A Small Moment

My Dad, 1927-2010

I met my Dad by accident on the main street in Sea Cliff.   To see him outside the never ending psychodrama of my mother’s house came with the realization that we both walked on streets outside in the world.  We met by the library, a gothic building with long, looming spires, leaded windows and dark brick, rococo swirls.  It was a building from a time when libraries were important.  

“Well, hello!”  he said.  

He was by then a fagile looking old man, whom I barely knew, who had kept himself from being known.   His steps were becoming tentative but daily, he took himself down the alley where once ran a trolley car, to the Italian deli where they knew his name and would tease him about all the women he could still attract.  

“He’s a cute old guy,” the deli man with the blood-stained apron would say to no one in particular.  My father would blush, this kind of banter unknown.

“Hello!”  I said in a slightly exaggerated way, schooled as I was in the great and necessary chasm between parent and child of an era begone just like the town.

It wasn't where I grew up in but it was a good choice of my parents to move there some years ago.  The main street passed the striped barbershop pole and its green awning, an antique nook that was rarely open, the deli, the post office with an impossibly friendly post mistress, one bank, the library, before continuing further on to the sloping lawns and wide verandas of big houses looking out onto the Long Island Sound with its sailboats lazily moving on nice days.  I was headed to the circular, grassy park that is the terminus of walks and bike rides and the end of the main street, where I  drink a cup of coffee in the morning or listen to the cicadas and watch the first firefly at dusk.  I met my father and we said hello - surprise, some formality in our voices.   “I am going to the park,” I said.

“I am going the other way,” he said and we smile and turn and begin to walk off and then, reason unknown, a small moment, we simultaneously turn and look at ech other.  We look for a minute, don’t smile now, and turn back to our own paths. It is the last visit I will have with my father walking, still well, still himself, still breathing on his own.

Miss Lily

She is bigger than life now as life slips away.  She imagines herself an icon, a talisman while driving a new fire-engine red Prius, saving the Earth with every mile. She has replaced the old van with the bumperstickers and reinvented herself once again, emerged anew, a siren, a goddess whose hands are thrown up in jubilation when she departs a room even if the attention has already turned elsewhere.  By day, she leads a troupe of middle school dancers to other middle school stages, insists they call her “Miss Lily” so as not to be confounded by the formality of a surname.  She herself has danced the samba in Cuba, the tango in Spain, the belly dance in Egypt.  She believes in the body’s wisdom yet speaks an inordinate number of languages.  During her summer vacations, she has traveled and lingered by the sea of fiery sunsets and white foam speckling pockmarked sand.  Way past youth, she has taken lovers in their own language, imagining them relishing her large thighs and substantial ass.   Her blonde curls flung back in a headband, she is not afraid of ageing, dances in her tights to world music.  She is Isadora Dunca, a red car, a red scarf,  white dance slippers, a coastline, a handsome stranger, a guilty pleasure.  At night, a hotel room with french doors flung open to a velvet warm night of sparkling stars and sparkling drinks.  In the morning, a balcony of yucca and cactus for Miss Lily.

San Francisco Alleyway

Journey

My Name

Secretly, my name is Happy.  Not Happy Rockefeller although I wouldn’t mind the money.  My name is candy canes and jelly beans, the riotous colors of autumn, the swirl of a psychedelic poster.  It is not subdued, brown, beige or depressed.  My name is Cuba, indulging in complimentary colors, not matching tones.  It is the pink of cotton candy and red hearts, Fiestaware and a lemony drink with an umbrella found perched on a barstool in the middle of a blue pool in Cancun.  My name is not the East Coast but the alleyways of San Francisco with brash urban art, the sound of a belly laugh, a pulsing of the air that refuses to cease and desist.  It is not serene but the braying sound of the seals in Fisherman’s Wharf.  It is not the name I was given on a dark, January morning into a world that still had Harry Truman as president.    I was deposited into a button-down, dreary, Cold-War world of steam heated apartments, frozen exteriors, dark skies, the silence of snow and a mother who went crazy.  I was named for a biblical figure, a woman of justice and majesty and it might have been enough until it  became a diminutive, the brand name of a small donut.  Little Debbie.  I was born with three short, ugly names.  A middle name that was a common tag of its time, a bowing to the convention of having one at all, innocuous and blending in with the first, not taking away its thunder, a bridge to be skipped over or forgotten.  The last name a  non-euphonious translation, a hatchet job at Ellis Island.  A name not in the language I speak.  One that had no flowing rivers, no hillocks, no resting places, no artisan occupations, no village as a reference.  An unlikey combination of consonants, a reminder that we were immigrants.   Over time, my new last name has added more vowels to round it out on the tongue, to drive it deeper down the throat, closer to the heart, away from the upper palate of Teutonic inflection, to sunny Mexico, to doors painted in blazing blues, to the colors of the rainbow.  My made-up name has migrated to lands with sunny plazas and ice cream vendors selling neon-colored flavors.  I love the Hispanic way of naming, a full succession of names denoting relations and ancestor lines, a seemingly endless parade of names, a heralding of a new person to carry on.  Secretly, my name is Happy now, happy to be old, happy to be finished with the seriousness of it all, happy to let go of everything that doesn’t please me, happy to find the world in its daily sounds, smells and images.  Happy I have survived intact.

Early Morning

Andean Joan (Juana)