she

came through the front door of Sorella's and was moving with short quick steps towards Ellie, the owner, who's new hair after chemotherapy had grown back with thick dark brown poodle curls. Ellie reminds me of the Basque woman from From Whom The Bell Tolls. she is a Hemingway two-by-four of a woman who is so sure of herself she's more sexy than any hot chick in the room. she stares fear in the face and scares it off the stage. her features are large - big lips, big smile, big legs, big bulk. on holidays she dresses up. she's a Gypsy. she's Ma Joad. i don't know much about her except on Sundays when most of the time she lets me take the small, one-person window seat where i can read and shovel in a Romeo omelette. the woman speaking with her today looked like a lesser version of Ellie. she was more tightly wound. the radar eyes i was sure she had even tho i couldn't see them, bore into my skull, straight through Ellie's body. she wore short shorts that hugged a middle-aged ass, too-tan legs, sandals and a brazen show-her-tits blouse. i wonder about women her age. do they stop worrying about no longer being young? do they worry about this as much as older men do? or differently? then i forgot about her. i went back to 'Gone With The Wind' and Scarlett O'hara who at 17 had been through more life than most ancients, a wicked girl with wicked thoughts who had you want to know her for real, to crank up the movie version and see those startling green eyes. i then became aware that someone had stopped at my table. it was her, that weird woman, staring at me with a curious smile. her blood red lipstick lips parted as if in her mind she could read mine. how did i look to her, eyes over glasses, fat book in my lap with the disturbed dry hair? had i been Fellini i would have cast her instantly as a drive-by wench, or madam. someone i could count on to yell at the top of her lungs in a desperate scene in a movie i would never make. she was there barely 7 seconds and then floated away in a swirl of hot afternoon air. she confirmed my New Age theory that we, as souls, are destined to meet all souls belonging to us, if only for a split second, for a glimpse or long term, but meet them we must before we die. they teach us, as we teach them back, the ineffable big book truths about everything we know nothing about.

but i think, there's something to be said for, you know, like, i mean...ah...

was the brain stall i overheard the other night at work. he was fishing around, like a hand in a jammed-to-the-gills purse, for the thought he wanted to get out of his head. as if by using catch phrases as lures he could somehow hook the evasive idea and yank it to the surface. his friend hardly seemed impatient. maybe he too had a line in the water near an algae-softened sneaker. it was hilarious to hear, to even notice. i stumbled away with a pitcher of water trying not to burst. we are so funny, we smarty-pants, when we try to stab the dark with a dull dart.

front/side

you see a face from the side, the profile and the person is a total knock out until he turns and everything looks different. his face is too wide, eyes are too small and his lower lip looks weird. and it's the same in reverse. from the front, he's scary handsome and then he turns and he's a chinless wonder with a shark fin nose. of course if we like them, they become beautiful, they 'are' beautiful. if we get bored, whatever they had in beauty stock gets lost, attraction being the great deceiver, because for most of us, classic beauty is like classic rock on classic radio - a milkshake that tastes great at first and later makes you nauseous. and then there's our very own face. we know it too well and not at all. on acid we're a Picasso, cracked across the bridge of thenose, infinitely sad and funny all at once. it's not unlike hearing our voice recorded and played back for the first time. THAT'S me? that grotesque narrow nasal embarrassing sound which can never be gotten used to? others know that voice and face and to them it's who you are. how you look. what you sound like. all these are parts of the ever impossible to put completely together and make sense of.

curtis york

led the choir, glee club and the middle school chorus where i went to school (the Episcopal Academy in Philly). he taught music appreciation and coached softball. his initials, C. R. Y., proved to be an acronym that spelled it out. his passion and his unfair downfall in my eyes. when i was 12 i auditioned for choir/chorus. i was terrified as i stood next to him at the piano. he played scales. i sang them back, the notes resonating in my small bird chest like a miniature Tibetan bell. the thrill of this new thing, this singing in a girl's soprano, ran from my heels and up my spine to the crown of my head. it wasn't really a girl's soprano. it was a boy's. there is a subtle difference. the sound is as pure as silver, ringing out of little mouths, little 'o's' on the upturned faces of cherubs. we never, at least not at our school, thought this was sissy. it was instead a huge credit to be singing there in the choir, chorus (soprano/alto) and later the glee club. it probably got me into Yale with it's diehard singing group tradition. i loved it so much, lost in a sea of voices at the spring concert (recorded onto swimming-pool blue vinyl), filing past Mr York to see if he'd give a meaningful wink. we felt special. we really truly did. to be awarded a solo was the pinnacle of the rush. one single fluted voice rising above 120 others to dove soar across the gymnasium and land in the hearts of adoring, astonished friends and parents. certainly my infatuation and eventual life obsession with music and singing began here, with Curtis York. as seniors we took his music appreciation class and covered the symphonic and opera classics with gusto. his enthusiasm was contagious and real. at the end of the school year he'd take us to his favorite Italian restaurant in downtown Philly where waiters sang opera and where we had our first inkling of a non-family dinner out with wine, song and romantic escapade. he was short and had a pencil mustache and up-combed wavy ink black hair. we worshipped him. we sought his approval. after i went off to Yale and ultimately became a Whiffenpoof (even recording at the big room at the Columbia Studios in Manhattan) i wanted to give York the result. i was proud of it. i thought he would be as well, especially my big ballsy version of 'Sit Down You're Rockin' The Boat'. i called him up and he asked me to meet him as his apartment. sure, i thought. sounds good. i was, at the time, in the cluttered closet. i'd been found out at Yale by others like myself, but none of them attracted me and to those who knew i swore i'd 'fix' myself. meanwhile i was falling in mad love with the less sure and doing nothing about it in bed. at Episcopal we had, as kids, theories about some of the teachers. who 'was' and who 'wasn't'. somehow Mr York never made the list. i guess we loved him too much to stain our sense of who he was with nasty schoolboy gossip. so it was with a naive heart that i drove to his place at school to see him, catch up, maybe have a more open conversation about art or something and of course to play the Whiff record. when i got there he'd already had a few and was red in the face, even a bit weepy. i knew it like a gun went off that Mr York was gay as a goose and damned if i was gonna tell him i was too. he seemed to like the record enough, but it was me, grown up now, 21, that he wanted to see, to talk with, as if he could come clean about all the boys over the years that he'd loved and never had. how his heart must have hurt to suppress those feelings. we'd heard that he took vacations to the west coast. maybe it was there that he acted out, maybe not. at any rate i wanted outa there. he came forward to hug me. i guess i hugged him back like a whore worried about her hair or about touching too close down there. it was brief, awkward and sad. this man, this wonderful man who had brought so much to so many had had to hide all those years. hide from the scorn that would have inevitably chewed him alive. hide from the feelings he had for those up-chinned boy sopranos, hide, hide, hide. it tears me up to think about him, even though i know i could never have been even remotely his friend. i guess love requires illusion. C. R. Y. created one of the most beautiful i have ever known.

small details

of the day - the laundry, taking out garbage, making the bed, clumping cat shit out of the litter box, getting the list of to-do's crossed-off off one-by-one at day's end. groceries, vitamins, idiot shopping, dishes, vacuum, phone calls, emails, twarts, bills paid - they are endless and they keep me in line. my lumbering 66-yr-old body likes doing housework minutiae, holding insanity at bay with regularized chaos. 'i do, therefore i am'. 'clean up your room and make your bed. it will quiet the blues,' my best friend's mom, Weastie, admonished. (she later sat in a car, garden hose from exhaust to window and killed herself.) so i wonder how i will handle NOT being able to look after everything. not being able to wipe my own ass. will i lose it? will i be able to bear, let alone ask friends and family to handle the detritus of my day? will i stand for it? will i not want others to be at my beck and call? why clutter up their lives with my clutter? or will i become a stinko curmudgeon like my Uncle Andy and chase help out of the apartment with a cane?

how do they know

dogs (and cats)? when you're hurting? they do, don't they? when i was a kid we had a standard poodle (the only one of the many dogs we had growing up that we disliked) who looked after my granddad after he lost his wife. he slept in a tiny room (the 'maid's room') at the end of a long hallway on the 2nd floor. the poodle would trot down the hall, sit at the side of the bed and rest his chin on the mattress next to my granddad, looking mournfully up at him with big brown eyes. he knew. he gave solace in ways none of us could.

the grim smile

looks like this: lips tighten, the corners of the mouth curve down and the chin puckers - all in one simultaneous gesture. we all do it. i do it. famous people do it. politicians on TV do it. i never fully took this in this i saw Bubba, in his empathetic prime, put that face on, the grim smile. he had me believe him even when i shouldn't. the grim smile says a million things. 'i hear ya.' 'i'm humble.' 'my heart goes out to you.' 'i acknowledge my mistake.' 'you caught me in a lie.' 'don't worry, you'll be fine.' if you add a nod, it communicates a deeply felt 'yes'. if you move your head from side to side, it becomes: 'what can i say? ya got me.' it's a con. it's also the truth. where did these muscles learn to do this? i see kids doing it, imitating parents. is it ingrained, a signal developed as early as cave men guilt? was there a cave man Bubba? i can't stop myself from doing it even if i wanted to. still, i wish it weren't so automatic. god, i'm doing it now even as i type.