When I said the word it felt like a live fish in my mouth, like I’d never heard it, never knew what it meant, like maybe I never said it before. How could that word be about me? It blasted my ear like a tumble from a front loader.
Who isn’t haunted by the roaches that creep through the brain’s kitchen at 4 a.m.? I couldn’t see and create myself when no one else even bothered to see me. So I signed up for some expensive coursework. You can’t cram for exams at the School of Hard Knocks.
And you, Mom? You knew that loneliness at such an early age. But you’ve never complained about it, not when Grandma was sick, not when you were nursing Dad, or after he died, or when your friends started to move away to go live with their children. Even now you won’t let the word take hold in the room.
The life she crafts—unconsciously and with fierce determination—is Goddess at her core. She is that composite we never really see in our lifetime, that we often don’t trust to be there—that vast well-spring we might not even dare to be. But we are here, anyway, in spite of ourselves or with calculated assertion.
I’m doing a lot of writing to flesh out the characters and components of my upcoming play–currently called Ephemory and I’m going to share these pieces here. Please comment in any way you like–ask for more–suggest your agreement or differences or confusion or ?? with what you find here. I welcome your contribution. Ephemory will [...]
I travel to this place each year to unburden my heart from the tedium of life and to welcome the secrets of my friend. Not that they are such secrets, mind you. But they may not yet have met the dry opening beyond breath.
“Laura was a free spirit. I wasn’t like that; I was very traditional. But Laura could do anything. You’re like her that way. I admired her.” These words were from Madeleine, a friend of my Mom’s from Gimbals’ days, circa 1945. Laura the free spirit: I had never thought of her this way. I knew [...]
Now that everyone knows our Portland secrets I suppose it’s not a surprise that I almost never going out in public without running into someone I know. For me, it started when I’d been here for six months.
She screams out ”Won’t someone please shoot this dog? Please, if I circle back around the block one more time, will you please have your gun ready and try to shoot the dog? Shoot the damn dog and don’t shoot me? Please.”
Greedy barnacles slurped their soup at hillside bistros. Tiny crabs paraded from neighborhood to neighborhood, skittish about the traffic. I drank it all in until my eye finally said “too much for one day;” the end of many city scapes.