They promised me at the AT&T store that it is the same for them, but clearly they just told me that to make me feel better. Not the Spiritual part-- we don't get into that at AT&T.
I got dressed up last night as Dorothy, and went to find someplace festive, though it doesn't seem to exist in Southern Cal. Two cars did beep me as I crossed the boulevard, smiled, maybe even laughed. I had a basket and Toto in my left hand and was glad there were still people alive who remembered, had seen the movie, maybe even thought Judy Garland was wonderful. Went to a bar and was so disheartened by one who was sitting there, grieving that he could no longer place in golf tournaments, that I left one sip into an overpriced drink, and moved on to Spaghettini. Did not stay late enough for the alleged show that was to be put on behind the spider webs woven across the stage and in front of the restrooms, a nice touch. Had the braids and red shoes and all. Put it in the closet this morning and will save for next year if I am still alive and in a place where people give a fuck.
I wonder why it is I so love Halloween.
Just came across this sentence in an old work I chanced on, never completed or fulfilled, and probably never would have been anything, but it's a fine sentence.
“Life was the gift that would eventually be taken back, so you had an obligation to pay attention to it while it was still there. “
Mon Dieu! What might she have not become!
I am borderline sad but not as much as I was the other evening when I had lost my cell phone, I thought, and was in a state of complete disarray. Memory, that thing which always characterized what I should feel proudest of, having been able to recite the Gettysburg Address at two years and three months, something that made me a show piece in Pittsburgh that made even my mother proud, she who didn’t like children even when she was one of them—has beyond “started” to fail.
My cell fell out of my pocket onto my son’s car floor when the evening
was just starting Friday, and by the time he brought me home I had forgotten
about hearing it fall, and later, on
foot, had gone back to the hotel where we’d had dinner to search for it. Spent the whole night borderline suffering,
emotions salvaged at daytime when Jenni brought it back after which I re-found
e-mail she had sent night before saying she would do that the next
morning. I am not so much scared as
distant-saddened by this softly harsh reality.
Memory goes, even when it is not the Gettysburg Address.
So
I am at the Brooklyn Water Bagel Co. wondering if it would be any better in the
South of France. Clearly I have lost it,
that I can even ask myself such a question.
Can I look at the striped awning and think it can in any way compare to
a boat splashing across the water?
It
is not so much that I have given up a love of places as taken on a dislike for
getting to them. Maybe if I could travel
always as I did coming back from Amsterdam on that tiny airline that stopped at
some pole, it would be okay.
