Memorial Day

Memorial Day is an odd day for me, of honoring those heroes that died for our country and David, who was dishonorably discharged from our country's service.  He told me all about it many times, and if he were to tell me about it again it would all be familiar, but I can't bring up any details of it.  I don't know if I'm getting two incidents mixed up or not.  He was in jail for drugs, but I don't remember if that was the same time he was in military prison or if he was arrested twice.  I never knew him as anything but an honorable gun-owning citizen that refused to wear a seatbelt, who shared my world outlook and political views, and who also never grew up since the hippie days.  He was the eternal stoner of the earth to my flower child.  Neither of us ever went on to the harder stuff beyond weed or our imagination, except some experimentation in the 60s.  Looking back, we both could have been killed, but having lived through it we both wouldn't have traded our stints with LSD, 'shrooms, psyllicybin, speed, and a couple I forgot, for anything.  They truly were mind expanding.  Well, the speed wasn't.  Speed was something totally different.  That was just a day that I accomplished a lot.

Accomplishing something would be memorable.  I was never a striver for things or a big dreamer.  David and I were both the laziest people we knew.  We both lacked any kind of ambition.  We tried to set goals and purposes for our lives, but could never think of any.  My only wish was to be happy, and happiness usually eluded me.  David never desired to be happy, because he didn't know what it was.  I tried for decades to get him to understand what happiness was and to desire it.  We would have arguments about it.  In the end, he taught me what it was.  He had to, in order to get me out of a mental abyss into which I had fallen.  And when I finally crawled out of that abyss he finally told me, "I know what happiness is." We rejoiced and celebrated.  And at some point a few days or months later he told me that he not only knew what it was, but that he was happy.  More rejoicing and celebrating.  From then on we were both deliriously happy and became teachers of happiness. I'm not sure how we did that, people were just inspired by us somehow. So when he died and I collapsed, others thought I was strong.  But inside me it feels impossibly hard to be a happiness teacher by myself, and it often feels like I'm only half of me and half happy.

David also thought I was the most oblivious person he ever met. He noticed everything. His survival depended on it.  His mother died a year after he was born, and his father abandoned him with an abusive grandmother that tried to poison him. He taught himself manners.  He was the life of the party type.  Very quick and sharp wit, and the discretion to go along with it that never got him in trouble for it.  You could take him anywhere.  His background never showed.  He had learned to keep his feelings hidden even from himself.

David was bi, and some of our gay friends assumed David was gay and our marriage was just an "arrangement." Sorry, boys, he chose me for most of his life, so eat your hearts out.  David and I were incapable of anything but honesty.  I don't know what it is like to be with a lying cheater, thank god.  I think Wil, my first husband, may have cheated on me, but it's just a mere suspicion, I really will never know.  With David I knew, I knew him down to his core, everything.  There were two times in his life he was clearly hiding something from me.  Neither were that embarrassing or freaky, but it took him 8-12 hours to finally come clean.  The first time he bought a car, and the second time was many years later, in a different car (affectionately called "the Toad"), when he got stuck on the road in heavy traffic and just had to pee, but it worked out very well because he discovered he could direct his pee right into the shelf of the door and it would leak right out.  Both stories were way longer than this, and we had a good laugh when he finally told me.  We shared everything, but it wasn't always blissful.  Honesty can be very hard to take, but it always made us grow.

We were both reclusive hermits.  We liked being home with our computers.  It's how we stayed connected to the world.  Me to my family and friends, and David with the latest in green, solar and organic.  He drove a free car - Barb gave the Toad to him.  It basically had no floor, the seats were mostly foam as the upholstery had worn off, the doors and windows didn't really open (I think David kept a wrench on the floor to open them with) and of course, it was a stick.  He had anything and everything you could want related to animation and a gazillion other interests.  He had a copy of everything Edna St. Vincent Millay and Stephen Meader ever wrote.  I have them all on a shelf waiting to ebay someday.

When he died I looked at the forums he was on, and his mailing lists, and his accounts and stuff.  I was terrified I would never be able to again if his computer crashed.  He always left everything open and on all the time, and I didn't know his passwords to any of these places.  I answered some of his emails and received condolences back, and one even came to his memorial. Our postal lady hugged me and cried and little kids came by asking for him. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the farmer on the corner in the middle of the city with his fish pond and chickens, that raised earthworms and composted and built a practice adobe wall in the middle of the yard.  Some had spent many an hour gabbing over the fence with him.  He was always home and usually puttering in the yard.  (I would have been home sleeping for my night shift). 

Once David and I began having an email conversation in our separate offices (mine guestroom presentable, and his a hoarder's nightmare) and I said, no, we're not going to become a nerd couple, meet me in the living room.  We liked reading to each other and watching TV together.  I liked when he barbecued (remember, he's from Texas - barbecuing genius is in his dna) whatever I prepared in the kitchen, no matter how badly I messed it up or how thinly I cut it or what ingredient we ran out of, if he barbecued it, it would be awesome.  I used to make a killer chili, the secret ingredient of which was David's leftover barbecued burgers.

Barb (the only other person in the world that watched David die with me) called.  She always calls this time of year without mentioning that's why she's calling.

Most of the year I'm happy, but right now it feels like June will never come.

David (February 26, 1938-May 26, 2009)

David was the only person there will ever be that knew everything about me. Most of it he lived with me, but the part he didn't, like my early childhood and young adulthood, he knew everything I knew, as I knew about him. Nobody can wholly know me ever again. Being with David was like being with myself. Being without him is like being with myself. There's no difference between life and death except that in life I can sometimes forget, and get very sad. Last year I went through "David Season."  This year I was only sad for a week or so. It's such an irreplaceable loss, so it will have to go unreplaced.  I'm caught on the razor edge between the chasm of the past and the chasm of the future, where I was born, where I met David, where I lost David, and where I'll die.  The Precipice of Me.  Where everything is perpetually new as I confidently and timidly stride, crawl, dive, trip and fall into the future.

As I mentioned in a previous post I met David when he poked his head in a hole between a wall of books I was hidden behind and asked me, "Who are you and what are you doing?" Clearly, a strong connection was made at that moment, but had gone unrecognized at the time. I was living with my boyfriend, Wil, and David was married. I soon left town and Wil and David met, became good friends and Wil started working for him, and staying with him and his wife on their farm. When I next got back in town (Dallas), Wil picked me up at the bus station and drove us out to David's land in Hubbard, Texas, where we stayed a few weeks. I think Wil was between jobs (we traveled and went wherever he could find metal lathing work (he was a third generation metal lather), and I worked for Kelly Services, a temp agency, wherever we went).

I was a northern city girl, I had never been to anyplace like Texas before. David's then wife took me to a dairy farm, and had me dip into the vat. That was the first time I saw the layers of milk and fat, and realized what cream really was. It was also the first time I tasted real milk. It was the first time I tasted real beef, too. There was a chain of steakhouses that served $2.99 rib-eye steaks so good they melted in your mouth. We never tired of them when we were in town, but Hubbard, Texas was out in the middle of nowhere. Once we saw a mysterious object zigzag across the sky and stop dead still. David got out his telescope and set it up on a tripod. We watched it for a few days but it never moved again and one day we noticed it was gone. I think this was 1974.

Wil and I eventually married, eventually divorced. David got divorced also. I thought of David as Wil's friend rather than mine, because they would write letters to each other, but David and I didn't keep in touch. Neither David or I could ever remember how we got back in touch again but we floated around in each other's lives for years before we became close friends. This picture was taken soon after I met him, maybe 1977? He would have been around 35 and I would have been 11 years younger.

 
Around 1982 he was living on his sailboat getting ready to sail around the world alone and I couldn't bear the thought of that. I kept finding things in my apartment for him to fix (by this time we were both living in the same town), and the thought of him sailing alone across the sea bothered me so much he never left. We went through a phase he liked to call "leaving a sleeping bag behind my couch." That year we almost adopted a baby together. A friend knew a pregnant woman that wanted to give up her baby, but the mother changed her mind when she found out we weren't Christian. David didn't even want kids, and was cranky about it, and we weren't even married, but he would have gone through the adoption with me anyway. He would have done anything for me.

More moments in which he stole my heart: When he broke down and sobbed in my arms for the first and only time. When I saw him gently brushing Mellie, my long-haired cat whose skin was too sensitive to let me brush her. When he announced to a group of dinner guests that he had married me for my salads. When he credited me with humanizing him. When he presented me with a purple heart (a real one he got from a junk store). When he refused to bring me flowers but would get me laser light bulbs with flowers in them, like these:

When he started taking the same classes as me and never studied and got straight A's it really pissed me off. Until he told me how he was treated so poorly at home and school that he had always thought he was stupid. David was discovered by the English Dept. to be a world class poet and fawned over by the school administration and the most prestigious of the faculty. Our nothing little lives suddenly blossomed with local culture and we were privy to all the campus gossip and political upheavals of the inner circle, a fascinating subculture in itself. And each department had its own dramas. David interviewed all manner of local celebrities for the school and wrote an essay for an English textbook the dean was publishing, for which he actually received compensation. He started a scholarship club, and was the first president of it. I myself won some writing contests, one for which David was a judge. He assured me all the other judges had also voted for me.  He often helped grade papers, tutored and mentored.  He instituted student photo ID cards. He set up the photo booths, took every existing student's picture, made the cards himself, and did so for every registration after that until the school was able to take over the system so no students were missed. David got both an AA and an AS degree, and was there about 4 years, and a part time employee for the college. I was there about 6 years because I kept taking classes after graduating. We both felt those were the happiest years of our lives. And we were divorced part of those years, too. Yep. David had some kind of mid-life crisis and divorced me. But divorce really didn't change things, and we eventually annulled our divorce. That's how we thought of it, not that we re-married, but the divorce just didn't work out.  (By the way, David and I were never unfaithful to each other.  In fact, he divorced me so as not to be unfaithful.  How fucking noble of him.) And it gave me an opportunity to be single again, and boy did I use it.  As depressed and angry as I was that the prick divorced me, I had the time of my life.  We both did.

His first really big emotional breakthrough happened watching a concert video with me.  We had very different taste in music, but every now and then he would hear something and tell me about it, and would be amazed that I could not only figure out what it was from his meager description of it, but actually produce it on some old tape I had made off the radio, or some old vinyl or CD.  I lost Graceland, Jennifer sings Lenny and my entire Phil Ochs collection this way, and with each loss I would gain a new husband. The first few decades it seemed that I was humanizing him (hence earning the purple heart). But the last few decades it was David that pulled me out of my black hole. Our favorite movie had always been Flashdance, but David's new favorite became "What Dreams May Come." That movie, as much as a watercolor painting as it is, is too real for me. It depicts a husband's journey to hell to get his wife back. I should have given him the purple heart back. He didn't live long enough for me to think of it.

Our song was Sometimes When We Touch, by Dan Hill. I had told him one day that I heard Dan Hill doing it as a killer duet, but never got around to acquiring it. I don't think he ever heard it. Well, David, here it is. Is there youtube in Heaven?

1981ish:

Our wedding photo, Valentines Day, 1987:

This was taken on our honeymoon.  He had a way with animals:

1998ish in our first and only home of our own (which we lost a few years later when we both lost our jobs):

Here he is by the pond he built and was very proud of (there were live fish in it and sometimes a frog), with our cat and chicken, 2007ish:

Here we are growing old together.  It was taken on our 22nd anniversary cruise 3 mos. before he died.

I barely noticed David. He was the rest of me, my mirror, my guru, my protector, my confidant, my partner in crime, my savior, the wind beneath my wings and the floor under me, and I never took anyone more for granted. He was always there, there was no imagining life any other way, so I didn't imagine it. When he dropped dead two years ago today it was unimaginable.

I never wrote a poem about him. I guess we just lived the poem. This is the only poem in which he's mentioned, but it isn't really about him. It's about waiting at home in light pollution while he was in New Mexico building our house (the one they could never take away), bathing in the open air and watching the stars while I stayed home in the daily grind, joyously anticipating the day we could move into our newly built house, alone together, miles away from anybody.

Milky Way

I washed the dishes and
changed the cat box sand
You took a shower in water
welled up from our own land

I made soup, folded laundry and
wondered why the pond went dry
You mistook the milky way
for clouds floating across the sky

My Mommy (1911-1960)

Yaslowitz, Austria-Hungary, where Mom was born. The town no longer exists, but it would be located somewhere in Hungary today.

Bubih pregnant with Mom (1911):

By 1913 Mom was joined by Uncle Irving:























The family in 1920:

The family in 1922:














I do not know why Zadih isn't in any of the pictures.  Is he the one taking them?  Was he away from home?  The story is the cops were going to arrest him for taking down anti-semetic posters.  Word of his impending arrest reached home, Bubih quickly packed his suitcase, and sent him away as soon as he got home, and that's when he came to America and I owe my life in the land of the free to him.  But I don't know what years those were.  Anyway, here he is in 1911:

Here's Bubih and Zadih, 1913

Mom and Uncle Irv with governess, 1920

Tween Mom:

Mom and bro Irv, 1923:

Family portrait, 1924:

1925, Mom and Irving sharing a rock with another brother/sister pair, my Aunt Lilyan Pell (who I spoke about in my post about being agent of the Pell estate), and her brother, Phil.  My mom is on the left making a funny face.

Same group, same day, more friends, 1925 (that's Uncle Irv hamming it up in front):

1926, graduation from...?

Mom (on right) with first husband before she married my dad (a real shocker to learn from Uncle Irv as adults!).  The guy she married was their Hebrew teacher, and apparently very charismatic and all his students were in love with him.  The story I was told was one day Aunt Lil saw him at the opera with another woman, and that was the end of my mother's first marriage.  Also in the photo is Aunt Lil (on left) and Aunt Belle (middle).

These next 3 pictures are in the 1930s, I'm guessing:

I think this is 40s:

Mom and me, 1955:

My family, 1957:

My last picture with Mom, 1958: