I have spent my morning cleaning the space at the end of the hallway to nowhere. Well, not really nowhere. It leads to two bedrooms and then ends abruptly with nowhere else to go. I think of it as an ignominious end, one of my favorite descriptives of Victorian literature, as in, "she (or he) came to an ignominious end." There old suitcases go to die, when they seem too tattered to travel again, and certainly too shabby to give away, and yet.... oh, the places they have seen (with thanks to Patrick Dennis and his Auntie Mame.) But today, everybody out! I discovered a wonderful box of charcoals, a long sleeved t-shirt I could have used this awful winter, boxes that I could definitely use to mail things, if, indeed, I had anything to mail, and a lovely scented sachet which accounts for the faint, ghostly perfume emanating from that unlovely heap, among other things. Very satisfying.
Speaking of ignominious ends, and I realize that that snarky comments are inappropriate when speaking of the dead, two long ago loves of mine passed away recently, within a few days of one another, and sent my balance wheel tumbling into unanchored eternity. The first was Jack, whom I have written of before. Jack was a love of the mind, a soul mate, someone who was there every day until he was not, and I didn't know how much I missed him until I did.
I found Jack again not long ago, when grief and illness had transformed him into a man who didn't want to be found, who isolated himself even from the breezes outside his back door, and who stayed huddled under blankets in the beautiful library he designed. He looked old though he was younger than I, and he leaned heavily on a walker when he made it to the front door to greet me. I think the smile of greeting on his face was put on for the occasion, not really felt, as I wanted it to be.
A friend sent me his obituary not long ago. So four months after we sat in the library and talked through lunch time, which he had forgotten and my stomach hadn't, he slipped away, without regret, I think, to join his late wife, presumably in that place which is architecturally perfect and would meet with his approval.
The other recently deceased friend from long ago was quite another story. I met him when I was seventeen, and thought he was - let's just say, wonderful. He most certainly was not, at least to anyone who was not teenage-blind. Handsome and rich, yadda yadda, and fun. Lots of fun. All the time. Endless conversation. Dancing the twist at The Peppermint Lounge across the river and, later, to the Beatles at frat parties in the desert. He was no stranger to alcohol, but he was to drugs. Just not for long. Our relationship ended with him grabbing my hair at a party and banging my face into a jagged stone wall. Before that black eye, eleven years had elapsed. I'm a slow learner. No love like teenage love, I guess.
He had the money to indulge his vices, which he did with a vengeance. Trips to jet set social scenes across the world, a couple of totaled Rolls Royce convertibles, a string of lovers male and female, and looking like Dorian Grey himself, his life ended in a nursing home specializing in dementia a few months after his sixty-ninth birthday. He was given everything and he took everything. No thank you's to life. He had a favorite line. When someone departing said, "Take care," he would always reply "I take it any way I can get it." Funny how we so often write out own epitaphs.
So after those two exits, I couldn't write for a while. I had to put the people, or at least a couple of them, in some order that made sense, and take the time to be sad for the right reasons. And to find the heart to be funny again, which is quite a lot more work than you might think. And, I had to wait for some of the cold to go away because my office is unheated! and to work out there, even with a space heater, can be misery. I work in a sweet, little sun room, windows on three sides and with no registers for the furnace or air conditioning vents. It houses the only computer I can compose on, a desk top that seems ungainly now but was quite the hot stuff in its day. Otherwise I use my smart phone for everything.
I read somewhere that most books today are written on smart phones. How? I want to know.
