Category: personal

I love you more than you can ever imagine…
I am an orphan when you leave for work,
but a One-Dog Welcoming Wagon when you return
And when I see you,
darling: if I had a tail I’d wag it!

Climb astride, gallop
I will be your stallion tonight
Ride me without fear
We are joined steadfast
by mortise and tenon
We are joined forever
As gulf and ocean
We are one
As waves and water
Water and waves
Earth and hoof
Horse and rider

Loneliness is not the broken violin,
it is not the worn strings
or the useless bow.
Loneliness is the missing musician.

***

1 –
“Sometimes it feels that your life is a game you play to make me feel more and more lonely” He said with his eyes fixed on something outside the window.
She took a long time to ponder this and then she said simply: “We need more milk…” and then, when he turn to look at her she added: “and butter…”
He stood up, grab the car keys and his wallet from the table, and pick up a couple of fabric market-bags from a hook by the entrance and left the house to never come back.

2 –
His body was found two hundred and seventy three thousand years too late, in a sedimentary layer corresponding to the twenty and twenty first centuries of the first cycle.

Let me raise my Vegetarian Glass to make In Absentia, a rather late but simple laudation of my beloved niece Mariana, in the occasion of her marriage.

She is universally considered beautiful – which she no doubt is; and sweet – to which again, I have no objection. But that is the outside, and the outside is only the decor, the fine garment, if you will, to the truly beautiful person that she is.

I can only hope this marriage will nurture and grow that person, and will not let her get lost in the warm and tempting oneness of its binary essence. Let us remember that it is only well to be lost in the two when the one is healthy and strong.

Mariana was the oldest cousin to my baby boy. The luminous smile that adorned his face when he saw her and her sister is one of the most powerful reasons why I will always love them. But she was also my own child for a while, when times were hard and her own family was in crisis, I got to live with them and care for them and take them to school every day. She was a gook kid at home and she was a good kid at school. She used to go to her Montessori class eagerly and with anticipation. Her teachers loved her, and her classmates too.

Mariana is an intelligent woman, gifted with not only of the fleeting intelligence that lives in quick responses and witty conversation, but with the sturdy persevering intelligence that fights and lives on in creativity and accomplishment no matter how uphill the road might seem to be. She can tackle difficult subjects and master them because her intelligence is allied to a strong will.

Mariana is a loving person. She hides behind the social manifestations of friendliness, but it was not just the age difference that made her the first of the children to “return” to the joy of the family reunions, when all the others had wondered away in their search for independence. You could see her loving nature in the way she treated her old grandparents or the younger boys and girls in the family, the way she never missed a birthday even when it was a clandestine affair.

She once wanted to be a veterinarian. She volunteer at an animal refuge. She left Victoria with few possessions but with her pets. She loves animals, not in the fashion-accessory manner she sometimes affects, but with total sincerity.

I meet Mariana first when she was only two very short years old. She was behind her father’s car, playing, with her “mimi” (her security blanket) firmly in her grasp, waiting to meet her Aunt that had been living in Europe and the new Uncle she had brought back with her. From the very beginning I had not the impression of meeting a child, but a person. Very late that night, while her parents and us were conversing after dinner, Mariana showed up dragging her sister by the leg. All matter of fact-like, she said: “Mom, she needs you.” – and went back to bed by herself.

The rainy season is upon us, the people under the skies and the pathos of Vancouver Island.
There is really only two seasons around here: the drier, tempered few days we call summer and the unending years that constitute each winter.
The light dampens, the spirit sinks and the plants first get sickened by rot and the die. Next year we, the eternal optimists that keep a garden in this wheather, will plant new ones.
The few that survive, the ones we call peremnials, are like old friends to us. The winter survival we shared, the little green the gave us in the dreary days, we thank them, and try to repay with care.
So, this is what I wrote last week, under the spell of the rain:

I am waiting for death – not mine.

The death of a garden we nurtured all spring and summer.

Autumn is here.

Winter is not death: it is afterlife.

With its dry air and the utter depth of its emptiness,

winter is a macabre heaven.

Autumn is the dirty, wet, muddled process of dying.

Muddy spring is the incessant fucking of two wild creatures in heat.

We are at the metro station, going south towards sterile,

but we will come out at the other end after a while.

Some trains have a circular route,

some don’t.