Notes from a Nobody

Back in 1993 when I was a serious Nobody (as opposed to now when I’m a Nobody with damaged hair) our late national treasure of a novelist and poet John Updike sent me a postcard in response to a column I sent him about an ABC boy who died young. I guess it was also about my mom dying in front of my eyes, the beauty of oranges piled in a bowl and how a woman cellist looks when she takes that instrument between her legs, which both embarrasses and moves you at the same time and makes you realize how Sex and Music and God really ARE all connected.)I’ve been reading Updike to cheer myself up. Others would read him to feel jealous but the thing with the guy is how generous he always was to everyone; how gracious, even to us little people: Back in ’93 he wrote a short story for The New Yorker about his mother dying. Anyone could see it was his real mom, so the column I sent him accompanied a condolence note. When he answered it he said I wrote ‘like a dream’ which is nonsense but such gallant nonsense. I’m writing for 1,000 years here and still no book offers! Still no requests for my endorsements on bras for your full-figured girls! I have never been on staff at a newspaper; haven’t earned a salary since I stopped teaching high school, topping out at the handsome figure of $12,000. But I have five books which I by-God published myself. And I make a princely ten dollars a column from the papers who still bother to pay me, who haven’t themselves gone under for the third time. And every April 15^th my husband David says “T, you couldn’t be earning LESS!” - to which I say 'So what?'Remember that great thing labor leader Eugene Debs said 100 years ago? "While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”? Well where there's a way to lose money I have found it, all unwilling, or else it has found me. At the same time I do know this, that the best fun  I ever had was on the day I took the train to New York on my own dime, went to The Ethel Walker School in Brooklyn, taught the whole day and gave away five cartons of my funniest book, the one from my children’s childhood with all the pee-pee and bum-bum jokes in it.It's what God wants of me I think. And to have written all your adult life is such a privilege.These last seven days I have been writing my way out of sorrow over the death of my cat Charlotte and now here I am on the zillionth rainy day of this rainy cold summer and I feel swell. We’re on vacation with our mildewed clothes and Old Dave is doin’ the crossword ten feet away. Our remaining cat Abe is calculating the minutes 'til his next pig-out on fresh shrimp, eight strangers are coming over for drinks at 6 and God bless you guys I'm writing to you.To read what I said about the dead boy, the oranges and the cellist give me a minute. Takin’ a quick walk for the sake of the old bones, then I’ll put her up.Signed,The Cheeseball as she looked last month.(Took one look  at this pic and went straight to the beauty parlor. "I have black curly hair, dammit; Throw out the peroxide and the straighteners and let me be what I am." Today it's the color of charcoal ready for the steaks. And by God if the curl isn't comin' back at the edges too! (that's what's known as FAKE HAIR stuck to the back of my head in the photo. Marie Antoinette called. Cue the guillotine guys.)

All Souls Day

I had a dream last night in which I had just died. I was dashing around - flying actually, over scenes like the one above, recently visited - and so didn’t realize I was dead until I swooped back over my body sitting in my same clothes from that morning, seat belt still on, so to speak.

I didn't look dead - just kind of deflated is all, like our little cat looked in the gutter after that car killed her, and all I could think was "So wait that anxious get-it-done, get-it-done girl wasn't even ME?"?

It wasn’t a sad dream though really, not like the one I had about my mother a couple of months after she died. In that one we were at the cemetery, the whole noisy family. I was scooping dirt from the grave to take home with me and my cousin Carolyn was saying "What are you going to do with THAT?” My husband was shivering in his best suit and Cousin George was just wading over to him: “Ever hear of an OVERCOAT?" he wryly remarked, only all that really happened. The dream was that my mother was there with us.

“Gosh isn't it cold!” she said. “I can’t wait to get back to the house! Do you have somebody there making the coffee and setting out the food?”

“Oh Mom I’m sorry but you... you can’t come. You have to go lie down there,” I said in the dream, pointing to the box, pointing to the open hole, and woke feeling about as desolate as ever I have felt in this life.

The other day I saw my former neighbor in a book store. Her husband was the heart of our town before he died in his sleep in a few summers back. He used to cut his grass in the pitch dark if the sun dared go down, using his headlights so he could see. He'd rive through the downtown in his pickup, yelling jokey hellos to people every 30 feet. He crashed a Halloween party we gave once; appeared in a gorilla suit, joined the dancing briefly, made apelike gestures and, even grabbed a sandwich before leaving without ever opening his mouth to say who he was.

Seeing his widow I suddenly realized something. “You know what I just remembered Joanna? I dreamed about Dave last night!”

“Oh! You did really?” she said with a face of inexpressible longing. “I haven’t dreamed of him in so long! How is he?”

The longer I live the more I think that last remark reveals the larger truth: when we leave here we don’t go lie down in a box. We take off our seatbelts and fly.

Drink to Sleep

I couldn’t sleep last night and kept thinking  how my mom dreamed once that she was on the 50-yard line going eyeball to eyeball with the Princes of the Church.  (Freud called, I know: Maybe Mom dreamed that because she got divorced way WAY back when it was like worse than sacrificing small animals, and yet she continued to take Communion which was grounds for a few more times around the ol’ rotisserie-spit in Hell but hey I don’t blame her. Her husband left her so now she has to just sit in the pew like I was always doing because I'd made out with my boyfriend for more than five minutes and was in a state of Mortal Sin?)

I envied her that dream last night just because she was dreaming! Everyone was dreaming last night,  people’s pets, their houseplants, poor George Bush on House arrest for another 100 days or so…..

My man, who CLAIMS he never dreams, was at least snoring to beat the band and even sort of smiling - which made me want to shave his chest hair off – dry - and harvest those eyebrows too, just out of envy, because I lay there NOT sleeping hour after hour after hour....

I hung my head upside down off the bed which usually makes me have religious visions and then pass out. No dice. I though about that fox-faced Eckhart Tolle who says we are not our minds and we should turn the darn things off but I couldn’t. So finally at 2am I, who am trying to diet here, got up and poured me some hot milk. Then I added cream, then cocoa, then a fat slug of whiskey, then sugar, then whipped cream and drank it down grimly. I thought maybe the alcohol would help but it didn’t, of course it didn’t. I always forget that alcohol keeps the body working especially that giant gelatinous thing under your right ribs known as THE LIVER, which thank God we have one, y' know? I used to eat cigarette ashes just to get the laugh and I suppose they’re still in my liver somewhere, along with the booze-soaked Belgian waffle-ful of calories in that creamy drink.

Anyway. I lay awake til 4:30, at which point I suddenly fell asleep and dreamed that the ceilings were all dripping rain and a young person I just met was here and my kids too and my kids were kids again and they were all busy talking with the new one and I thought  “Ah, my dear children living under this roof again, leaky or not.... “ - and then the alarm went off at and it was 5 and so I got up.

It’s raining still and I’m like 100,000 calories further away from thin but I was able to work and write and water the plants just now. And the ceilings AREN’T leaking after all and David seems to still have chest hair and I sure do miss Mom who lies in her grave these 20 years in her favorite little suit and I will never ever be sorry I took a picture of her in her casket even if the funeral directors did all scowl at me as I snapped it.

So here’s a shot of death, if you even believe in it. Me I don’t. I see Mom all the time out of the corner of my eye and I hear her voice, which was strong and full of fun. My idol Emily Dickinson wrote it to a friend: "There ARE no dead, Katy. The grave is but our moan for them."   So there.