Author: gwayland

CHRISTMAS EVE 2025 AT THE LAST MILE LOUNGE

35 degrees in Boston as day dawns, December 24. There a 90 per cent chance of rain — a rainy Christmas Eve? Now it looks like it might snow. A white Christmas? Really? Gray drops falling into snowy remnants of the recent freeze and snowfall? Or fresh, glowing snow of the kind the child in us likes to sing and dream about. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, at the Lounge….

Haven’t been to the Lounge in a while. The Last Mile Lounge out where the cities of Revere, Lynn and East Boston, Massachusetts converge like carnival bumping cars, not far from the ocean at Revere Beach, the airport (a crazy place today), the city (glowing night and day until the new year when it will submerge again in cold and gray), the country and all of life and nestled in a neighhood of happily variegated wood and brick homesteads that, for Christmas Eve, sit quietly where, now and then, on narrow streets off the main route into Lynn across the marshes, a soul or two will come to stand before some woodframe ghost and tell their kid they grew up there and tell them about the things that happened in the small front lawn if there is one and the back lawn if they can see it where it backs into other houses or some old garage.

By nightfall, those houses, occupied by generations born more recently, some in this century, will glow with lights. Great. Silent Night.

The year will end soon. End again, begin again. On and on and on.

For now, the Last Mile Lounge has its scattering of Christmas decorations — Deano the bartender stopped spraying that fake snow on the window. HIs old girlfriend Jean liked it. She moved someplace south, oddly, to escape the real snow and Deano figuired there’s enough real snow around every year that he doesn’t need to be spraying fake stuff. Crazy things we do for girlfriends.

But he does put some poinsettia on the ledge in front of the windows; he does hang stuff above the mirror behind the bar and around the main room –and, of course, there is the tree that got deocrated during the tree-trimming party on the 17th. Joe Barron, the owner, insists on a Scotch Pine or a Fraser Fir, no balsam. Guess it has to do when HE was a kid. (Joe is usually down on Key Biscayne, but somebody told me he’s back and occupying one of the two upstairs apartments — Knox the artist is in the other. Knox, by the way has finished his Man Walking The Last Mile mural — only to have the nurses and a group of Revere City Hall secretaries come in and tell him it’s depressing — a guy walking between two prison guards headed for the swining door down a long corridor — and The Chair. “It’s for guys who won’t straighten ou,” he told them.” But that didn’t satisfy them. “I’m married to a guy who won’t straighten out,” said the woman named Cheryl. That led to a lot of bad jokes — so much so that Knox spent three days changing around the whole mural so that it’s a painting of a guy smiling between two smiling guard walking BACK from The Chair — alive….and Deano started serving a drinking at the bar call Governor’s Reprieve.” Then Knox stuck a sign under the three guys saying, MERRY CHRISTMAS.–and painted santa caps on all three guys.

“You ruined it,” said Charlie Simonetti. But his girlfriend Cheryl Burkhardt said, “I love it.”

Knox drank the first Governor’s Reprieve, skipping his usual Blushing Monk. “I’ll turn them around after the the New Year,” he said, feeling warmed by the Reprieve, no doubt, who’s ingredients I’ve yet to learn. I sat down next to him, slapped him on the shoulder, wishing him the greetings of the season and ordered my cranberry and seltzer with a twist of lime.

Deano has his little manger set up behind the bar. The magi are down by the bottle of Old Bushmill, working their way toward the Epiphany.

“Kids are coming by about 7:30 with their parents to sing carols,” Deano told me.

“Kids in a bar?” I ask.

“Outside — out the side door on Myrtle Street. Safe and sound. We raised money for their trip to the LaSalette Shrine in Attleboro last year. And we collected canned goods for their food drive. It’s all about gratitude.”

“I’m grateful,” I said, and sipped my tart little Christmas cocktail.

Carols at 7:30. I was thinking I’d have to come back for that.

“Spanish and English,” Deano said. Stickey and the Crow will be here.”

Stickey and the Crow. I was wondering where they were. Stickey Sammartino and Jackie the Crow. Regulars as regular gets.

“God rest those merry gentlemen,” I said. Knox called for a toast. Everybody toasted —

Kenny Foy (I didn’t even see him over by the juke box) called for a toast of the three guys on the wall, especially the smiling convict – convicted but forgiven on Christmas Eve.

“Joy to the world,” said Athena Leroy, the realtor from Beverly (I didn’t see her, either.”

Dean plucked the Virgin from the creche, held her high. “To miracle births and mercy.”

“Very nice said Pippa Goldfinger who’d just parked her Mercedes and walked in the side door.

I walked down to the beach after that, to see the gray Christmas Eve clouds gathering and the December wind blowing in off the surf, a northwest breeze — and the seabirds were overhead–and a plane heading into Logan bearing sons and daughters home to mom, dad, grandmom, granddad.

First Mile, I thought. Miracle birth. I heard a church bell on the wind. Think I imagined it. Nearest church was — where?

Early Dark. Home for things unseen, unimagined. Pray like crazy, hearing children’s voices–and I hope that wasn’t gunfire.

No. Just a truck lowering his tailgate, making a delivery up by Kelly’s

Somebody working Christmas Eve. Bless him.

And is that a snowflake? Or a raindrop?

BLESSED DARKNESS

The winter solstice. Shortest day. Sunset at 5:40. Christmas lights. Chill, deep silence.

Whose woods these are, I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

Many will know the rest, know that this pause in which one can almost hear the snow falling. Robert Frost wrote this in 1922, the year my mother graduated from high school. She loved Frost. Didn’t know all the levels to his poetry; didn’t have to. No one has to. Pelucid in its evocation of a human moment when even the horse wonders why a human would stop on his busy way on this darkest night when the earth is tilted farthest from the sun. (It’s the time when Christian, centuries ago, chose to mark the coming of The Light into the world, the light darkness could not possess.

But, of course, Frost’s man — probably him in that moment –had to move on. He had, as do we, promises to keep…..

ROSE-COLORED INTERLUDE

Gaudate (Rejoice)

We wait. The seed is planted. It waits the winter and the spring rains. (James 5:8)

In the doorway of EddieDubuc’s old sandwich shop, corner of Neponset Ave and Pope’s Hill Street, shuttered and sealed up in plywood beginning early in the Sixties. (Don’t know if Eddie ran out of money, just got tired of running the place, or what. ) Waiting in the shallow shelter of Eddie’s old doorway for the MBTA bus to carry me to the rapid transit station at Field’s Corner, after which I had to disembark at either Andrew Square or Broadway and catch the City Point bus to a final bus stop — then walk a block…all due to the drab obligation of high school of which there are only scattered happy memories, just the daily filing into the grim, dark halls of the brick school, some of that time in the first two years being bullied — and, at the outset of this daily journey, coming out the front door of 210 Neponset, walking up that long neighborhood block every morning to that bus stop in front of vacant, abandoned Eddie’s lunch place. Only now remembering the one freezing winter morning cloistered in the doorway with a couple of adults, all of us jokingly bemoaning the necessity of waiting bundled up but still cold and in severe discomfort. It was about then a bus passed by, sadly not our bus, emblazoned on its side with an advertisement for travel to Florida, a long, tanned female , sun-glassed body reclined on bright sand. Laughter, one adult joking, noting the longed-for escape. (Does he live, as I do now, in Florida? Did Florida, often warm to another level of discomfort, prove to be The Second Coming of our humanity? Humbug! We still wait, for this cannot be all there is. Are those adults who shared that doorway with me still on this earth, or gone to the Judgement and, having waiting and hoped for it, gone to the sunny sands of a happly timelessness we simply cannot imagine?)

I wait now on the morning of Gaudate Sunday, being urged to be patient, wating for the seed planted in me to receive the winter and spring rains.

This James of the Bible, is said to be one of the ancient pillars of the new Church in Palestine, one of the many New Testament personages named James. (Can I call him Jim? Was there a Jim standing in that doorway with me that cold morning? Was I laughing with a prophet?) This James (Jim) was, we’re told, an administrator, not the Apostle James. Some guy who knew a lot of good stuff and, all through the ages, is telling us to WAIT. BE PATIENT, while trying to be good, faithful, worthy, all that. Easy for him to say — or have said.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

T.S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”

They will light a rose-colored advent candle today.

Hope. We wait….burning, like that little flame….

DECEMBER 12TH, 2025

This date is, incidentally, many things, sacred and mundane — the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Frank Sinatra’s birthday.

But it is, most especially, the birthdays of my twin brothers Ronald and Douglas. I must note that fact, for it is very much on my mind.

Ron is extremely ill and infirm with Parkinson’s Disease. He lives in Winthrop, Mass, near in to Boston, the airport and all things north of the heart of the city.

Doug has lived for decades in Denver. I’m happy to say he is healthy.

Happy birthday, Twinnies. (“Twinny is what Ron’s and Doug’s boyhood playmates and companions were given to calling them from time to time. They were identical.

They are a major part of my life. I pray Ron will gain enough health and strength to be able to get home from the rehab in Woburn, Ma. and enjoy life. I pray Doug remains healthy.

WHAT NOW IN UKRAINE?

Direct from today’s New York Times, December 8, 2025

When the war began, Ukraine’s Western allies wanted to figure out how to send money to Kyiv without seeing it vanish into the pockets of corrupt officials. To protect the money, they insisted that (President) Zelensky’s government allow groups of outside experts, known as supervisory boards, to work as watchdogs.

But ( a Times investigation has found) the Ukrainian government has sabotaged that oversight, allowing corruption to flourish.

Zelensky’s administration stacked the supervisory boards with loyalists, left seats empty or prevented boards from being set up at all. Leaders in Kyiv even rewrote various company charters to limit oversight, which allowed the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars without outsiders asking questions about where that money was going.

Zelensky has blamed Energoatom’s supervisory board (Energoatom is Ukraine’s utility company) for failing to stop the corruption. But, according to documents and interviews with officials, it was the government itself that prevented the board from doing its job.

Zelensky’s role

Zelensky himself has not been directly implicated in the corruption.

But his policies may have enabled it. After Russia’s invasion, Zelensky relaxed anti-corruption rules in the name of boosting the war effort. He worked with political and business figures he had once called criminals and, this summer, he tried to curtail the independence of anticorruption investigators as they pursued the case that ultimately implicated his associates. (He reversed course after Ukrainians poured into the streets in the country’s first large antigovernment protests during the war, saying that Zelensky was threatening Ukraine’s fragile democracy.)

In the course of the investigation, Zelensky asked for the resignation of two ministers and his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak.

Were we warned of this possibility?

Yes, mainly, in my memory, by certain American pundits and figures characterized as “right wing.”

But, left or right, it’s the only story: where there’s money – be it Ukrainian hyrvnia, Russian rubles, American dollars or, once upon a time, Roman denarius, there is greed to currupt us.

MACKERELS IN MOONLIGHT

I’ll take a rare, reluctant excursion into a topical area I most often avoid (contemporary politics), but I do so in the interest of the worthy topic of language, specifically words, their use and abuse.

I’ve read that during the presidential administration of Gerald Ford, Hollywood comic Don Penny was brought into the White House communications office to improve the president’s wooden delivery.

Now, Gerald Ford was a good man. His transitional tenure in the highest office in the land was marked, as I remember, by steady, mostly uncontroversial initiatives (if you rule out his pardon of Richard Nixon, for which even the liberals ultimately gave him an award and told him he did the right thing in declaring an end to “our long, national nightmare,” i.e., Watergate.

He said of himself, after assuming — in a most unassuming way –the Oval Office ( going from vice president to president in the wake of Nixon’s resignation) that he was “a Ford, not a Lincoln.” He was a humble man.

But it is true — his delivery of speeches put you in mind of another word — soporific (sleep enducing).

So it has been written that, after one trying session with Ford, Don Penny said, “Mr. President, these are words. They mean something.” It was a joke, meant to cure Gerald Ford’s inarticulacy.

But yes, we must all remember — words DO mean something.

The current president is part way through a second term in his broken tenure. His inarticulacy is well-known and, one might suppose, deliberate. He comes under enough fire from the Left without me repeating one wag’s suggestion that he functions with a fourth grade vocabulary. His supporters would say he is plain-spoken. You may notice that he repeats himself often, seemingly in a failed search to find a better. clearer way to say what he’d just said. One might also theorize that this is calculated to drive him point home — twice.

Nonetheless, in Donald Trump’s and all of our mouths, words DO mean something, whether you like them or not. Among the things for which he will be remembered is extreme rhetorical recklessness. This has been noted often by friend and foe alike, and it is clear he never intends to change, short of a divine rhetorical intervention –such as God having Lincoln, Gladstone, or even just Ted Sorensen appear to him in a dream to scold him like a Christmas ghost. “Mind your words, Donald!”

His most recent venture into rhetorical recklessness was to suggest that some members of Congress should be executed for, in an undeniably blatently political gesture, creating a video in which they remind military service members that they don’t have to obey illegal orders.

Well, this is true, if an order can objectively be judged to be illegal. That, of course, is not at all a clear, easily recognizable matter to determine. It could be decided after the inevitable courtmartial.

The subsequent furor among Democrats and the liberal media was a predictable — and partisan – tempest in a tea pot. But even Trump’s partisans were inclined to call it –reckless. Another in the inumerable instances of rhetorical recklessness on the part of Donald Trump. It does not serve him — or the nation — well.

This sort of thing is boundless in our society now dominated by the impulsive world of social media. Trump is our first truly social media president.

There is a way to discuss all matter — to object, affirm, criticize — that is powerful, creative, respectful, useful — if the president would only pay attention to the impact and value of his own words.

To which I’ll add, in despair, ‘ain’t never gonna happen.’ Trump is Trump –rude, crude, ineducable on this score. (How did he ever pass the verbal SATs to get into Yale??) And he is reckless. One prays his recklessness is a superficial calculation to shock on the surface while, again, one prays, he is actually more deliberative in private when he makes the decisions that affect our national and international fortunes. The jury is still out on that.

TRump is given to insulting people. I dislike that very much. That’s recklessness. Perhaps he could at least learn to be creative in his insults and denigrations, like John Randolph of Roanoke who, in describing the corrupt nature of another politician’s speech, famously said, “thy words stinketh like a mackerel in the moonlight.”

I guess that would be an improvement. Better still, Mr. President, how about you just stop hurling insults?) It stinketh!

IN THE WAKE OF MELISSA…

I don’t listen to a great deal of rock music since I stopped drinking thirty-eight years ago. Much of it heard with sober sensibilities, filtered through my brittle predispositon and frank prejudice seems merely visceral, hedonistic and superficial — mass enterainment at its most venal. But, that’s just me.

And here I go praising the work of a couple of late, inspired, long-haired souls who wandered about out there in the red clay and neon rain between Macon and L.A..

I refer to keyboardist and vocalist Gregg Allman who died on May 27, 2017 in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He and his slide-guitarist brother Duane (dead in a motorcycle wreck on October 29, 1971 at age 24) formed the core of the Allman Brothers Band and, with their many sidemen, made a real impact on recorded popular music. Their Filmore East recording of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” is supurb improvisational, live rock, artful far beyond top 40 or studio-produced album rock fare. I’m only occasionally a fan of their blues/ rock genre but have often marveled at the craft, range, energy and improvisational near genius of these Georgia boys. I speak of “energy,” but that does not properly characterize the lolling Southern, half-staff stasis that was typical of a band, like most country or blues-rock bands, that seemed just to stand in the spotlight and play — and play and play. And that was and forever will be their glory. Just singing and playing. (Duane, by the way, was born exactly a week before me, Gregg the next year. I never knew this until I started to write this of a Sunday night.)

A guy who bought used vintage guitars and called himself a guitarcheologist, once showed me a picture of the stark, unlovely, chain-link-bordered suburban Macon, Georgia intersection where Duane, traveling at a high speed, collided with a flatbed truck and began his journey to death. There was nothing distinct or special about it — just roadside America. But this Allman Brothers fan and rock guitar afficianodo felt the need to photograph it. The band’s bassist Barry Oakley died close by, also on a motorcycle, a week later, drinking heavily and grieving. The world — it seems especially the world of rock music — seems to have its share of these dark, booze and drug-induced tragedies. I recall while in the Army reading of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s substance-related deaths about a week apart.

Gregg Allman was married seven times, including to Cher ( who was also a serial spouse). It would seem then, that he had difficulty finding true and lasting love. He’s not alone, of course. But perhaps his best song was the love song “Melissa”. His brother Duane thought so. I happened to hear it recently as incidental music on a TV series in which a guy is saying goodbye to his girlfriend — who was not named Melissa. I’d heard it before, of course, but it struck me as sweetly, sadly fetching and so I made a point of calling it up on Youtube and listening to it — and to its elliptical, purposely ambiguous but evocative lyrics, which approach but are not real poetry. Just, as I say…evocative. Isn’t that what the best pop lyrics do? Evoke images and emotions? We don’t listen to most pop music for the chord structure.

And so, Gregg wrote and sang (I pluck phrases here), Crossroads, seem to come and go, yeah…There’s no blanket where he lies…In all his deepest dreams the Gypsy flies…With Sweet Melissa…”

No, not great poetry. Maybe not even a great lyric. Just evocative of some unseen, imagined and absence and longed-for “Sweet ” Melissa…

I’ve read that Gregg Allman wrote the song as early as 1967. He’d apparently tried and failed to write dozens of ballads, and “Melissa” was among the first that, by his measure, made the grade. It is written that the band was staying in a Pensacola motel and that Gregg picked up brother Duane’s guitar” which was tuned to open E and immediately felt inspired by the natural tuning.” The title’s love interest was almost called Delilah. Gregg allegedly settled on Melissa while in a grocery store late one night buying milk. That’s how he tells it in his memoir.

And that title made all the difference to a Youtube commentator writing three years ago under the handle of RoseandRichie. I don’t know if it’s Rose or Richie that says, This song is treaasured by my dad. My sister’s name was Melissa. She died at 26 Yr old. We often listen to it and cry together. Nothing unmanly about it. My dad is a war hero veteran and when he cries, we all cry.

So it is that songs touch us — evoke, remind.

For some on the long Youtube thread following the singing of the song, there are testimonials to its personal impact that seem hyperbolic, exceeding anything I personally could claim for any pop tune, such as when mariazimmerman8639 said five years ago, this song does things to me….brings me back to every wonderful thing in my life…the whole song is just mesmerizing…alweays will be.

You read that and think of Gregg Allman, himself now gone over the horizon into the unknown bourne, simply strumming in a motel room and on a late night errand to buy milk but summoning from within something that will move mariazimmerman years afterward –well, such it is that makes songs such a splendid, eternal form of human inter-communication.

hectorthewonderhalibut6331 (a person, based on his handle, with a playful streak) declares, or, you might say, prays…God I miss the times when this song first came out. Those days and those friends. Damn.

Yeah. Damn indeed. But southerngirl300 goes right over the hedges and declares, one of the greatest songs to ever be recorded in the last century.

Well, for some, probably so. Right up there with Frank Sinatra singing anything by Cole Porter. It’s all a matter of taste. Those cultural/ generational/aesthetic barriers do unavoidably divide usf

As for times when this song came out, it was the early 70s, when romantisizing nostalgia for the 60s was already kicking in. hectorthewonder is obviously a boomer. (And, by the way, the guitar work on the song sounds to me like the work of Duane Allman who would have been dead by the time the song was released, right? One account has “Melissa” being recorded in December of 71, another in February of 71. Duane’s fingers and spirit seems, to my ears, to be on the frets and strings in and between brother Gregg’s third-person choruses of lonely longing (Crossroads, will you ever let him go? No,no,no….I know that he won’t stay without Melissa.

The brothers are gone. Their band with its distinctive sound but a shadow of its former self, lingers on, still touring, even dropping into Madison Square Garden last April.

Meanwhile, maybe for all of this century, moonlighting balladeers in roadside saloons up and down America’s highways will likely be crooning about “sweet Melissa” to slow-dancing embracing couples in dimmed romantic lightiing. No doubt many babies born to Allman Brothers fans, like the lost but not forgotten sibling of Rose or Richie, might be among those shuffling about on the dance floor.

As for weddings and funerals where the bride or deceased happens to be named Melissa…those slow, sad, sweet strains will drift out over church and lawn.

Crossroads seem to come and go….with sweet Melissa.

THE LIGHT WE CANNOT DULL

“The word ‘gay’ has always rubbed me the wrong way,”  James Baldwin told the writer Richard Goldstein, who interviewed him for the Village Voice in 1984. “I never understood exactly what it meant by it.” Baldwin also thought that the word “homosexual” was not a noun. (By which I assume he meant it was just an adjective, modifying a noun or nouns. Now it’s a word, whether noun or adjective, that has basically been declared inoperative by “gay” advocates–for some reason.)

One of Baldwin’s first pieces, published in a journal called Zero in 1949, was an essay on homosexuality in the novel. Novelists, he argued, know that human beings are not reducible to such labels: “Once the novelist has created a human being he has shattered the label and, in transcending the subject matter, is able, for the first time, to tell us something about it and to reveal how profoundly all human being interlock.” (Emphasis added.)

There are a multitudes of ways we mortals have found to be unatural and disordered in these insane times that are disordered morally and emotionally. This has been true, from the evidence, from the dawn of time.

James Baldwin was a gifted, troubled soul who, as often happens with gifted souls and gifted artists, managed to shed some light in darkness, even as he -we, us — linger in darkness and insist on dulling the light.

It’s the human way.

 

JUST SOMETHING I DID, AND REMEMBER…

It might not seem worth remembering. It was a sad time, shortly after news of Diane Harrison’s mother’s death. I remember Diane’s mother well.

Diane’s mother Claire died near the end of the last century. I believe it was April, 1999. Their relationship was loving but difficult. But they loved each other. Somehow it happened that, sometime after the word of her death came, we drove to visit Claire’s sister, Diane’s aunt Joan and her many cousins, on the Jersey Shore. There would ultimately be a memorial service for Claire at St. Agnes Church in Atlantic Highlands. But at this point in time, it was just essential to get Diane to the Philadelphia Airport for a flight to Sarasota, Florida. I do not recall at all why Philadelphia, not Newark Airport.

But I drove her, with the help of directions from one of Diane’s Philadelphia-based cousins. I recall I parked my car in the airport garage and escorted her into the terminal, said goodbye — all these goodbye’s in life, temporary or permanent. I probably wasn’t making the trip to Sarasota because I was working back in Boston.

But this is what I’m recalling about that occassion — strange, I suppose. I recall, on my way back to the airport garage, deliberately finding one of those ground-level, glassed-in areas at the base of a stairwell. It had plastic seats mounted on a steel rod, rare as it might seem for anyone to find it necessary to pause there.

I did.

I purposely sat down in that secluded, little traveled place to try to ponder, to really dwell on that moment, far from the central bustle of the airport, sitting in a place where perhaps no one had paused to sit before, or maybe since. It was odd, as I say, to have seats there — this seldom traveled little nook in the airport, and I’m not sure how I happened to come upon it, doubted if anyone had found the need to sit there ever before or ever again — if that stairwll still exists, airports being places where buildings come and go. Airports are transitory places, unlike old brick train stations where the rails never move.

I thought of Diane alone on her way to see her aging father’s side. She hates to travel alone. I thought of her sorrow, how she must have been thinking about her times with her mother., now ended forever. Airports are full of people traveling to see loved ones in the wake of a death, or a birth.

I might have though about my few other times passing through that airport — one of them among other G.I.s being shipped to Georgia for further training.

I knew that afternoon, that I had a drive of some 700 miles ahead of me, probably into darkness — probably on the Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Parkway, then the Mass Pike. Back to the cozy little house on Acton Street in Carlisle, Mass — that, though old and dear and the antithesis of tranistory — has since been demolished and turned into a weedy, bare rise leading up to a big new house. I would be alone in that house with our little dog.

I was going to welcome some solitude. But then and now, with many changes, anxieties and obligations and difficulties and life passages ahead of me, pressing down on me, as it was that afternoon for millions. Some others at the Philadelphia Airport that day were probably on a mission of sorrow to some place in the country.

…I knew this wasn’t exactly Frost’s idyllic Winter Soltice pause by woods on a snowy evening. But I did have promises to keep, and miles to go before I could sleep.

I just wanted to sit for a moment in that obscure little corner without a soul around — just a minute, actually probably not more than sixty seconds, if that – and think about what was going on.

No one ever came along. I got up, got to my car, left for my journey. Perhaps I felt fooslish.

My heart gets heavy just thinking about it. But I’m grateful for that pause. Life would go on. Busy life.

Rest in peace, Claire. I probably, above all, entertained that thought — and thought of Claire’s and my relationship. She could be wise and funny, irascible, difficult. She was bright, smoked, drank, was never in perfect health in her later years.

I’d never intended to have these relationships. But did, and go on with relationships with the living and the dead.

Claire, in that moment in that stairwell, I probably loved you, prayed for you –and your daughter, in however a broken way.

Then it was time to get up from that seat, and go on.

We all go on.