Joel

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On This Mother’s Day

Sometimes I think I will walk right in and there will be the Crazy waiting for me, welcoming me. And we will dance off together and there will be nothing to look back upon. It will be a good thing only I will not remember.

Once Joel said he always thought about me but only when he wasn’t thinking. Aren’t we always thinking? I asked. Yeah, he said. Pretty much.

The most beautiful flowers a Mother ever gets are the dandelions held in a bunch in a tiny hand. Small. Small I always picture them, and young, and with little round faces. And so much hope and slammed doors and giggles and tears to brush away.

Yellow roses and mums and love from Angela who is doing so well and living in Portugal where I will be going to visit in October.

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Field Notes

Some few notes on today. For a while. First, as spiders are part of my totem, I couldn’t pass this by. It was posted by “The Fabulous Weird Trotters and noted as· Camera Flash on a Spider Web 🕷️ Isn’t this an all time gorgeous?

Today I took Zeus (the cat) out for a bit of a walk. He’s slowly learning to tolerate the harness, not the leash so much. Anyway, he was out for a while. He is such a smart cat. I got a Christmas mouse for both him and Lisa Fig (one each) and they both adore them. Zeus brings his back for me to throw it for him. I become tired of this way before he does. The game could go on for hours.

I now have a cat on Prozac. No lie. This should be something to be ashamed of if it weren’t so funny. It does calm LL cool Fig down to the point where she is not so freaked out by Zeus’s very presence in the place. At least she has stopped hiding. And she does have her own sub-leased apartment as in my bedroom with bath and tub for her necessaries. Also a changing area and closet. Though she does not wear any clothes and doesn’t change anything.

I have been thinking and dreaming of Joel so much. One dream was so real that I actually said to myself that it was so nice for what was happening to be real and not a dream.

Sometimes cleaning and arranging and fixing are such lovely things to be doing. Comforting. Enjoyable. Once upon a time that could not be imagined. I think it has to do with your happiness. Your peace and being in the right place for the time that it is. It is this time now. And now I’m going back to cleaning. 42

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San Francisco

SF with Joel, in 1997? I was living in Delaware, OH, working for Nationwide Insurance. The company was supposed to pay for my trip at a training session and I had asked Joel to come with me. It was cancelled at the last minute, so Joel and I decided to go anyway. We had a great time wandering about, exploring and taking photos. We stayed at a great little motel next to the tenderloin area.

We of course did the Beatnik tour, saw Allan Ginsberg’s apartment, as well as all of the old places: Grateful Dead apartment house, the Purple Onion, visited City Lights bookstore, and went across Jack Kerouac Alley to Vesuvio’s where we drank and ate.

The inscription on the wall reads: “when the shadow of the grasshopper falls across the trail of the field mouse on green and slimy grass as a red sun rises above the western horizon silhouetting a gaunt and tautly muscled indian warrior perched with bow and arrow cocked and aimed straight at you it’s time for another martini.”

This episode has resurfaced as I’m still cleaning and clearing which causes photos to reappear. If you look closely at the inside of the bar you will see a photo of James Joyce on the back wall.

  • City Lights
  • Inside Vesuvio’s
  • Vesuvio’s
  • Wall outside Vesuvio’s
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Happy Birthday Joel

Today is my son’s birthday. It hurts my heart to say that. It’s so easy to picture him here, to see him grinning and laughing. If he were here he would play with the dog, and the cat. He loved animals and was very good with them. He was great with computers and became a computer programmer. He wrote code. And he liked that. He loved Queen and sometimes I play many of their albums. Sometimes I can’t bear to listen to any. Bohemian Rhapsody can tear my heart out. Sometimes I have to listen to it so I can know something—I’m not sure what. But something pounded into me makes sense because you travel somewhere else with grief. He was beautiful.

“It’s funny the day you lose someone isn’t the worst. At least you’ve got something to do. It’s all the days they stay dead.” —Steven Moffat

You just want to take everything back. You want another chance so you can do things right. And you say over and over again: I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You want him to know that, you want him to know, so bad. That you are sorry.

I used to get drunk and cry and drink and cry and drink and write and cry. I didn’t care about any life here, in this world. I wanted to die. That I didn’t was a surprise.

Squeek was his cat. He had gotten her just before he died. He knew he would die, he just didn’t know when, or that it would be that soon. It took a very long time until suddenly it was done.

Joel

JoelasBaby

Joel as Baby

 

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Happy Birthday Joel

JsPlaque

I made this for him, or to represent him, or for something, I don’t know. I made it after he died. And there it is. I would give anything to hold him once again, to kiss his fat baby cheeks, to have that time again. Those times, those days, those summers and winters, that boy, my son. Stay with me, comfort me.