The Goose is busier than I thought but most of the crowd is settling their bills and heading out to watch the fireworks, leaving only a few of us. 

As usual, nearly everyone on the deck is coupled up, but when I walk over to the water cooler I see an attractive woman sitting by herself. I smile and she gives me a big, warm smile back. Well that’s nice, I think, but she’s probably waiting for someone. But when I go to sit down with my drink, I see her start to talk to a guy sitting by himself a few tables away from her. He has a full beard and a baseball cap. He also has a dog. 

By the time my food comes they are laughing and chatting like old friends. His dog barks wildly at every other dog that approaches the deck. “She’s just saying hello,” the man says every time. I can’t make out much of their conversation but I hear him say that he’s in real estate. She’s new to the neighborhood, and fairly new to Portland. I hear them talk about paddle boarding. They look like a good match. Even if I had a dog, I can’t compete with real estate and paddle boarding, not to mention that beard, which is full and lustrous. I can only hope that the cap is hiding a case of male pattern baldness, though I know that wouldn’t make a difference at this point. 

I take my trusty sketchbook out for company but my heart’s not in it. I tell myself this is a good opportunity to practice not spiraling down into self-hatred and misery about how alone I am, how long I’ve been alone, how the older I get the chances of this changing grow ever slimmer. It’s so easy to chastise myself for my cowardice. I should have gone right up to her when I got my drink, talk to her before that irresistible canine spell could take hold. But I couldn’t do it. I am convinced that no woman wants anything to do with me. While this might not be true, it has been many years since I’ve seen any evidence to the contrary.

“I need to get a dog,” the server says to me.

“Same here,” I say. “But I like cats better.”

“Me too,” he says. “But, you know.”

The new friends order another drink and I finish mine and head back up the hill. In an empty parking lot, a gorgeous young woman and a man who looks like her father are fiddling with an automatic ball-throwing machine that their dog is nosing warily. The girl is twitchy and holding her limbs at odd angles, like she’s on something. Dog toys and balls and various bits of throwing apparatus lie scattered across the parking lot. 

At the top of the hill, the lost dog signs grow more desperate, hanging from every telephone pole. The sky is nearly dark. Soon the fireworks will start and all the dogs I saw tonight will be whimpering under their owners’ beds. I wonder where the lost dog will hide, who will comfort him as the world around him explodes.

Clean Towels

        It’s the day before Independence Day and the second Revolutionary War has been won. After decades of fighting, the noble rich have finally thrown off the shackles placed on them by the filthy poor. For us huddled masses, it’s all pretty disheartening, but I have the day off tomorrow and am on my way to a backyard barbecue. As I sit on the bench at the bus stop, I look at the arrival time on my phone. It keeps leaping around, getting longer and shorter as some unseen force impedes the vehicle’s progress. A man on the corner shows a cardboard sign to the traffic. I don’t bother to read it. I used to be interested in these signs, in all the different ways people ask for help, the various kinds of lettering they use, but I can’t look anymore. 

        A teenage girl sits next to me, thumbs skipping across the screen of her phone. There is suddenly an explosion behind us, followed by another, and another. It seems early for fireworks –the sun is still high in the sky. I turn around to look and see puffs of smoke in the air above the bridge. The booms go on for a few minutes. 

        “What was that?” the girl asks uncertainly. She doesn’t have an accent I would guess she’s Pakistani.

        “Oh, somebody getting ready for the fourth,” I say.

        “But that’s not until tomorrow,” she says, sounding confused.

        Just then there is a crash right in front of us. An old hatchback truck crammed with junk has spilled a pile of metal shelves out of its open hatch. The truck speeds through the intersection then pulls over. Fortunately, the car behind it brakes before it hits the shelves, and I walk out in front of it, holding up my hand up. The girl runs out after me and we both gather up  the shelves. The words CLEAN TOWELS are written on a piece of masking tape on one of them. We carry them to the sidewalk and the driver of the truck comes and grabs them without a word. 

        

        The girl and I sit back on the bench. 

        “Lucky that didn’t go through somebody’s windshield,” I say. 

        “Yeah. Pretty scary,” she says. The bus comes and I gesture for her to get on first then she does the same to me and I insist and she says no then we both try to step on at the same time and laugh. As we drive off I look at the guy on the corner and finally decide to read his sign. He’s crayoned an American flag next to the words WAR VETERAN ANYTHING HELPS. I wonder if he knows that the real war is just beginning. 

The Lew Welch Memorial Expressway

I wake up beside the highway. Above it, rather. Over the past year I’ve learned the rhythms of its traffic the way someone living beside the sea learns the patterns of the tide. The traffic never stops on the 405 and its many arteries, though it does slow down at night. The poet Lew Welch ranted about the insidiousness of highways in a letter he mailed from a house one block from here that a few years later was razed to build this very road. If it was still there, I would be able to see the roof from my bedroom window. Despite all the changes to the city, I like knowing that many of the buildings he would have walked by are still standing, including this one. 

The sun has not yet crept around the corner of the building so I’m a little chilly as I sit on the balcony with my coffee. The sparrows vanished last week; I miss their frantic chirping, though I never caught more than glimpses of their beaks. I do my puzzles and read the news, even though I know I shouldn’t. I should be protecting myself from the constant barrage of horrifying updates to the story of our country’s plummet into madness. It’s  rush hour and the traffic light on the ramp is helping to stagger the traffic speeding toward the tunnel that cuts through the hills. 

Last week my mother and I drove through that tunnel on the way to the zoo. She was in town to visit and she said the two things she wanted to see were my new (to her) apartment and the baby elephant. Tula-Tu is four months old; I’d never seen an elephant so young, and while it’s always depressing to see animals in cages, my mother and I were both captivated. It’s a strange experience to stand next to the woman who gave birth to you and watch a baby elephant tuck her trunk into her own mother’s armpit to suckle. 

We had a nice week together. Growing old has not made her bitter and crabby like it did to her own mother, who never was all that nurturing to begin with. I didn’t plan a lot but we managed to pack in a lot. I dragged her along to a program dedicated to the work of a local video artist, which wasn’t great, and a production of Assassins, which was. Assassins is a Stephen Sondheim musical about the people who killed or tried to kill the president. It’s hard to believe there has only been a single botched attempt at eliminating our current president, but the show repeatedly urges us to follow our dreams.

The production was put on by a small local troupe of self-proclaimed marginalized  individuals, all of whom were terrific. They performed in the black box theater at Reed College. Lew Welch went to Reed, along with his friends and fellow Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. I wonder what they would have thought of the play, its usual carnival barker narrator replaced by an imposing drag queen Lady Liberty. 

We spent a few days at the coast, staying in a motel in the sleepy town of Rockaway Beach. It was shabby, but it was clean, and it was right on the beach. We had lunch in Manzanita, which is a bustling metropolis by comparison, then went to my favorite spot on the entire coast, Short Sand. I don’t get there often because you need a car. From the parking lot you follow a creek for a mile through old growth forest, where trees sprout from other trees, their roots forming twisted structures that look like portals to the faerie kingdom. It all looks otherworldly. The path ends at a gorgeous cove rimmed with pines and beloved by surfers. 

Welch famously disappeared into the California wilderness with a rifle when he was 44, leaving behind a note.

 

I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends. I can’t make anything out of it – never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone.

 As I sat next to my aging mother, looking out over the Pacific, I felt grateful that she was still in good enough shape to visit me, to drive to the beach, to walk through the woods to get to this beautiful spot. It has been a hard year, as was last year, as was the year before, as was... The losses keep building up and the planet seems to be spinning faster and faster toward apocalypse. My foot is still fucked up, and as usual I’m aching with loneliness. To cope with it all I’m drinking too much, which, oddly, does not seem to be helping. I’m not ready to give up on this world yet, but if I was, this would be a good place to do so. To let go of this world with the protective arms of the cove encircling us. Juncos twittering in the branches. The sun sparkling on the water. The waves crashing against the sand like the sound of rushing traffic on the freeway.