In my beginning is my end.
—T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"
The first time I went into the cement building with the big cross on it, set at the top of the hill like a pan of bread dough slowly rising, I was 10. Nannie ordered us off across the Betzwood Bridge not to church but to Sunday School, which has no Hell—only pianos on wheels and classroom doors with paper hands and crayon-heightened Jesuses taped onto the glass.
The two stories sat upon one another like Duncan Hines layers, with a portico running the length between them like escaping frosting. The ground floor was a dark labyrinth of little rooms, but upstairs was a single meeting hall, airy and open as a ballroom, with a stainless steel kitchen at one end and a small stage at the other—the whole studded by curtainless casement windows gazing down onto the tiny green cemetery like portholes.
Poppy just dropped us off, and I didn't know which tiny room to enter. I was terrified of the families—all familiar to one another—and at the end of the hour we never went back.
The sliding glass doors of our new apartment faced the church, the cemetery, and the Sunday School building perpendicularly. Just beyond, Route 422 cut the narrow road that had once connected the village of Port Kennedy, the road Poppy had taken years ago, so that now the church and its parking lot formed a dead end, shunted off by the four-lane highway, semis roaring above the sound of its 9:30 bell.
But the sunsets above Valley Forge Park were unobstructed and showy as a postcard. The Vs of geese bound toward the Schuylkill River made a deafening but forlorn music just before dinner.
Yellow leaves, then snow, then blossoms carpeted the grave markers and the stone wall that ran the length of the drive up to the Sunday School building. After school, I would sit on the ocher carpet in front of the glass doors eating bowls of ice cream and listening to my mother's "Lady in Satin" album.
You've changed—
The sparkle is your eyes is gone,
Your smile is just a careless yawn,
It's all over now,
You've changed.
Propinquity being the better part of faith, one Sunday morning I crossed the parking lot and attended a service in the little white church with the bright red doors. Someone must have noticed the solitary boy and invited me to the Sunday night youth group ... or perhaps I just read an announcement in the bulletin.
I can't remember why I went, but I can remember exactly how.
I would walk up the hill still on the large, longitudinal parking lot of our apartment complex, parallel to Fritz Drive, named after the church caretaker, then cut across the two properties on a 12-foot-wide strip of bramble and young birch trees the diameter of clarinets. There were two dips in the dirt path and then you emerged onto the older, mottled macadam of the Sunday School parking lot.
I remember the details of this ground because at 15 it was the longest trip I had ever taken: away from the isolation of my mother and grandmother, toward others my own age—kids I recognized from school—superstars.
And Gregg, the youth pastor I kept late on Sunday nights telling the story of my companionless, fantasy-filled, anxious life.
I was in 8th grade.
I spoke like old ladies do.
If something suddenly surprised or frightened me, I said Mercy! When I spoke about the future I added If we live.
I liked to set a formal table by looking at the black and white plates in my grandmother's smelly, foxed 1927 edition of Emily Post's Etiquette. My grandmother appraised my work and corrected my errors (I had separated the salt and pepper shakers). I unrolled old oriental carpets consigned to the attic long ago and smeared Scott's Liquid Gold on all my grandmother's old mahogany drop-leaf tables, waiting for the grain to rise again. I played through her stack of shellac 78s—silent in their crumbling paper jackets since the thirties. I sight-read hymns on the piano.
My mother selected my clothes—the same turtlenecks and pumpkin-colored polyester slacks she bought for her new husband—over which daily I wore a fussy 24-karat gold cross as prominently as Hester Prynn's A.
My half-brothers, in their twenties and married, must have regarded me as Laura in The Glass Menagerie. My mother had sheltered—and then disavowed—me. Already a grandmother at 42, she just moved on.
I needed someone to listen, and Gregg, a Drexel student with a blonde mullet and a light moustache above a still boyish but compassionate smile, was the first person ever to do so.
Holding on to him like a handrail, I waded into a pool of teenagers who seemed to delight in—or at least tolerate—my eccentricity. The reticence that was never a genuine trait gave way to my manic loquacity—the rich verbal mimicry that is with me still.
We went rollerskating often. Driving home four to the back seat, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat endlessly looping, we kissed the objects of our desire whenever a padiddle passed.
Proms and prayer vigils came and went, and I was educated culturally in occasionally awkward ways.
Once, as we were taping Halloween decorations onto the painted cement block walls of one of the tiny downstairs rooms of the Sunday School building, I suddenly punctuated one of my remarks with the phase Turtle twat!
Sue Bernhardt, a mature, motherly senior bound for William & Mary and (probably) an excellent marriage, looked down from the top step of the ladder and said, evenly and with some weight in her voice, "Do you understand the meaning of what you just said?"
Of course, I hadn't any idea.
Yet, I was integrated into a small group of people about my age who provided me with an identity—and a status, however subordinate—for which I was grateful. The transition to college was difficult but eventually resulted in another, looser network of personalities that helped to define me as creative, clownish, and, above all, transparent.
My adult relationships were islands of security, and as a rule I didn't look back. The formula developed early on and persisted: an individual of greater than average self-confidence to whom I was physically and emotionally devoted, whose dominance and judgement—little Gods, they were—I depended on exclusively, absolutely. They changed like exhausted shift workers.
The (fortunately, few) years alone were the worst: I couldn't draw, or paint, or read (or sleep). Alone, I was a vacuum, a ghostly negativity ... that exposed patch on a wall where a picture had hung.
I came to accept the monogamous chit-chat of the kitchen and the bedroom as my social present and future. A few letters came, and were replied to. There were a couple of surprise visits or awkward, unexpected phone calls, but I remained quietly watercolor painting and baking little ramekins of bread pudding late at night while my lover watched "Remington Steele."
Finally we left Pennsylvania, and the door shut on my past.
I can't remember why I went, but I can remember exactly how.
I would walk up the hill still on the large, longitudinal parking lot of our apartment complex, parallel to Fritz Drive, named after the church caretaker, then cut across the two properties on a 12-foot-wide strip of bramble and young birch trees the diameter of clarinets. There were two dips in the dirt path and then you emerged onto the older, mottled macadam of the Sunday School parking lot.
I remember the details of this ground because at 15 it was the longest trip I had ever taken: away from the isolation of my mother and grandmother, toward others my own age—kids I recognized from school—superstars.
And Gregg, the youth pastor I kept late on Sunday nights telling the story of my companionless, fantasy-filled, anxious life.
* * *
I was in 8th grade.
I spoke like old ladies do.
If something suddenly surprised or frightened me, I said Mercy! When I spoke about the future I added If we live.
I liked to set a formal table by looking at the black and white plates in my grandmother's smelly, foxed 1927 edition of Emily Post's Etiquette. My grandmother appraised my work and corrected my errors (I had separated the salt and pepper shakers). I unrolled old oriental carpets consigned to the attic long ago and smeared Scott's Liquid Gold on all my grandmother's old mahogany drop-leaf tables, waiting for the grain to rise again. I played through her stack of shellac 78s—silent in their crumbling paper jackets since the thirties. I sight-read hymns on the piano.
My mother selected my clothes—the same turtlenecks and pumpkin-colored polyester slacks she bought for her new husband—over which daily I wore a fussy 24-karat gold cross as prominently as Hester Prynn's A.
My half-brothers, in their twenties and married, must have regarded me as Laura in The Glass Menagerie. My mother had sheltered—and then disavowed—me. Already a grandmother at 42, she just moved on.
I needed someone to listen, and Gregg, a Drexel student with a blonde mullet and a light moustache above a still boyish but compassionate smile, was the first person ever to do so.
Holding on to him like a handrail, I waded into a pool of teenagers who seemed to delight in—or at least tolerate—my eccentricity. The reticence that was never a genuine trait gave way to my manic loquacity—the rich verbal mimicry that is with me still.
We went rollerskating often. Driving home four to the back seat, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat endlessly looping, we kissed the objects of our desire whenever a padiddle passed.
Proms and prayer vigils came and went, and I was educated culturally in occasionally awkward ways.
Once, as we were taping Halloween decorations onto the painted cement block walls of one of the tiny downstairs rooms of the Sunday School building, I suddenly punctuated one of my remarks with the phase Turtle twat!
Sue Bernhardt, a mature, motherly senior bound for William & Mary and (probably) an excellent marriage, looked down from the top step of the ladder and said, evenly and with some weight in her voice, "Do you understand the meaning of what you just said?"
Of course, I hadn't any idea.
Yet, I was integrated into a small group of people about my age who provided me with an identity—and a status, however subordinate—for which I was grateful. The transition to college was difficult but eventually resulted in another, looser network of personalities that helped to define me as creative, clownish, and, above all, transparent.
* * *
My adult relationships were islands of security, and as a rule I didn't look back. The formula developed early on and persisted: an individual of greater than average self-confidence to whom I was physically and emotionally devoted, whose dominance and judgement—little Gods, they were—I depended on exclusively, absolutely. They changed like exhausted shift workers.
The (fortunately, few) years alone were the worst: I couldn't draw, or paint, or read (or sleep). Alone, I was a vacuum, a ghostly negativity ... that exposed patch on a wall where a picture had hung.
I came to accept the monogamous chit-chat of the kitchen and the bedroom as my social present and future. A few letters came, and were replied to. There were a couple of surprise visits or awkward, unexpected phone calls, but I remained quietly watercolor painting and baking little ramekins of bread pudding late at night while my lover watched "Remington Steele."
Finally we left Pennsylvania, and the door shut on my past.
* * *
If a habit of looking back to the stylish past of antiques and jazz and the etiquette of wealthy country homes had been the hobby of my childhood, my mother's death when I was 42 turned me into an historian—of my own life. While she lived, in whatever condition, she held a place—a fingertip jammed into a paperback that saves the page—maintaining a fragile chronology. After she was gone, the book fell onto itself, the beginning indistinguishable from the end.
In shoeboxes of Kodaks she stared out at me in a bikini on a bright, sandy—but oddly blurry—beach. In silver and grey tones she stood in defiant profile, grinning and pregnant. I was the one who carried age on my shoulders, now.
Her protection, a gnostic fiction that stretched across my life, ended when—about a year later—someone sent me a microfilm of the newspaper clipping that reported my father's 1961 suicide.
Neither my grandmother nor my mother had ever, in 42 years, been able to tell me.
Reading the clipping, I recognized my mother in the woman it described: her husband had locked himself in a basement rec room threatening suicide and she drove to the police station. She didn't think to telephone for the cops.
I had witnessed my mother's inefficient, emotional, roundabout behavior many times—I knew it in myself—and this single line snapped into place like a puzzle piece. I could see her there.
As she and a police officer circled the house, calling to the man inside, he fired.
Where was I?
I put together a website, an extended apprenticeship in Photoshop, with different pages dedicated to my lost family: the story of my father, a page about my mother's stylish life, a presentation on one of my half-brothers who had died of AIDS in 1983, and a small page about a cousin, Brian, I hadn't seen since childhood—since the era in which Poppy had driven us together to the Sunday School at the top of the hill.
On the last day of a Maine vacation in September 2005, as I was leaving for the airport, an email arrived from a young woman in Washington state who had discovered the page about my cousin and sat weeping in front of her monitor: I had described her father, who was at that time serving a short prison sentence.
In the few recollections I had typed up and formatted between the photos she recognized the same stories her father had told her, growing up, about his little cousin "Willie."
I still have all of Brian's letters from prison, all in the uniform canary yellow envelopes the facility provided. His incarceration ended, and after a rocky adjustment to freedom—he had inherited a profound alcoholism from his mother, who died in her early thirties trying to dry out—his life stabilized. His daughter, Megan, had a baby boy, and I'd receive text messages with photos of a happy new grandfather—unrecognizable in a full beard—posing with his grandson.
In shoeboxes of Kodaks she stared out at me in a bikini on a bright, sandy—but oddly blurry—beach. In silver and grey tones she stood in defiant profile, grinning and pregnant. I was the one who carried age on my shoulders, now.
Her protection, a gnostic fiction that stretched across my life, ended when—about a year later—someone sent me a microfilm of the newspaper clipping that reported my father's 1961 suicide.
Neither my grandmother nor my mother had ever, in 42 years, been able to tell me.
Reading the clipping, I recognized my mother in the woman it described: her husband had locked himself in a basement rec room threatening suicide and she drove to the police station. She didn't think to telephone for the cops.
I had witnessed my mother's inefficient, emotional, roundabout behavior many times—I knew it in myself—and this single line snapped into place like a puzzle piece. I could see her there.
As she and a police officer circled the house, calling to the man inside, he fired.
Where was I?
* * *
I put together a website, an extended apprenticeship in Photoshop, with different pages dedicated to my lost family: the story of my father, a page about my mother's stylish life, a presentation on one of my half-brothers who had died of AIDS in 1983, and a small page about a cousin, Brian, I hadn't seen since childhood—since the era in which Poppy had driven us together to the Sunday School at the top of the hill.
On the last day of a Maine vacation in September 2005, as I was leaving for the airport, an email arrived from a young woman in Washington state who had discovered the page about my cousin and sat weeping in front of her monitor: I had described her father, who was at that time serving a short prison sentence.
In the few recollections I had typed up and formatted between the photos she recognized the same stories her father had told her, growing up, about his little cousin "Willie."
I still have all of Brian's letters from prison, all in the uniform canary yellow envelopes the facility provided. His incarceration ended, and after a rocky adjustment to freedom—he had inherited a profound alcoholism from his mother, who died in her early thirties trying to dry out—his life stabilized. His daughter, Megan, had a baby boy, and I'd receive text messages with photos of a happy new grandfather—unrecognizable in a full beard—posing with his grandson.
* * *
It was in my uncle's kitchen in Maine in the very late Nineties or early Aughts that the wheel of change in my habits made its first audible click.
Before, I spent the week having his Fornum & Mason tea or "Orange Pekoe/Pekoe Black" (as he always recited) after we returned from an afternoon hike on Acadia or just before bed, while we watched "Are You Being Served?" reruns or Canadian news.
Then, abruptly, we had to go to Shaw's or Hannaford's the first day I arrived for one of the big, 1.5-liter bottles of wine. I required two for the week.
He was silent.
But he insisted I store my "booze" on the linoleum floor of his dark, oddly deep kitchen closet. The humiliation of this request—and my compliance—only really strikes me now, 15 years later.
The first time I tasted wine I was seven or eight and participating in holy communion. In my grandmother's Lutheran church you walked, in groups of 12 or so, up to the altar and took the wafer and the tiny glass from large trays held by the minister and his acolyte.
I distinctly remember walking back to our pew, always the fifth from the front of the church, arrested by this unfamiliar, pungent flavor ... like the steeped maraschino cherries my mother would routinely surrender from her Old Fashioned cocktails.
Liquid tranquility.
I still associate it with the cathedral ceiling, royal red carpet, and highly-polished cherry wood wainscoting of that church.
Elegance.
In my twenties I bought bottles of Pouilly-Fusé from the sterile, stainless steel and cerulean tile state store on West Walnut Street in Philadelphia that was nothing more than a counter, with the inventory behind—inaccessible. You leafed through a three-ring binder with plastic-covered pages and made your order from that, like posting a bail bond.
I thought the French word was pretty.
But I did not drink wine on any regular basis until my late thirties, when a friend brought a bottle of Malbec to the house. I don't recall the vineyard, but the label featured a lovely illustration of a bunch of grapes against a parchment-colored background.
Artsiness.
I hadn't heard the word "Malbec" before and thought I need to learn more about wine.
Unlike piano, or watercolor painting, or collecting American first editions of Virginia Woolf novels, my new hobby, at a relatively late age, quietly took the lid off of a familial trait I had never reckoned with: a genetic predisposition to alcoholism.
I had been lucky until 40.
* * *
It was Megan who first sent me an invitation to join Facebook. My friend Josh had some sort of link on his blog to it, but I never investigated. In an avuncular spirit of cooperation with Megan, I signed up.
I guess I regarded it as a sort of YouTube, but without the videos.
I had made a few friends on YouTube through a sort of increasingly technical (and rather effective) display of personal, vaguely autobiographical videos. They became an extension of my website and shouldered the same work of exploring the personalities and circumstances of my family history.
I only did what I was passionate enough to do well, and I only absorbed enough technical expertise to—just—accomplish it.
But a very few people—interesting people, whose opinions mattered—told me I was doing good work, a tiny but devoted klatch of viewers. The urgency and the technical savvy had met, somewhere in the middle. I still watch them, occasionally, and, even by today's standards of sophisticated and accessible software, they hold one's attention easily.
On Facebook, I anticipated the same small universe of like-minded, enthusiastic strangers.
What developed, instead, was a relentless reunion for which I was not—and probably never could have been—emotionally well-suited.
If the years had passed for my schoolmates and early lovers in a series of friendships, escalating career achievements, travel, and children, forming a benevolent callous over memories and youthful experiences, for me they had passed in the solitude of primary relationships, stultifying jobs, and the relative vacuum of my artistic endeavors.
Encountering these people again in the little comment boxes or occasional, busy-fun photos, I realized the playing field had not, even after 30 years, been leveled, nor had any graciousness or kind, indulgent humor been added to memory. Yet, like standing over a skillet and adding first more salt, then a bit of cheese, then a tablespoon of cream, I kept trying to make something palatable out of old relationships in which I had left—30 years ago—a bad taste.
A small voice kept saying Let it go. I ignored it.
I was reminded of that scene in Ang Lee's unforgettable "Sense and Sensibility," in which Marianne (Kate Winslet) discovers Willoughby at a London ball, after announcing her presence in the city with a set of unanswered letters. Immediately she calls out to him, excited yet increasingly confused—dimly comprehending—and it is left to her sister Elinor (Emma Thompson) to take her arm and slowly lead her out of the room, all the while repeating, gently, Come away dearest ... come away.
Here were a handful of the most tenderly or hotly remembered names from my teens and twenties, all in the homogenized and anonymous (and, it seemed, constantly updated) fonts of Facebook, genuine and yet somehow flattened, sentences that seemed to reach out and yet were packaged in the clinical directness—and heartless brevity—of telegrams. They were posted for everyone, or just anyone, to read.
A luminous, massive evening party—a London ballroom.
My drinking made the painful interactions worse.
I had no understanding of (nor any interest in) the biophysiology of ethanol. Only after several years of a persistent pattern did my awareness emerge.
Alcohol lowers blood sugar. At some point during extended intake the body's chemistry plunges headlong into the perilous equation of the diabetic approaching a coma: pointless anger, extremes of melancholy and bitterness—theatrical, needless, forgotten in the morning.
Don't drink and dial Jack warns Miles in the movie "Sideways."
As mildly entertaining as I could be for old and new friends alike, my online persona practically fused with the lighter side—the bon mots and So whats?!—of boozing, my numbers started dropping after the sudden chemical flips. After a night of lengthy drinking, I'd disconnect handfuls of friends, or close an account altogether—uncertain in the days following how to explain my disappearance.
Creative as always, I managed it, at first: Just got a new phone and still haven't figured out how to work this thing!
Each time, Gary would receive a small number of messages from concerned mutual friends.
As 2010 turned into 2011, he stopped telling me about them.
Today, my Facebook feed is all terriers, Van Gogh paintings, and Joan Crawford photos. I've tamed it into the ticker-tape of light entertainment and profundity misfires it strives to be.
My reunions all behind me, the mystery of myself among others—whether I am remembered or forgotten, a misstep in someone else's life or an uncommon, haunting liaison—stays covered like the kitchen compost pail. I can't fix the past, can't polish or upgrade another person's recollections.
No second chances.
A few large souls have hung on with me, helping me to appreciate the quality of compassion as much as I had always appreciated, even worshiped, creativity.
One completely surprising and relatively stable re-connection was Gregg.
Only about a year after I started going to Sunday night youth group, Gregg and his quiet, dark-haired wife Bev—still waters, as I recall—were replaced by a British couple. I never saw (or heard from) Gregg again after 1976 (or 1977) until he materialized, a year or two ago, on Facebook.
I made a promotional video to accompany his trilogy of Western novels. I also made fast friends with his gorgeous, ageless new wife Nancy, who has become a sort of writing buddy.
He calls me Brother (as he does all other males).
We have little in common—he likes guns and Hawaiian vacations—except that remarkable, brief period when he helped me be a teenager.
I admit I owe something to a technology that can draw a circle back—across 39 years—to my self in 8th grade, my self before others.
One night last week, just before dawn, I woke with chest pains and, as always, resorted to a calming hot bath, my cat sitting on the commode seat like a Sphynx with her eyes fixed on me, protectively.
I couldn't combat the hour of the wolf, and I thought about what my last words to Gary might be. They came to me easily.
I would tell him this: You are better than how I treated you. You are just wonderful, and you deserved more patience and kindness than I gave.
Why have I never been able to extend this sentiment—so entirely genuine toward Gary—to myself?
The funnel of bath water scolded me a little as it finished draining.
I daubed myself with a big towel and went back upstairs to bed.
Encountering these people again in the little comment boxes or occasional, busy-fun photos, I realized the playing field had not, even after 30 years, been leveled, nor had any graciousness or kind, indulgent humor been added to memory. Yet, like standing over a skillet and adding first more salt, then a bit of cheese, then a tablespoon of cream, I kept trying to make something palatable out of old relationships in which I had left—30 years ago—a bad taste.
A small voice kept saying Let it go. I ignored it.
I was reminded of that scene in Ang Lee's unforgettable "Sense and Sensibility," in which Marianne (Kate Winslet) discovers Willoughby at a London ball, after announcing her presence in the city with a set of unanswered letters. Immediately she calls out to him, excited yet increasingly confused—dimly comprehending—and it is left to her sister Elinor (Emma Thompson) to take her arm and slowly lead her out of the room, all the while repeating, gently, Come away dearest ... come away.
Here were a handful of the most tenderly or hotly remembered names from my teens and twenties, all in the homogenized and anonymous (and, it seemed, constantly updated) fonts of Facebook, genuine and yet somehow flattened, sentences that seemed to reach out and yet were packaged in the clinical directness—and heartless brevity—of telegrams. They were posted for everyone, or just anyone, to read.
A luminous, massive evening party—a London ballroom.
* * *
My drinking made the painful interactions worse.
I had no understanding of (nor any interest in) the biophysiology of ethanol. Only after several years of a persistent pattern did my awareness emerge.
Alcohol lowers blood sugar. At some point during extended intake the body's chemistry plunges headlong into the perilous equation of the diabetic approaching a coma: pointless anger, extremes of melancholy and bitterness—theatrical, needless, forgotten in the morning.
Don't drink and dial Jack warns Miles in the movie "Sideways."
As mildly entertaining as I could be for old and new friends alike, my online persona practically fused with the lighter side—the bon mots and So whats?!—of boozing, my numbers started dropping after the sudden chemical flips. After a night of lengthy drinking, I'd disconnect handfuls of friends, or close an account altogether—uncertain in the days following how to explain my disappearance.
Creative as always, I managed it, at first: Just got a new phone and still haven't figured out how to work this thing!
Each time, Gary would receive a small number of messages from concerned mutual friends.
As 2010 turned into 2011, he stopped telling me about them.
* * *
Today, my Facebook feed is all terriers, Van Gogh paintings, and Joan Crawford photos. I've tamed it into the ticker-tape of light entertainment and profundity misfires it strives to be.
My reunions all behind me, the mystery of myself among others—whether I am remembered or forgotten, a misstep in someone else's life or an uncommon, haunting liaison—stays covered like the kitchen compost pail. I can't fix the past, can't polish or upgrade another person's recollections.
No second chances.
A few large souls have hung on with me, helping me to appreciate the quality of compassion as much as I had always appreciated, even worshiped, creativity.
One completely surprising and relatively stable re-connection was Gregg.
Only about a year after I started going to Sunday night youth group, Gregg and his quiet, dark-haired wife Bev—still waters, as I recall—were replaced by a British couple. I never saw (or heard from) Gregg again after 1976 (or 1977) until he materialized, a year or two ago, on Facebook.
I made a promotional video to accompany his trilogy of Western novels. I also made fast friends with his gorgeous, ageless new wife Nancy, who has become a sort of writing buddy.
He calls me Brother (as he does all other males).
We have little in common—he likes guns and Hawaiian vacations—except that remarkable, brief period when he helped me be a teenager.
I admit I owe something to a technology that can draw a circle back—across 39 years—to my self in 8th grade, my self before others.
* * *
One night last week, just before dawn, I woke with chest pains and, as always, resorted to a calming hot bath, my cat sitting on the commode seat like a Sphynx with her eyes fixed on me, protectively.
I couldn't combat the hour of the wolf, and I thought about what my last words to Gary might be. They came to me easily.
I would tell him this: You are better than how I treated you. You are just wonderful, and you deserved more patience and kindness than I gave.
Why have I never been able to extend this sentiment—so entirely genuine toward Gary—to myself?
The funnel of bath water scolded me a little as it finished draining.
I daubed myself with a big towel and went back upstairs to bed.
1 comment:
This is one of your most naked pieces, revealing yourself to your friends. I had read once while you were writing, but the part I didn't read has me close to tears again, admiring your writing as well as you, a person creative enough to write so beautifully while exposing yourself to the reader. It isn't always easy, but it is always a wondrous adventure sharing life with you. You need to share the sentiment with yourself and I need to practice what you credit me with more often.
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