It's My Dad's Birthday

My therapist told me during our phone session last Friday that I should find the biggest rock I can find, and carry that around with me when I feel the burden of Phil's disappearance/abandonment/death/the whole thing, whatever you want to call it...and then set it down. An ancient ritual for those in mourning - to personify and articulate and validate the weight of such a thing....and the relief, inevitable, of setting the heavy rock down. So far, I only have a few big chunks of crystal that Phil had found on some of our recent desert hikes. They're not even close to heavy enough. They're too pretty, too white. I need a jag of concrete, I think, something uneven and ugly and brutalized. That or an elegant seashell.

Lots of coffee. lots of it, this morning and continuing until now. My mind must, must, must sharpen so I can sluice through my impressive workload today, tomorrow, for the next days on end through, pretty much, the end of May. Book presentations and signings, Palm Springs Library tomorrow night - poetry reading with Global Alchemy friends that I'll be at Weds night, also in Palm Springs, at a bar, Space 120(beer, glorious beer), Inlandia Writers Workshop in Riverside Thursday night, Mt. San Antonio College writer's conference on Saturday morning - I'm teaching a poetry of place workshop - and back to Riverside on Sunday for what will be a very cool desert writing workshop - I'm partaking - with multimedia artists and UCR MFA students, sponsored by the UCR CA Museum of Photography and the Sweeney Art Museum.
Diet coke and poring through bills, too. I was numb at the LA Times Bookfest last Saturday...signing books and chatting people up, an old friend from BLM firefighting days looked me up, that was great...was I even there.

How can this house weigh so much. Over 100 degrees today. I rode my bike in the mid-day noon for half an hour. My body feels like it's hauled firehose over a series of 12,000 foot passes in the high Sierras. Sucking on low oxygen altitudes. Chilled by snow, melted by high thin sun. Except there's no fun backpacking adventure in this one. I'm a beast of burden. The walls and windows close in with this kind of heat. Phil ditched out of the rocket ride right before summer cinched its tight belt around me. It was spring and flowers were alive. Now it's summer and it's only going to get hotter day by day, month by month until deep into 2010 fall. Anticipating fall. How much more of this can I go? I was burned out a year ago. Thought I had returned. It will be a rough fire season, I can tell. The tall weeds, mega-rain, are already brown and will burn too well. Again.

Mom comes by mid-afternoon. I'm staring at piles of bills. I'm struggling to get files for Solstice lit-mag to the printer so that the COD lit-mag can be printed up in time for a big event on campus for contributors on May 11th. I got it done. I need to email my creative writing students. I need to post new forum threads for English 1A classes online. They're writing a lit analysis of symbolism in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony. I was unable to teach the book last week - catching myself too imbedded and stung and impotent in the sickening irony of....a novel of a post-modern-era young man struggling with identity, mental illness, and inability to get his life together, suicidal. I told my students. This hits too close to home. The novel has a beautiful, healing motion to it. My life goes the other, wrong direction on this one, strange dry wash discourse, datcourse, not a course but is. Stay away for now.

Mom leaves. It's Dad's birthday. He cancelled our planned dinner at the Esmerelda Resort in Indian Wells tonight because they're getting ready to go to San Francisco for a brief getaway very early tomorrow morning. So I email him. Happy Birthday Dad. Have fun. I tell Dad in an email that I love him. I love you, Phil said. I really, really love you. He told me. A few days earlier. Hugged me extra long. We ARE going to be together, always. I see now. He was actually saying goodbye. How can a day, before the day, make so much sense, but only in retrospect. He knew that my #1 hangup in life was fear of abandonment. And he left. Imagine that. Is it possible to feel so left behind by someone 25 years old? Who I met and knew for the past three years...go ahead and tell me I lost my head. Yeah, and I'll say we just saw Alice In Wonderland after a hike to Tahquitz Waterfall, dinner at Native Foods. And it was good. Beheadings befell. And there was us two, digging the show. Caterpillar. Butterfly. I want only to sit him down and ask questions and get answers that aren't zen koans, impossible riddles that may or may not lead me to enlightenment. Cupid, you weren't in the movie. What sucker punch did you blow.

Simplify. I have zero capacity to cook anything beyond toast - which I did last night, eating the last of a loaf of La Brea Bakery sourdough, with avocado - I order a Z-Pizza, to be delivered. Last time I had Z-Pizza, just a few weeks ago, Phil did the ordering. Our usual, organic vegetarian, well-done. Like he did for most things domestic. Going to Trader Joe's last week for food - only when I was at less than zero for groceries - destroyed me. I even asked the cashier if I could get a blue balloon to take home. I ignored her questioning eyebrows. Clearly I had no small child with me. Only the one inside me: lost, sad, and unable to cry aloud in public, not quite able to be soothed by carrying around a blue balloon - biodegradable I'm happy to say - and it's still got air, smaller now, and perched on my kitchen counter. I ended up buying Phil treats: a box of cookies, and his own dark chocolate bar. One for each of us. We did things like that for each other. His cookies and mine. His candy and mine. And sharing.

What is it about the food thing, going to the store? I almost lost it in Albertson's yesterday.....when I saw his favorite chocolate chip cookies by the cash register. When I saw the cases of Fat Tire and Red Stripe beer in the cold case. Even buying beer right now feels stale and old. I can barely eat, let alone drink anything. Except for water. And I take two iron pills today, finally, doctor's orders, I'm anemic as hell. She told me, and that was weeks ago. I kind of forgot. Could be adding to my extreme, mono-like fatigue. I stare out the window. Watermarks. Desolation. Am I even here?

Now Tarah is here. She calls and comes over. After work. I'm now in my home office, staring at the computer monitor, wondering how to even begin to scroll through the formidable backlog of emails from recent weeks (nevermind the many, many phone calls I am obliged to return, both professional and personal). I'm starting at the monitor,staring out the window at hot, empty, late day desert space. Nothing has moved since noon. Frozen would be an apt adjective, yet ice can only melt here. Faster than you can keep it cold. The way a life can expire in a fractioned second, a bullet shell too fast for the hole. That was and is and grows larger with the pondering.

Tarah. Full of life and love. She brings a huge dish of pasta with four cheeses from Olive Garden, leftover from a drug-company rep who delivered the food to Dr. Younis's office today; it went mostly uneaten. I tell Tarah not to quit her job just yet. She gets incredible perks, working in a posh private practice here. You wouldn't get that anywhere else. The pasta goes well with the pizza. Perfect timing. Ice coffee now. A short break from an endless day, as I try to get as much done as possible tonight in this groundswell. Candle lit in the bedroom on a small pile of rocks. Wearing the hand acupressure t-shirt he gave me just a few weeks ago. It's soft and warm and it's better than anything else I can think of to wear right now. Last night I lay in bed, my mind just reeling: Phil isn't here. Phil is dead. How can that be? It just doesn't want to click. Let alone make sense.

Time to water the orange trees. The garden, with its lettuce heads and carrot tops and reach for the sky yellow flowers already taller than the wall separating me from neighbors next door and the swamp cooler sticking out of the wall that actually has weeds growing on it. I don't think I should tell them about it. The plants I tendered only a few weeks ago, tiny things burst into sturdiness, outlasting my care. All they need is water. The heat begs their thirst, and the tiny budded green fruits on the citrus trees are ready to grow. What bees made thee? A William Blake sort of thing. Ahhh, Sunflower.

They won't be ripe for many months, till next January. Good to see that the flower made it through to baby fruit. I will nurture them well, never mind what outcome it may bring. Water is good. I will be generous with my love, as always, and again, even if with my beautiful, concerned daughter who comes by to stir mom from her cement brick load walking for a short spell, to bring food, and wine, and hugs, and conversation and even a few jokes along with her. Like the shriveling blue balloon, I know I can still let go of this wrist-rope, and float for awhile. But not entirely away. I'm thinking Hamlet now, my favorite Shakespeare play to teach, (love the Ethan Hawke/Julia Stiles film version) and wondering about those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nobler of mind, tonight.