At the Door

It wasn’t quite the wolf at the door. Still, the sound was huge, demanding, and scary.

I had been resting with my youngest, both of us newly returned from the children’s hospital in SF where dozens of medical staff (and janitors and clerks and people in the hallways) had flooded our lives with kindness, straight talk, & (for me) hastily produced tissues to wipe my streaming eyes. The sounds there were curiously both sharp and muted—the beep of machines connected to my boy, the steady purr of oxygen, his gentle breathing. I hadn’t slept.

And now, at the door, these heavy thuds. To tell the truth, I figured it might be my partner, back from the woods with armloads of firewood, annoyed at the locked door and unable to reach his key. So I rushed out, inwardly swearing at his impatience, but glad at the prospect of a warm fire.

I was wrong. A tall man with a jagged branch of redwood had hit the glass of our door with force. Twice. The pattern radiated like a spiderweb, but the glass held.   I opened the door to call out “what on earth are you doing?”  Next door a woman shouted, “no, get back in, he could hurt you”.

I watched him rush away into the cold and misty night, and went indoors to call 911. The young cop was kind enough when he arrived, shaking his head at what he figured to be a thousand dollars worth of damage, sympathetic to my desire that the guy get some help. He told me he’d been picked up quickly and would be taken to the hospital and then for some mental health care, and if I wanted to press charges, well I certainly could. I said I saw no point in jailing him, I was glad he’d get care.

I saw him the next morning, his arm stapled up (there was a knife wound), his eyes bewildered. He said he had no memory of the night before. “I did that?” he said, over and over, staring at the pattern in the glass. Yeah, I said, I saw you, it was you. 

I suggested maybe a bottle less each week of vodka might be wise. And, well, he could bring the money he’d spend on that my way, to add to the door fund. It seemed a good idea. To me, anyway; he didn’t seem all that impressed, walking back to his camp, unconvinced, telling me he needed a good place to live, telling me he was 70 (I said he seemed younger, he said, well, his birth certificate tells him he’s in his 50’s, but he remembers when his mom picked him up 70 years ago).

I’ve been looking at the broken glass a couple weeks now, waiting for the one glass person in our region to have time to repair it. It’s a pretty pattern. Everything interconnects. Light shining through makes little prisms. It still makes me feel punched in the stomach, though I tell myself how pretty.

And I worry about the guy, one of many who have no safe place to be, who walk through the pouring cold rain, who have no shoes, who howl at the inexplicable, obdurate world in which people laugh at them, throw things at them, whisper. Who go hungry. Who drink too much. Who sometimes die of small things. Who die small deaths daily. Whose eyes bear hurt. Who can’t remember, and it might be a good thing.

I think it is probably my own inner wolf, my own inner brokenness, my own desire to howl and rage at the world that finds such easy if complicated recognition of the stray and wild in our world; the little feral cat at my windowsill or the disturbed and raging man breaking my window-door.

When I have time to sit with all this, as I sat all night with my son, stilling my anxious heart, chatting with night nurses about their new children, their loves, their dying fathers…when I have time to go a little deeper, I find that I have so much longing for so much. For warmth for all those out in the elements, for a quiet place for each. For understanding that we are connected, all us broken little pieces with our bright edges. We belong together, somehow. Yes, even though sometimes we clash and bleed.

Now They Will See Me

I’ve been thinking lately of Birdsong. It has been 10 years or so since I last saw her, wrapped in finery from the free box, dangling single brass earrings in her hair—a star, a crescent, a glittering butterfly, telling me drunkenly “Now they will see me in my true beauty!”

She annoyed me greatly on the days she was drunk or in the florid upswings of her bipolar illness, loud and flamboyant and demanding. But she knew a bit about books and a lot about plants. One afternoon in a calm moment she described the beautiful glassed in porch in which she once grew her begonias and African violets and ferns, in the days when her girls were young and still with her, before the bottom fell out of her universe.

We shared a lot of similarities. I often thought that with just a small twist of fate she could have been the town booklady & I the desperate, drunken, sometimes charming survivor.

I particularly remember the time at the start of bombing…somewhere, Iraq, Afghanistan—when I stood alone in my weekly Women in Black vigil down the street a bit from the bookshop and was joined by Birdsong and Bobby and Cricket.

Bobby fixed me with his blue eyes and said “I did terrible things in Nam, so if you are a peace lady you got to hate me” And I said “I’m so sorry, so very sorry you went through that. I don’t want anyone else to go through that, not ever”. He asked if sometimes he could come and stand beside me. I said yes.

Cricket was just tagging along with his Birdsong, but they wanted to know if they could also stand with me. Sure, I said. You might have noticed I wasn’t exactly a very traditional Woman in Black, except for the black I wore. I’d answer questions. I’d talk. I’d even laugh, and I wasn’t going to turn away anyone, man, woman, child or dog, who wanted to stand beside me. So Birdsong and Bobby and Cricket did, especially on the days when my stalwart associates Sara and Michelle weren’t able to be there and I would have been left by myself.

Bobby died of hard drinking and pneumonia and probably the spinal problem he brought back from Vietnam. Cricket got bit in a fight and the wound turned green and oozy and he died of gangrene in a hospital up north. I remember thinking, as I wept at the news, that access to soap and hot water might have healed him. Birdsong by then had flown somewhere else. Maybe to find her daughters in the Midwest, where that glassed in porch was, where there were memories of begonias and ferns. I don’t know.

But I remember particularly that first time she joined me, because she sat on the side walk, smelling a bit of cheap booze, and glared at me. “D’ya think I’m homeless?”

I really wasn’t sure what to say to her, knowing as I did that she was sleeping in a torn tent on the edge of town.

“I’m not” she said. “People say I am and they tell me to move on and they look down on me, but I have a home”.

She waved at the darkening sky. “There, see that—that’s my roof”

I smiled. “Well, true enough, that’s the roof for us all”

She said “and this is my home, right here” and she pounded the cement sidewalk with her open hand. “I’m home, ain’t no one got the right to tell me to move on”

So, as I said, I don’t know if she’s still living, if the sky remains her true roof, if she found peace or calm or anything. But I remember her in her finery, and how she said she was a queen, an empress, and how when she walked down the streets of this town, someday people would know her in her glory.

And how astonished they would be, to see her shining there, so beautiful, so radiant, so much in her own true home in this aching, fragile world.

I ALWAYS WANTED A MAP.

I thought it should make sense, this life.

Children are pretty matter of fact. What is, is. I see it in the traveling families. Tonight we sleep by the road, tonight we sleep in a tent, now we must try to be quiet in the car. I saw it in myself, a military kid. Today we move across the ocean.

And maybe because I grew up traveling, maybe because maps were guides…well, maps and airport lights and beacons and static filled radio broadcasts—I have long thought of life in terms of travel. The dusty roads, the places we go, the people we bump into, share a moment with, remember, the journey ahead.

I always wanted a map.

When I was 8 or 9 I prayed a lot for guidance. I wanted an angel to appear, shiny and feathery, holding a map or maybe the directions that apparently were left out of my baby hand when I tumbled into this world, nicely wrapped in my caul, and totally bewildered.

The map would be large and scrolly. There would be some sort of ribbon, and there would be stars and dotted lines and maybe a picture or two. And the angel would point to a place marked You are Here and then show me, moment by moment, year by year, the paths my feet would take.

I saw it as sort of a tangled and meandering path, even then, but I knew if I prayed enough the angel would come, and certainly the angel would tell me what it was all about.

Because…well, let’s face it, it was all pretty confusing. Even to a fairly sheltered child. Death was happening, and there were things called wars, and my mother was not expected to live..and the angel just never came with the map. Other things happened that gave me some measure of peace, but…no map for a pilgrim’s journey.

Okay, I was an odd kid. But I think of that map that never arrived and I think we are making our maps day by day, step by step, all along the way. Our own designs, canny as any spider spinning. Our own trail of memories, encounters. Our own meaning, though maybe we’d never put it into words.

I saw the man early this morning as he rose from his shelter of bushes beside the freeway. He didn’t notice me, or my dog. We were well screened by redwoods, and on a higher road. He moved awkwardly, but I didn’t stop to stare. We had appointments with squirrels and stellar jays and ravens.

But I saw him later, sitting on a low wall. I nodded hello. He had kind, wary eyes. He nodded back.  When I next saw him, having completed my uptown errand, he was walking. And he was walking with a lot of pain.

I stopped. “Your leg is hurting you?” I made it a question, because it was ridiculously apparent that this was so, and probably my remark was stupid…but I needed to ask. Yes, he said. He said he’d broken his foot a few days before, and he was out sleeping rough and had no place to go, but he had made it to the local hospital.

They said there were two breaks. They said there wasn’t a thing to be done about them. They sent him on his way.

I told him about the health center and promised respect and…well, maybe there was something to be done? His knee was paining him a lot as well. Walking was hard. He figured…well, he’d heard there was a shelter up north and he thought if he could get the bus up there, and if he could have a bed, and if he could rest up a day or two…well, then he could go on.

He refused, gently, my offer of bus fare. I’m all right, he said. Just a little broken now.

I told him when and where the bus would come, and wished him a good journey, and a place to rest, and the ability to go on.

And here we are, all of us, on our journey. Not so far apart, though oceans might separate us, though some are in deserts and some in cities and there are crises and bombs and revolutions and terrors and great delights. And we are all, maybe, just a little broken, though we are lucky and our feet don’t pain us at the moment.

And no angel came with a big map.

But you know, I think I do know the way. It’s still confusing. Death is still around. My mother died…but after more years than we imagined. Things don’t make sense.

But it doesn’t matter. I take a step at a time. Sometimes I hold someone’s hand.  I try to love the journey.

the ground is rocky

“Um, no offense, not saying anything, but you are petting a dead kitten”

I told him I’m a bit strange. I think that energy lingers a while after death, that sometimes it is a slow and delicate transition.

And I kept patting the kitten, still telling it it was precious, it was wonderful, what a good cat it was.

He’d brought it by a while ago, cold & barely alive, rejected by its mother. But it had a spark; there was a strong pulse of life still there. When the cat opened his eyes and complained as I tried to massage it back to us, when he bit my finger trying to grab some wet catfood, I thought…yes. Yes, you will fight. You will stay.

The kid did all he could. He warmed the kitten against his chest in a pouch I hastily contrived of a knitted hat and some red ribbon. He offered food and water, eyedroppers if need be. The cat got to visit motels, carefully undercover, and pounce and play and be admired for his soft fur and his blue, blue eyes.

And eventually, upon waking in seizures, on a day with no vets open & no transportation, kitten and friend arrived on my steps as I was starting the day of paste up and editing and hard deadline.

Sure I’d stop it all for a kitten, for just a scrap of hope, for just one more breath.

Kitten learned to purr, and watch, and be fascinated by light, movement, this strange quick world.

I always thought it knew me and felt safe in my hands, and it was in my hands, to my murmurs of “you are a beautiful cat” that he died.

You don’t give up till the end.

And even then maybe you don’t give up.

Kitten (his name, bestowed only a day or so ago, was Joey Gizmo) is buried in my back garden, now with a potted Japanese maple marking the spot. The kid and I talked of death and ceremony. What do you do? I’d told him of my dad’s death (like kitten, in my arms). He told me how he hadn’t wanted to go to his father’s funeral.

Were you close? Well, yeah, he taught me a lot about ethics.

Sorrow and the scent of ripe, falling plums. These mark the day. Hard to know what to say. The ground is rocky.

Almost every day of my life someone asks about one passion or another, one cause, one struggle. They say pretty much the same thing. “Isn’t it a done deal?” “You can’t fight power and money” “No way one person can do anything”.

It’s kind of as if they are telling me I’m stroking a little kitten whose eyes remain fixed on mine, whose breath has just faded away, this mere handful of fluff & beauty. Why waste the time?

Well, you never know. And you can’t turn away. And though I wish with all my soul for the power to save, cure, and transform every hurting, dying, sorrowing bit of our universe I know what’s possible and what’s not.

And what is possible, what is always possible, is love. That’s what I’ll rest on and what I’ll keep on doing, in every breath and every soft or sharp moment. Living, dead, transforming world—here’s my love. It’s what I take from you and what I give back.

And Joey Gizmo, I was very glad to know you.

did kafka write this story?

It was court day today for Reign and her mom and all the support people with our official notices to appear. 8:30am sharp in the city to the north. I was awake at 5. Well, I didn't really get much sleep in any case.

Into the ribbed tights, the acceptable suit, the nice little boots, the sterling pendant. Cup of very strong tea, long journey through the forests under the dawn light.

In the corridors of justice we waited. And waited. And waited. I said hello to the paternal grandmother and the birth father. I hugged Reign's mom, I chatted with other support people. I watched the social workers gather, each holding reams of paper.

At last Eddiethepublicdefender darted from the stairwell into the room. Reams of paper in his arms too. He came directly to me and said "have you heard, we have a settlement". Ever skeptical I asked what the terms were, what was given, what was taken. As he started to tell me--Reign would go into state custody, but maybe someday her mom could have her, wasn't that nice, and the state would no longer charge the mother with starving her child, and...
As he started to tell me, as I was about to say something...well, I was so tempted to swear, but I am a ladylike soul--the CPS lady across from us said "Eddie, Eddie, we don't have a deal".

Consternation on the lawyer's face, confusion everywhere. Does this sound familar? Are we in some careful Noh play? Or perhaps it is a novel by Kafka?

The attorney for the birthfather stomped by saying to the father and his mother "I am shocked to even see you here, why are you here?" Heidi said "my granddaughter's life is on the line, why wouldn't I be here?"

And I looked at my midwife friend beside me and said "something is very wrong here; there is evil in this hall now".

She looked at me and did not disagree.

Into the courtroom for ceremonial announcements of who we were. Lawyer bluster. Confusion.

Afterwards I spoke with one of the CPS lawyers who informed me that they had grave concern over the mother's mental state and her ability to care for her baby and she needed to prove her ability. I said "I saw her and her baby daily during the first month and I have no doubts. It's a bit hard for her to demonstrate her mothering without a baby to mother." I said "don't you people realize there is a baby with a whole vast family and everyone is hurting now?"

He told me I was being unreasonably argumentative.

So there are more hearings to come. And...my gut feeling? Reign is in state hands and due to be adopted. She will not know the story of how we fought for her. Her mother was poor, her mother was young, her mother was without shelter.

Those are crimes in our system. How can you fight that?

But yes, I'm still fighting.

some of the disappeared

It's my stepfather's birthday today. Or, well, it would be, if he and my mother had married and if he had stayed in my life in some way, or in hers.

Sometimes I check out his name on the internet, but there aren't any hits that make sense. Of course, he could well have changed his name. He could perhaps be dead, but if he were dead...I think, if he were dead, somehow the echos from far away and long ago would reach me even here.

It's not as though he was in fact, in any way at all, a father to me. It's not as if he held me on his knee or read me stories or walked me to school. I had a father. That father also did none of those things, but, well, he was my father.

Tony, well, Tony's something else again. When I met him he was motorcycle slick and back from Vietnam. He'd met my mother in a bar. He said she seemed so sad, so beautiful, sitting in the corner nursing her drink, her long gold hair spilling over that black dress. He had to go over.

And I gather things progressed from there, I don't know, I was traveling through Europe. The last thing that mattered to me was the love affairs of my 40 something beautiful mother.

I'm not even sure Tony was 30 yet, back then. But they had a lot of years together, and mostly they seemed happy, and he helped her through some of the really rough ones, the years of crime and punishment, the years when my brother served time for murder, the years the world seemed to fall apart.

He carried my picture in his wallet and showed his friends. My mother said he'd say "This is my beautiful daughter and her children". Yeah, it was strange. Sure, it was touching.

He helped seal the roof of my cabin one year. And somewhere along the way he disappeared.

Well, my mother's life kind of fell apart that year, between the cancer and the end of her job and the loss of her apartment, and she was swept up to North Dakota by my other brother.

The last time I heard from Tony I was visiting her there--it was maybe 14 years ago. He called, he always called, said my mother, he always promised he'd come up, only there was a court case. Only there was a job somewhere. Only there was another woman, or two or three. Only...

My brothers won't even mention his name. My mother in those days was...discreet. I never knew quite what she thought, quite what she felt; she was busy trying to survive. She managed another year.

I guess he knows she's dead.

I think of him on his birthday, because it is close to my own, and easy to remember. I wonder where he is, and what was ever true, back in those days. With his startling blue eyes he claimed he was Indian, he claimed he knew the old ways. He taught my son how to make paint of flower petals.

It left the slightest stain.

(the photo, which was titled "umbrella man" is from Flicker, where the photographer goes by mysza 831)

That Black and White Hat

I saw the black and white hat in a shop window, as I walked in the rain gleaming streets from the market.

Ugly hat. But my heart stopped a moment, and for a moment time shifted.

Acrylic knit, with a visor. Sort of pseudo hounds-tooth check. It had been a present, along with a red hat for me, sent to England by my mother to my love of the time and me, to keep us warm and cheerful through a British winter. I think my boyfriend actually liked it. At any rate he wore it, back in that autumn, back in that winter, in the days we walked across the heather outside Edinburgh, or around the many corners of London.

In September time shifts for me more than in many months. September's calendar is pocked with little points of emotionality and little stars of "oh, that was good". It is the month of my own birthday. It is the month my parents wed, the month my father died in my arms, the month my partner of now almost 30 years first lay in my arms, the month one of my great loves and mentors was born, and then died, the month of my daughter's partner's birth.

And it was the month we walked around Edinburgh and looked at Blake watercolors in a little library and thought we'd live together and in love forever.

September is the month I said I would travel no further with that love. September is the month I took a job in an unlikely bookshop in a town with less than 2000 people in it and said "I need to stay here".

So, you know the great what-if? What if our ten years had turned to twenty and to thirty and to forty and nearing fifty? I don't usually indulge in these fancies, but the black and white hat took me by surprise.

I know, looking back, what happened with that choice. I look at my children, my roots, my land, the forests I love, the people I care for, the sustenance I get and that I share. I look at trees planted and bearing fruit, at gardens, at a series of griefs and joys and complications. It has been a very rich life, for which I am grateful.

My love of the black and white hat has written a lot of very well received books, and lives what appears to be a good life thousands of miles south of me, with a woman I've never met. Now and then he tells me when a new book is due out, or a prize is awarded.

How we raged and loved, those years so long ago. How I rushed into the night air to walk and walk and walk and calm my spirit. How arrogant I found him. How arrogant I was.

His latest email mentioned, in amongst the dates of future publications, that he is losing weight rapidly. That the surgeons took out his gallbladder, but to no avail. That they are running new tests, but he is off meanwhile to Mexico with his current partner, whatever the results. Living, he says, on gummy bears and pasta.

Just a little "oh, by the way".

Sort of "well, I might be dying, but...my books are coming out". Sure, I congratulated him, and wished him well.

Yeah, we thought we'd live forever, love forever. We were so very young.

(the poignant photo is by a photographer called Dalona)

rainbows and visitors

My English friend who lives on a unstable hillside in a newly thrown together shed, with his cat and his memories, stopped by the other morning to tell me there was a rainbow.

I immediately left the bookshop to rush out into the mixed rain and sunlight and stare at it.

I have very few rules in life, but one, as I told him, is to never miss the opportunity to stare at a rainbow. There aren't enough in a lifetime to take the risk of missing one.

He's a good man, married four or five times ("why on earth did you bother?" I once tactlessly exclaimed). He's a twin, adopted at four or five months of age with his pretty blonde sister. He was, he said, the extra--the dark and crying boychild. Much of his life...well, I don't probe where it hurts. But I see the pain.

"Stinky old dog" he greets Champ, and Champ is delighted. And because it is said with warm affection I don't get upset. Sure, call my old dog stinky and chat with my cats, it's fine.

There is an odd privilege to being the bookstore lady, the person who can be found with ease, who will take a moment to listen, who has some bowls of good fruit and a well known box of warm socks and a sort of Mary-Poppins grab bag of what-might-be-needed. I'm pretty lucky.

And people like my English friend do alert me to rainbows.

Yesterday was exceptionally full of visits and revelations, amongst the chat about the latest mystery novels, and whether someone who likes Steinbeck would like McPhee, and poetry, and rain.

What struck me was the common thread though, amongst the stories I was told.

Poppy's companion came, as he does most days, for apples and water and some bread and a biscuit for Poppy. Poppy's a little black and tan dog with white paws; to my untrained eyes she looks like a beagle, but she dances like a poodle and her person once told me she was a particular fancy sort of hound. Her person showed up last summer with her and asked for a needle and some thread to repair his sleeping bag. I had those on hand, but I also had a light sleeping bag not in need of repair, which I gave him. He said then he was moving north, just here for a day or two. Fine, said I. He said "I was once a meteorologist". Handy knowledge, I said.

So he came yesterday, got some apples. I offered him some kiwi fruit as well. He confided that pears were his very favorite. And he told me how his mom used to leave offerings of bread and fruit in the garden when he was very young, for the fairies.

We thought there were fairies, he said.

Well, maybe there were, said I, you never know. And I asked if he had many sisters and brothers or what.

And he told me. He told me his mom had been 15 when he was born, the eldest of her children. He told me his dad was drafted and sent to Vietnam, and the young girl said to hell with that, she wasn't gonna wait for a dead soldier.

And she gave her son to her sister to raise.

"How old were you?" I asked.

Four, he said. And he said when he was 15 his mother got in touch, but he didn't want to have anything to do with her. "I was 15, I didn't need a mother".

I said nothing.

"And when I was in the Navy later she wrote...well, she emailed...she had three children, she didn't need four. So that was that."

She's a nurse in Ohio. High up in some hospital, he said. He said he was proud of her. And his dad died, and his wife died, and there wasn't much to live for, so he walked out of the house with his dog, with Poppy, and that was a few years ago. And so it goes.

No sense in getting close to anyone, he said. And then he seemed a bit ashamed that he'd told me all too much, so I got busy looking for some biscuits for the dog, and wished him a good day, out there along the roads.

The next guy, with his pitbull puppy, had been thrown out again by his girlfriend. "So, I'm back beneath the bridge" he said, and he said he was sorry, cause he'd told me he was getting money together to replenish the dogfood and he didn't.

I understand, I said, things come up, don't feel bad. His girlfriend had taken up with some drugs he doesn't do, and some guys who can supply them.

I'm sorry, I said.

I know about his mom, who died long ago, and he found her. I know about the jail time and the series of girls, young women, who cling to him a while and then drift off.
The pup is looking good, though.

And then John came in. Now, I haven't seen John for a few months. The last times I saw him my heart was full of trouble. He was lean, and dirty, and desperate and sick. He was using, he was drinking, he was looking for some quick way to fortune or some quicker way to death. I'd run into him at night and his eyes were haunted.
Yes, his story has abandonment in it too, and foster care, and hardening.
John used to bring me small treasures. Small, stolen, treasures. I'd quietly try to get them back to where they belonged. He would offer me his gifts with hurting, pleading eyes.

Women liked John, especially women who shared his drugs. Oh, there were stories.

So he came in, after some months of no news, and he said "Kathy, I had to come see you. I'm clean, I'm okay. Took some jail, but I'm okay".
He'd been picked up for something minor, and had done a bit of county time, and then decided to go to a clean and sober house.
"Kathy, it's been 124 days. I'm not using, I'm not drinking, I have a job. I'm living up north, but I had to come see you".

I hugged him. I thanked him, I told him he looked great. He'd put on a little weight; had cut his long ragged black hair. He was smiling.

"You never gave up on me" he said. "You never did. So I'm not giving up either".

And then I cried.

(the photo, oddly, comes from Finland. But it so looks like my part of the world)

speech after long silence

"How does he look? Is his hair gray?" The phone call came from an acquaintance who had heard an old friend of mine had passed through town briefly.

I paused and thought a while; it has been a few years since I last saw him, and nearly a decade since he moved to another region, remarried, had new children. There was a time...well, it was long ago.

I said "yes, his hair is graying now, but he looks good". And indeed, the ones I love look perpetually beautiful to me; I am just not a terribly visual soul; I tend to see with the eyes of love, and those are unwavering.

To this brief visit he brought the oldest of the new children. The other children, the children of the first marriage, had been the ages of two of my own, and in those long ago days they were with me and my children day after day, extensions of my heart, as much my own as the children of my body. I had not met the first child of the new marriage, though I sent him, and his small brother, embroidered blankets when they were born, and their mother has sent photos over the years.

The little boy and his dad rushed into the shop as I was due to go out for a peace vigil. The father, as he always did, engulfed me in an embrace. The little boy stood quietly by. "Hello" said I, and told him my name, you must be...oh, let's call him James, which is not his name at all, and held out my hand. He gravely took it. A most polite child, the image of his older brother, who is now in college, save that he has his mother's fair coloring.

"She's been a friend of mine a long time" said his father.

The store was very busy, my partner not back yet from a visit to a friend in another town. My old friend and I spoke quickly of many things--the older children, the youngest child, with his mom in another state for a visit to her family. I helped the child find some interesting books. There is something of his grandfather in his eyes, I thought--I had loved that rough and ready guy tremendously, as well as his elegant wife. Both are dead now, but I could see flashes of the past darting like light over the six year old's face.

Time is a strange thing. My friend said he and his family are considering moving out of state, to be near his wife's family. That will be wonderful for your boys, said I.

I play music these days, at night, after everyone is asleep, he said. I drift off into that world--there's no pain there, there is beauty. I think of you, sometimes.

The little boy wanted to know why the dog wears a sock, and I told him Champ's story. My youngest child wanted to see his old friend--my friend was Gabriel's stalwart helper and champion in many ways, back when Gabe was tiny. I could tell James seemed puzzled--a big kid with Down Syndrome; might have been the first person he had met like this. I trust his father will explain. My friend said, "wow, last time he didn't have any facial hair at all" and Gabe smiled, for he is proud of his bit of pale fuzz.

And the phone rang, and my partner returned, and someone needed books on how to train dogs, and a kid I've helped came in to tell me he was out of jail, again, and to return the money he'd borrowed, and I needed to get to my vigil.

I wish we had a longer time to talk, said my friend.

I do too, I said. It is lovely to have met you, I said to James. You have your mother's beautiful eyes. Not that there is anything wrong with your dad's eyes, mind you.

My friend laughed, and left.

I found my peace signs and adjusted my black clothing and rushed out to my corner, apologizing to Sara for being late. And watched them drive away.