Alan, Angela and Aleister

Here are pictures of Alan and me, Angela and me and Angela, me and Aleister. How is it that all three of these people's names begin with the letter A? It can not, of course, be significant in the least, but still.....well, it's just one of those
things. Aleister is young, Angela is what "they" call beginning-middle-aged and Alan and I are hitting the early-elderly wall, although we don't see it that way. Why, Aleister told Alan that he, Alan, looks to be in his forties - and he told me I look fifty-seven. I tried to get him to lower his estimation of my age just a little bit more and I managed to bring him down to fifty-two but he would go no lower. If I remember correctly, Aleister used to be sweeter.

Before he could speak.

Alan is my future husband. We've set the date for September 24rth, hopefully at the Unitarian Fellowship, which is a beautiful place, surrounded by trees. The wedding could be indoors or outdoors and you can all be invited, if you are good. If I don't die in New York, where Alan is taking me this coming May, I will be at the wedding as the bride. I am afraid of New York, mostly because of the movies, which, despite Woody Allen's brave attempts, have not done New York any favors. I would feel much better if I could be followed around by Woody Allen's fabulous background music....perhaps Alan could arrange that. Alan, who is from the Jersey Shore and no, he doesn't watch that TV show, in fact, he detests that TV show, although he has never actually sat down and, God forbid, watched it, is equally familiar with New York, swears I will love it. The cheesecake. The bagels. The pizza. Central Park. The Metropolitan museum. Broadway plays. And all I can think of is all the weight I will gain and what shoes will I wear? I, who have never been in a larger city than Seattle (well, I was in Chicago once, but my father drove as fast as he could and kept yelling at my mother to "Lock and duck! Lock and duck!") so I didn't really get a good feel for the place.....have a basic inbred fear of large cities. Seattle and Portland are large enough for me. I am not a big city girl. I am a small-town-with-a-good-book-store type of girl. I'm plenty neurotic, but I don't think I am neurotic enough for a huge place like New York.

On the other hand,I don't blend well. I want to be the center of attention. I don't want somebody dribbling mustard of my hot dog. What if somebody mistakenly dribbles mustard on my hot dog? What if I get mugged on the subway? What if Alan loses me? What if I wrench my neck by gawkingup at all the skyscrapers? What if I wear the wrong thing? What if what if what if what if............

Wild horses couldn't keep me from going to New York. Wild horses couldn't keep me from visiting Alan's friends in Jersey. I wanna see, I wanna see, I wanna see. I'm see I'll see Robert De Nero bopping down the street. I know I'll see Anna Winotaur dashing into the lobby of some chic building. I'll follow her. She'll take a look at me in one of my LOGGER'S DAUGHTER skirts, grab me by the arm and photograph me for Vogue. How can she not? Of course she will. Oh my God! And I can't wait to meet Alan's sister Fran and Fran's husband Leo who comes from the same area as Neil Simon and Woody Allen and is therefore hysterically funny, not to mention Alan's Jersey guy friends, all of whom have Jersey mouths on them. Can't wait. Can not wait. Can't wait to walk through Central Park with.....can't wait to see a Broadway play with........can't wait to eat New York pizza with.......can't wait to do ANYTHING with......because he is so likable. Know what I mean? He is just so .....likable! But he's not a pushover, not by any means. So listen here, you crazy-ass New York subway guys, don't f___k with Alan Schein, because, like Aleister says, "He's forty years old and he rocks bigtime!"

Look out, New York! The Schein Man is comin' home.
I'll be the short woman hiding behind the slice of pizza.

GOODBYE, ELIABETH TAYLOR

Who said you could go, Elizabeth? Who said you could leave us here alone without any other dangerous stars to blink at and perhaps go blind because of one silly human blink? Who were you, you broken British tower, you short stumpy thirst quencher whose eyes befuddled so many men, you nearly conquered a certain part of the world in your time, and you kept on conquering and conquering, bashing down knights and paupers, never flattering falsehoods, flashing your diamonds around because you loved them, you loved them, and that was so utterly unAmerican of you, wasn't it, weren't you, because we Americans don't like to admit we love anything that's gorgeous and nonessential, no, not us, uh-uh, we are Puritans and you weren't a Puritan, nothing like that, were you, you ravishing golden sword, and now your Parade just drifted by in some L.A. hospital which had to be, which had to be way too mundane for you. I said that, not you........

Oh, Elizabeth, my first movie star love, whom I adored even more than Debbie Reynolds, whom you did wrong but you did it in such a way, so openly and nondefiantly, so transparently, like a circus queen, no,like an entire circus act without a net, (I remember THE SEATTLE TIMES headline, when I was twelve years old, reading "Elizabeth Taylor Says Needs Only Four Hours Sleep At Night") so intimately, that even my childish mind knew you were right, you were playing by a different set of rules than Debbie's poor little housewife rules and that girls like Debbie could never ever win and should never even try to win but should just step out of the way and allow the wave to happen, allow the tree to fall in the forest, allow the tiger to chew up its prey, allow the inevitable bombs to inevitably fall.....because you can not fool, you can not out talk, you can not out walk, you can not stop Mother Nature. Even if it's wearing the largest diamond in the World, you can't, you can't, you can't. Just step aside, dearie, step aside. Oh, Elizabeth, my first movie star love, my cousin Linda and I would walk through the Silverdale farm fields looking for tokens, for broken pins or bottle caps or crow feathers and send them to you along with little girl notes, and you would send back pictures, signed pictures, pictures signed with ink, and we would spit on our fingers and rub our fingers on your signature to see if the ink was real or not, which ruined the signatures but satisfied our hearts that it was you, you, your hand which signed the photographs, never stopping to think that the world held secretaries, that you paid secretaries to sign those pictures, those millions of pictures MGM shipped out to little farm girls like Linda and me....and we would pin these ravished photographs on the walls of our Grandpas chicken coop and sit and eat stolen peas and smile and feel like the biggest little girls in all the world, yes, us. Yes, us. Yes, us........

Oh, Mrs. Lavender, with that almost-Betty-Boop voice toppling out of that most beautiful face of yours, that seriously beautiful face which was not a joyful Rita Hayworth face or a happy Doris Day face but a solemn face, a face that said, "...and I MEAN it...", "...and I MEAN it...".....oh, Mrs. Lavender, owner of that almost implausible voice, I heard them call you "One of the last of the great Hollywood goddesses", but that is not true, you are THE last of the Hollywood goddesses, there is no other, there is no one left, not one. You have held the throne for decades now, and you have tried to hold on to a life of your own, as well, marrying and unmarrying, sipping teacup after teacup of ashes, ashes, your body torn apart by pain and the surgeon's knife, I hope you are sitting next to Shakespeare now, I hope you are back again in Mike Todd's arms, I hope you are well again, no scars, no audience, no pulp magazines, no pain patches, no crutches, no pumps, and you live and you live and you live and you live......only for you...........

PLEASURE PUDDINGS

This morning, while sitting in my green armchair waiting for my ten o'clock patient to arrive, my eyes zeroed in on a dream journal from 2004. Upon opening it, it was with immense pleasure that I noticed I'd dropped in all sorts of quotes from this place and that place, just anything, really, that took my fancy at the time. So, without any further adieu, here are a few of the "little pleasure puddings" I discovered mashed upon before and amongst my dreams:

"No one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity."
- Gustave Flaubert

"One of language's first functions is to help a child create a mental image of his mother, one that can soothe him when she is absent."
- Julia Kristive, from THE MIDNIGHT DISEASE

"The main thing is....father and mother must eat. Write!"
- Chekhov

"No words can express the secret agony of my soul; Even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man, and wander desolately back to that other, older time in my life."
- Charles Dickens

"There is some Myth for every man which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all that he did and thought."
- Yeats

"Mama Kay, which is the other hand?"
"Which other hand?"
"You know, like 'On the other hand!"
-Aleister


And this, my favorite, by an anonymous but accurate source"
"According to all aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly because its body weight is not in the right proportion to its wingspan. But ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway."

"A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us."
-Franz Kafka

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will."
- Rimbaud
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And that's that. Today my three o'clock patient, I shall call her Helen, said, "I guess I've felt quite good all week because I don"t remember feeling at all badly."

One year ago this entirely elegant and beautiful woman stood up and stated, "I can't believe how absolutly tolerable all my imperfections have become!"
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Oh, and there's more, so much more. Two weeks ago, Chris Dosa and I were drinking wine and rolling around on my living room (or whatever one calls it) sofa, making up words and finally we settled on the word DUKE. As in, "He or she got 'duke'." Meaning, "She gets it, she understand the blues and blues lyrics, jazz, hip, rip, rag, rag-mop, Ella, Aretha, Billy H., etc."........."....but does she 'duke it'" meaning: "But does she do it with style, with juice, with cool, with elan, with a sense lf 'hey now', with a sense of 'get down', with a sense of 'go' or 'stay' or..... 'easy, easy, easy, baby' or whatever is needed even if it's not needed, exactly, you know'........." ......aw, it's hard to explain, it's ineffable, it sounds stupid to explain, you've got to hear it, got to see it, got to walk it....she got duke, she got duke, he duke, she duke.......we rolled around heaven all day.

It felt good. That day, we were ridiculous.
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In movie terms, "duke" is style. It's Michael Chekov saying to Gregory Peck who's marrying Ingrid Bergman who used to be married to Michael Chekov, "Any husband of Constance is a husband of mine, so to speak."

or; "To hardly know him is to know him well."
- Cary Grant criticizing Katharine Hepburn's fiance in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

Or Eva Marie Saint asking Marlon Brando,"What are you rebelling about?"
And Brando, responding: "I don't know, wha'tve ya got?"
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OKAY, THAT'S IT - ANOTHER PATIENT - GOTTA GO - LOVE YOU ALL, GIVE MY REGARDS
TO BROADWAY AND KEEP THOSE WORDS COMMIN'

THE PRIVATE LIFE

The photo is of Kay and Alan at the 4 Swallows celebrating a Valentine's Day dinner.

Earlier, the man in the photo presented the woman in the photo with a big bouquet of flowers on Valentine's Day. Each time she attempted to place the flowers in a vase filled with water, he called out, "Not yet, not yet!" and diverted her attention elsewhere. Finally, he took her by the shoulders, led her into the kitchen and said, "NOW!" she poured water into the vase, placed the flowers inside, and noticed a small white package, wrapped in cellophane. She fished around in the water and lifted the package out. Inside the package was a ring, gold, silver, with a pearl in the center. An engagement ring. The man led the woman to the sofa, where he lowered himself to one knee and asked for her hand in marriage. This was the third time he had made this request and the third time she had answered yes. The process of reaching a consensus, in this case, was irrefutably elegant. She loves the man. She loves the ring. She will have the same Port Townsend designer create her fiance a ring for his finger. A wedding date is not yet known.

I have been greedily devouring Joyce Carol Oate's new book "A Widow's Story", the passionate memoir of the death of Oate's husband of forty-seven years. Her husband, Ray Smith, editor of THE ONTARIO REVIEW, died the same year Jim died, in 2008. Unlike Joan Didion's memoir of her writer husband's death, Oate's book is singed with emotion: anger, passion, disorientation. Married once again, Oates has written the truest book I have read (I think I must have read them all)about a widow's experience. Grief is a stress reaction which takes one for a ride. There is no formula for grief, no one way, no two ways, no ten or eleven ways, to "go about" it. People have ideas about it, that is true. But ideas are artifices and ignorance is bliss, always an excuse; and even one who has gone through enormous grief, has only (only!!!) gone through one's own. I do appreciate Oate's book immensely, though. Thank you, thank you, Mrs. Smith.

This past Saturday, Alan and I took Aleister to Seattle's Science Center. Getting off the ferry, Aleister ran up to Alan and pointed out something, calling him "Grandpa". Alan, who cares deeply about Aleister, was immensely moved. "Look, Grandpa!" Aleister said. Later, Aleister said to me, "Grandpa Jim walks up in Heaven and Grandpa Alan walks here on Earth." Coming back on the ferry, Aleister said to me, "They are so much alike, Grandpa Jim and Alan! They are both funny and smart and they play around but they are serious, too, and they both care about me! And they look so much alike!" He went silent for a moment or two and then added, "...well, they both have beards."

Notice that, for Aleister, both men exist in present tense. Notice that both men exist. The psyche, said Jung, does not know the difference between the imaginative and the real. And the "real". And the real.

Give my regards to Broadway.