Wednesday meander

With hardly any rain on 7H, we nevertheless had quite a display, lightning out the kazoo, far distant, one close, and then three streaks at the same Time, so close, bright and immediate that blinding flash and deafening clap were simultaneous, near enough to say "better go inside". Too close for comfort, but only once in six and a half years has it been close enough to splash the Bay water in front of us and feel the arm hair rise.

Not at all wanting to get back to blogging every day, sitting here and writing something every blasted day. It's not a commitment, it's just a whenever.

Last week we had lunch at Apna Bazaar across from Sam's on 23rd Street. A super meal for anyone who loves Indian food, and Pakistani food, and lamb dishes, and variably spicy hot food, as much as I do. My lamb stew dish, I ordered "medium" or "three" and it was perfect. Next time I'll try one of their goat dishes, don't know that I've ever eaten goat, said to be the most consumed meat in the world (just not in the US).

After eating, a walk-around their grocery store, purchased a sheep cheese from Bulgaria, and two jars of jam, a strawberry, and a fig, from Turkey, much less expensive than the French preserves I buy, excellent, and so loaded with fruit as to be preserves instead of jam. Why are they on mind? Because, like the chicken liver paté from TJ's, I delayed opening them until after my medical check-up weigh-in.

A friend asked me recently, "What are you reading?" and I was dumb, couldn't remember. So I'm paying attention. Two lifelong favorite magazines instead of opening a book at the moment. Tuesday evening, from September 2021 TheAtlantic.Com, "Twenty Years Gone: One family's struggle to make sense of 9/11" by Jennifer Senior. Well written and most moving, about four people who were nearly destroyed by their loss of Bobby McIlvaine, 26, who was killed that day, two thousand people murdered as the Twin Towers fell while we watched. His mother, his father, his brother, his fiancé. I was taken by his brother's words that Bobby would not have wished that they could never recover. He resolved to not dishonor his brother by letting his own life be ruined, though basically it was. Emotionally, none of them have really moved on, it's all still there, daily. You wake up to it mornings. For me, the unexpected loss story was intense, took me to the afternoon of January 23rd, 1947, me sobbing, my mother telling me, "Mom wouldn't want you to cry", and me, eleven years old, feeling that Mama was so wrong, that my grandmother who loved me, and whom I had loved so, would know that my heart was broken, and she would know that I would cry.

The pain in my throat and chest that went beyond the tears, lasting months. I'm the only person still living from the events of that long ago frantic, busy house that afternoon of what Emily Dickinson wrote, about the Bustle in a House after death, "The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity".

What most struck me from Senior's article, words, "It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead". Never thought about it, and may agree but not entirely: my grandmother has been dead nearly 75 years, my first such loss, and I've lived nearly a generation longer than she did but haven't abandoned her at all. I no longer live in her house, The Old Place, but she's present to me every time I look across the Bay at Davis Point. My mother died ten years ago last month, my father 28 years ago last month. Others I loved deeply and grieved hard. But I've held onto Mom longest, maybe most of all.

Life is Good this morning, and I'm far from morose, no matter how this reads! Still, not until you get to this age, and may be stirred by things you read, or hear, or see, will it come home to roost, that it's gone and you can't get it back. Somehow, entirely irrationally, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't, something in me always assumed that in Time I'd be seventeen again! And forty! Two old cars parked in the garage out back on the alley of my mind. From Time to Time, I used to peer in at them through the cracked window, but the last time I looked both cars were gone.