Little moments of tease

So, Marcie has been making her appearances again in my dreams. But there is a different feel to them now. For one, I am not aware that I am dreaming.

I have had several of these new dreams. There are no surreal or grand visions, no strange transformations of reality or unnerving sensations. There are just relatively simple little chats and cuddles.

The best one was one that happened last week after the crazy spring in our mattress drove me off the bed and onto the couch. I dreamed I was laying with my head in her lap as she sat "Indian style," a rare treat.

Oh, geez, I miss that simple little thing. So you know how it works:

I usually would slide into her lap as I laid on my belly on the couch, wrapping one arm around her hips and the other under her thighs, then lay my head down. She loved to keep a pillow on her lap when she sat, conveniently enough. She only let me when she planned to stay put.

I had a tendency to fall asleep there, actually. I did almost every time.

In my dream, Marcie was stroking my back and leaning down, holding me and kissing my head as she basically petted me. I rolled over on my back and admired her as she watched something on the television.

Her soft little cotton pajama bottoms and the warmth of her body under them always made me want to stroke her, if not always out of my enamored state then for the tactile pleasure of it. She smiled and blushed as I got a bit fresh, but did not protest.

"If you can't behave, you can go," she said, smiling and leaning down, kissing me and stroking my hair off of my brow.

"I don't want to behanve, but if you try to make me leave, I will tickle you mercilessly," I said.

She gave me her look of defiant warning, one of my favorites, and the play ensued. By the time I had her on her back with her arms pinned, we were kissing. I let her hands go and she stroked my back gently and looke dup with such loving eyes.

Eyes I knew. Eyes I very much wish I could stare into again.

"I love you, honey," she said, and smiled. Then a tear rolled down her cheek.

Then I "remembered" she had cancer, and she was under treatment. I kissed her tears and her nose and her face, gently holding her head and stroking her face with my fingertips.

"You'll be okay, baby," I said, holding back tears and gulping at the lump in my throat.

She smiled and nodded, then looked up at me with a strangely calm and happy face. "I am okay," she said. "You'll be okay, too, honey. You'll be just fine, I promise."

I kissed her lips and slid down, hugging her waist and settling my head just under her breasts, kissing her tummy. She stroked my hair for what seemed a long time. Though I did not drift off, she said "Honey, you have to get up."

I pushed up and she sat up and kissed my forehead. "You have to go to work," she whispered. "I love you."

She smiled and stroked my cheek. I woke in our front room, laying on my belly, her kiss of the phantom of it still warm on my forehead and the stroke of her hand's tingle not yet quite faded.

For once, I felt not just loved but undisturbed and not as bereft as I awoke, and I went to work happy and well-rested for the first time in months.

I hope these are the moments I can expect when I take our trip.

Dreams upon dreams.

So, as I have been wrestling with dilemmas and working on the trip, the dreams have become very strong again. They are quite comforting at the moment, too. I intended to write about them tonight, but I have been busy on other fronts and needed to catch up with some friends.

I had an interview tonight for what appears to be a great project.Imagine a startup journalism site on nonprofit issues, growing slowly from a simple but professional, top-notch blog into a much more complex and powerful source of information on nonprofit work than currently can be found in one place.

I'm hoping I did as well as I might have. Make money, do good,all at once in one place? Sign me up! I'll let you all know how it goes. We'll see.

I need sleep. Good night, folks

F.

What riches for the moral?

Lately, I have been considering, or rather reconsidering, what eyes I look out at the world with. I have always been committed to playing fair, being good to people as much as I can manage and placing principle first.

I am beginning to think that perhaps such an approach may have contributed to losing Marcie.

During my time with Marcie, I did not do some things I now know would have paid off handsomely. Some of these would have brought serious detriment to other people, something I have tried to avoid ("First do no harm..." etcetera).

Others would have been unethical but not harmful to anyone in any direct way. But some I simply had to forgo because Marcie was not going anywhere. Marcie was in San Diego to stay.

I had offers of jobs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, Portland and even British Columbia, but Marcie had her foot down. She did not want to leave her parents, specifically her mother, again.

I could have forced her to choose to follow or watch me leave, but I was honestly too smitten. Never mind that some of the jobs and opportunities were simply outstanding, replacing our two salaries at once. Never mind I have always hated the sunshine tax that San Diego levies with aplomb on all not related to the scum who own it.

I loved her and, even if I could win an argument, I could not stand to see her cry. So, I was trapped trying to negotiate a path that kept me happy with her and not so overwhelmed with frustration at the constant struggle to get a decent career going.

One consolation I had was that she always knew that I wanted to move on some of these opportunities. She was always supportive when I did not bury someone at a job after a big backstabbing took the rug out from under me.

"You're a pure soul, and you are better than that," she would say. "I am so proud of you and I am so happy you are not like that."

It is not much consolation right now.

I should have just gone and let her know I wanted her to come along but I would not wait. When I wanted to start a Ph.D., I should have refused to drop it as she wailed about the expense of school and her wish to stay rooted.

I sometimes feel that the jobs at several internet companies I was offered, including those very early on at CNET and a few with more business-oriented startups, would have greatly enriched us. Two of them had spectacular IPOs.

Why is this relevant now? Well, I have been thinking that perhaps not being in a better place with more money and a better life may have killed my baby. That process of thought has been stuck in my brain lately, those regrets and deep guilt teaming up on me as I consider my next moves in life.

I waver between keeping the faith and trying to find such opportunities again and simply going for the jugular on every opportunity I get, hurt to others be damned, ethics be forgotten.

Adding to this is a huge arbitration battle in the future over her death itself. I am a battler, and the only time she would become upset with me was when I would take up a crusade. There is no Mr. Nice Guy when I fight. I do not so much want to win as to thoroughly defeat, destroy and permanently debilitate my opponent.

I have never really lost when I have been in that coarse and mean mode, but I have had regrets. Cajoling and bashing at Kaiser for the best and most treatment worked, but was I even able to know about the best study medications at such a place?

Probably not. I wonder what I could have stomped around and, if not outright bought, strangled out of UCSD or John Hopkins. What could a few million have bought, and how fast would the problem have been detected? Would she be here making me some breakfast for dinner?

But then I come to the realization that my romantic proclivities got me into that regretful nostalgia. Do I really think that if I were involved with someone who loves me, the romantic side of me won't soften me too much to put my foot down?

Have no doubt that I will always have that romantic side to me. I write things about Marcie that will never see the pages of this blog. I have a chapbook full of innocent romantic notions that would make the most peurile and pedestrian poetasters sneer in contempt.

But I wonder if, barring the need for a soft heart (for a book tour and the writing of a book matched in tone with my love for her) and all those ethics and that whole purity business, I should not just seek every crappy dollar and crush anyone who stands in my way.

I have told a friend that the sun will likely set on romance as a guiding force in my life's decisions over the Atlantic as I watch from the Moroccan coast and the last of her ashes slips from my hands. Even my intended end to it sounds romantic.

More honestly, I am afraid that, should I ever fall so deeply in love again, I may not keep my eyes open and my will strong to tend to the opportunities that come my way. I don't want that to happen.

However, I acknowledge that I could find something enriching, or have one of my two provisional patents turn out to be valuable enough to secure whatever future I wish to have. Who knows? Maybe the book will be something with value in the market, not just my heart. I do intend to pursue higher degrees, regardless.

But if none of those pies in the sky are within reach, I want to start building up a pile of cash through more direct means. If I have to work in a field of relatively little appeal, or do it while stepping on people ruthlessly, then perhaps better late than never.

Perhaps I can join the scads of scum who redeem themselves with reviving that romance when they have had their fill, and somehow reconcile the moral body count and ethical boneyard in retrospect with some charitable grunts.

Then again, maybe Marcie would have left me long ago as my foot was down and I said I was going with or without her, or when I started leaving people in the lurch for a buck, or when I started applying my crusading ways to my business behavior.

For now, the only thing that has been strong check on me has been the memory of her stroking my face on her little hospital bed.

"You get so mad, honey, but you always do the right thing," she said. "You are such a pure soul. It just breaks my heart to think you'd change that."

And even if I have my thoughts, her voice is still so strong in my heart that I can't unleash my long-dormant predatory instincts. Honestly, though, I think a few more solid beat-downs, a few more paltry paychecks and a little more pain will "help."

New friend

Another new blogger and visitor has popped in. Teej, who commented here, then I ran into on Lana Banana's site, may be connected to this site and could be the author? Welcome, Teej. Let me know if it's your blog and I will put up a link.

A disservice

I have posted stridently about romance and love, and I have been very supportive of an idealistic look at such sentiments. I want to acknowledge the people this outlook potentially does disservice to.

To the people who have been badly hurt after being taken in by pretty words, I apologize. Not everyone is sincere, and there are many scoundrels cajoling and carousing in the pilfered cloth of troubadours.

Just listen to your heart, and if it hears something wrongly, run away.

To the people who have honestly lost faith and settled, or have found some lusterless lifelong relationship in the mundane and unloving safety of someone familiar, I apologize. It is your choice to comfort yourself how you choose in this ugly world.

Refuge can be more important than comfort, and much more accessible. But settle well.

To those who have had their fill of romance and decided that more of it is far too much, no matter how little more there might be for you, I apologize. I understand you completely and I have been there with you. Romance is a burden.

It can be easier to appreciate what we have had and pursue something less taxing.

To the people who have spent so much of their lives in love and dedicated to it that they have forgone great things and feel the burden of lost opportunity, I apologize. You do not need my notions and insistence in them to coax you into further sacrifice.

Remember opportunity has its place, and true love should make room for it either way.

To those who have suffered as that great devotion was severed or stripped from them-their careful, loving ministrations spent on a phantom-I apologize. How can I, knowing what you have been through, call you jaded or cynical when you evade it?

We who truly love have a secret knowledge of its cost in this vapid, nasty world.

It is all I can do to advocate some try to adhere to romance and some basic code of the heart. But before I let everyone know where, after my duty to Marcie is discharged, I will focus my efforts, I wanted to cut some slack.

I'll likely need some, too. On all counts.

Running on empty

As everyone who has read my archives knows, I took care of Marcie constantly from the day she needed help, months before she was bedridden, to the horrible moment itself. It was not just tough on the heart, it was tough on the body.

Before Marcie fell ill, I had rediscovered and reawakened to surfing. Nothing was more relaxing than a long ride on a wave, and I did not care if it was on a fish, a longboard, or a bodyboard. That is, until I saw how much fish and longboards cost.

I may never return to it, or I may flee back into it as the water warms and the gently rocking waves urge me to relax in the cool womb of the Pacific. I just don't know. I do know that when things were very tough, a precious few hours in the water recharged me.

Marcie was not a beach person. But as for my surfing, she loved it and told me how much she enjoyed how very "attentive" to her I was after long session in the waves and a shower.

In time, as her needs grew, such hours were scarce. I managed to squeak a few in here and there, quickly stolen moments of forgetting, all taken before worry and panic drove me back to her.

When she was bedridden, I was relieved to the beach only when a friend or family member showed. Usually, I did not want to leave anyways. I needed to find a new way to exercise. It was critical.

I gained weight after a near-death experience of my own. Due to a careless antibiotic prescription, I swelled and broke out in hives (I am deathly allergic to pnicillin and cephalosporins). I was placed on steroids.

I bloated like a balloon and hit 260 pounds. I began running.

I did not notice at first, but I slowly began to pare the weight off. I would run until I could not, then walk back. It was not far at first, perhaps a mile. Soon it was two, around Morley Field. Then three, around my neighborhood, on flatter ground.

As much as I hated it at first, I forced myself to run. To keep me running, I would thing of the last swallowed tear or the last indignity she suffered. It would drive me on a bit.

I came to run whenever I needed to cry but she needed me to be strong. The salty tears mingled with my sweat and gave me a camouflage of sorts.

Sometimes I ran very far, especially when there was much I had been trying to help her with or that had gone awry with her or our lives in general. Sometimes I ran home spooked, needing to check on her, touch her, kiss her.

I ran to stay alive and to feel as if I was taking care of myself as I cared for her. I ran to try to control my rage as nurses and doctors gave us little more than pitying nods and platitudes. These, too, urged my feet to move.

I ran because it was time for fight or flight, and all the fight I had was not saving her. Flight would not, either. But through it, I could leave the pain of my everyday existence and punish my body until its pain replaced the heaviness, the ache, in my heart.

I still do. It still does. It takes longer to replace the ache, though.

I may never return to surfing, even though I can get a board tomorrow, and a wetsuit, and just get on it. I tried to recently, but it brings back memories of her in our better times, and there is no loving redhead who is happy to see me when I go home.

And in a very acute way, that she was not there became very painful when I stepped out of the shower in that post-session stoke. There was no kiss and warm hug or cuddle on the couch for me, just my head and a beautiful picture of her, and her ashes and candles to light.

I know I will keep running until I run out of pain, until I run out of reason and I run out of time. I still have plenty of all of those, and memories of that time make me want to run away.

For now, I am content to run five or so miles, local and well-traveled. Someday, as is my wont, I will run and not stop until I have a reason to and a place to give that reason context.

Maybe that place will be someplace to surf. Maybe it will be a better place to run.

But maybe I will simply run out of time before I run out of pain and reason.

Keeping the faith

I am by no means a slow person. I tend to be actually rather quick on the uptake, according to most people I know. But something I was apparently well behind the curve on was Marcie's imminent demise.

Marcie's illness had been on a progressive-regressive loop. She would improve greatly over a long period of time, then she would lose a little ground or suffer a setback.

At the time she became bedridden for good, Marcie was prepared to have a little extra help around the house in the form of hospice nurses, as palliative care with our provider meant "waiting for about six weeks."

So, when her last setback came, I focused on her recovery. I stood alone on that ground until the end.

She had had her medication adjusted the night before and she was feeling good. She had some energy. Jane was on the way to see her the next morning, which we were both greatly looking forward to. Jane visiting was always an immense bolster to Marcie.

When she woke on her birthday, and I did as well, she asked for help. She could not raise herself from the bed. Her speech was slurred. I will not further detail that day's pain for now.

By the end of it, she was in a nursing home, I was being assured that the home would help her convalesce, including recuperation of her to an ambulatory state, and her medication had been changed again.

Just one of many changed, though. It drew my eye that it was the same one which had been changed the night before. That change was never explained to me.

I was foolish enough to believe the nurses and staff at the hospital would help her walk again. I was very wrong.

The first visit to her in the nursing home, after a drive up in an ambulance the day before, was horrible. It was only the next day, and she already was being neglected.

She had not been changed, an ignominious offense to her that I immediately remedied. It was only just more horrible that she had not been tended to in such an important and basic way than the fact that now she needed to be changed at all.

I read her chart. No Range of motion exercises had been done. None had been ordered by the doctor, the nurses explained.

I performed them for her, stretching her legs and toes, moving them back and forth, massaging them gently as she watched, occasionally smiling, tired. It took a lot of energy, but she tried. She did not want to, but did it for me.

The following day, I received a call from her oncologist, who expressed shock that she was in the nursing home at all.

"My god," he said. "I don't understand. Her radiology came back and all of her brain metastases have reduced in size 'markedly,' according to the report on the MRI."

This was hope. I expressed his thoughts to Marcie, who smiled a little, weakly, and demanded that I haul away all of her birthday belongings. She allowed to give her range of motion exercises and I swore to get her home.

Jane had to go back to San Francisco, but she had provided me with some comforting food and immeasurable moral and physical support. She had also given Marcie compassionate and beloved company in frightening times. She would return.

When Marcie was finally able to come home, Kaiser said that she would not be on her feet again. I was incensed. I checked her chart, and she had not received a single day's range of motion exercise from the nursing home. But she was headed home.

After I fought Kaiser to first provide everything she would need, from a hospital bed to a transfer chair for her shower and a commode, she was brought to the house by an ambulance. She was so tired.

At least she was in my care again. I did range of motion every day. Her nurse and other support staff came by when they were scheduled or after I repeatedly demanded it. But they were not enthusiastic about it.

They weren't alone.

I noticed the rituals beginning around me. When her mother visited, there were sympathetic smiles and silent strokes of Marcie's hand, no discussion or speaking. When others visited, they either whispered or did nothing but look down at her grimly.

I never surrendered her. Every day was encouraging words, range of motion exercises and constant skin care and love. Every two hours saw me rise from bed to shift her weight a bit and prevent bed sores.

She never developed a sore after the red, nasty, open welt of one she came home with from the monstrously negligent warehouse-as-nursing-home in Poway was eradicated. Her skin was constantly massaged and tended to.

I noticed that the nurses were not performing range of motion for her and asked why. One nurse said that I should probably continue it, but it was really not in her orders. Another said she was only for skin care and vitals, or changes.

The nurse started giving me the, "you know that she is pretty close now..." speech. I knew the speech well. I ignored it and kept working, feeding, cleaning, loving and tending to, hoping and straining for my woman.

The social worker started prodding me to read the "blue book," of how to care for one's loved one and understand dying from their perspective. I already understood and refused to further fall back on my hope for her.

I do not know who it was or how it came to be discussed with Marcie, but one night, upon my return from work and after her family had left, she took my hand and squeezed with all her might.

"I don't want to suffer, honey, okay?" she asked, slurring her words as tears slid down from the corners of her eyes. "Please, don't make them revive me if I die."

I knew Marcie's wished to not be revived very well, and I felt tears on my own face as I quietly asked "Why would you suffer?"

"Because you want to make me live and she thinks you'll keep me alive if I start to die," she said, biting her lip. "Please don't?"

"Ohhhh, honey, I won't make you suffer," I said. "I promised you that. Don't believe them."

"Okay, honey," she said, trying to enunciate. "I trust you, okay. But I'm afraid."

I enveloped her on the bed, carefully hugging her as she laid there until I heard her breathing slow and go regular, felt her little heart slow and the pounding of some horrible fear grow softer. She slept and I tucked her in.

I was afraid, too. She never saw a nurse unless I was there with her after that.

I did not have time to find out who had said such horrible things to her. Her condition changed and she started falling ill of pneumonia shortly after that day.

The county burned around us and I was ordered home by the school district because of the fires. Schools were shuttered.

I focused on connecting to Marcie whenever I could. The slightest stir in her bed brought me out to her and had me holding her hand.

Every word and every recognition of me as I spilled my love over her was a little moment of peace or comfort.

I hid my trepidation, but my heart was already in ashes, and the wildfires outside rained little echoes of my agony across the map as she faded.

I accepted the possibility but not the inevitability of her death in time. But when it came, I was still unprepared.

I knew when she did depart that I had been there to the end in the faith of her potential renewal, and I stood alone only because she, the last to leave, had no choice to make that would let her stay.

To that last breath on the 29th of October, I had held hope only for her to be my wife, whole and walking, loved and loving, smiling and vibrant, again.

It was better to feel the full brunt of the pain and loss at once. I saw the people around me surrender her. Some, family and friends, did so with little choice.

Others let her go with little honest effort otherwise. To this day, I cannot help but remember how fast those paid to aid us seemed focused on her remaining time and how much more she had, as opposed to how much more she could have.

But what evicts their dark shadow from my memory of that small part of our journey together is the support of our loved ones, her loving touch and the occasional moments of clarity, which we spent sharing our love and healing our last wounds.

We had a chance, and we did everything we could to make it matter. We succeeded in some ways more than others, especially where honoring her, us and our love was concerned.

I hope that some of that honor will be reflected in this, and my future, work.

F.

The cat visits: Making the rounds for Marcie

Marcie enjoyed walking all over our neighborhood and even in Kensington from time to time. She loved the shady passages, old Craftsman homes and the winding, calm roads.

But truth be told, she was in it for the cats.

Our neighborhood is overflowing with cats of all shapes and sizes, colors and patterns. Marcie loved nothing more than to find a new feline friend to play with for a few minutes. The kitties definitely were beguiled, to the very last one.

A particular week of chemotherapy had been very rough on Marcie, and she was pretty exhausted. She looked at me as I prepared for a quick run.

"I wish I could see my kitty friends, but I am just too tired to for a walk today," she said.

I decided a quick run was not the best exercise and, before I left, grabbed my cheap little Emprex camera. I walked the neighborhood far and wide, and I snapped some pictures of her friends.

Cheap or not, the camera had a nice camera-to-rca cable to let me show her the shots on the television.

I caught two of her favorites one day, both "Tuxedo kitties" as she called them. I also snapped a few shots from "creaky kitty" I would learn as she named them all.

Then while preparing for a run at Morley Field, I spied a familiar gray form. The cat looked like the Stoddard's kitty Samantha, who had passed. I took one of her and her friend, which Marcie dubbed "the creamsicle kitty."


What I showed Marcie, (Also featuring Seamus)


She enjoyed her show and was fascinated by the Sam clone and the "creamsicle" cat. But all was not perfect by any means.

I did not capture one very important kitty with my lens, and soon Marcie was asking me to go see her. Cavinia, the last neighborhood kitty Marcie went for a visit to.

The places of our early love (pt 2) Cortez Hill

At our little apartment, 1573 Ninth Ave, Marcie and I began our life together. The old building was put up in the 1920s as a boarding house behind the main apartments. Behind that were old vacation bungalows converted into cottages.

They were the old San Diego's "No-Tell Motels." Stars, politicians, executives and their extramarital partners and the occasional honeymooner stayed in them back then.

The whole neighborhood stank of decay in 1993. There was a former Denny's, sometimes open as the "Spice house," usually not under stable management or ownership for more than a year at a time.

Nonetheless, our little home was architecturally interesting. Did you say you'd like a tour? Enjoy:



With her receipt of $6,000 from the Casa Arleda relocation settlement, plus the rent she had saved by not having to pay for some 8 months before that, Marcie had gathered quite a nest egg.

She needed it. CVS, her employer at the time, had decided to close its mall stores. Sav-on was buying others and hiring away some of the employees, but Marcie and I had no car and she could not reach the new location in La Jolla.

The store finally closed.

"I think I am going to take some time off," she said. "But I am going to look for a job that I want, and it's not going to be retail."

I smiled and kissed her cheek as X Files played on the television, back then a mutual obsession. She smiled and I remember now thinking that my silent support was just what she wanted to hear.

Marcie took some time off, but she found a job at the Union-Tribune as a customer service representative for subscribers. She still had quite a nest egg. She decided, one year after she had been laid off, six months into her new job, how to use it.

"Honey, I am going back to Paris next winter," she said. "Thats going to be my first vacation.

She said it as she rocked on her feet a little, happy and waiting for questions as she smiled.

I could only smile. I had hoped she would want to indulge in travel before she went back to work, but she had been prudent and had wanted to have a job first.

It was a very happy day in our little home.

The promise of honor

Compliments complement. Nothing we do in love becomes worse with a compliment, everything is just made better. But sometimes, I know the tendency is to let them slow or stop, or to be used as bandages when we wound each other.

Marcie and I served each other compliments constantly. Some were too much. My head would swell when she called me a genius, her handsome man or, most preciously to me of all, her hero.

She was better at it sooner than I was, but I am very glad she taught me to be free and direct with them.

The issue really came up in Humboldt. I was under constant stress, working after a full load at school every day, full time, and trying to find little gestures for Marcie to enjoy her life more in Arcata.

I was also a reporter who took his work on the community page of the school paper very seriously. I was neglecting her. One night, she just broke down.

"Frank, I don't even know why I am here," she said. "I hate this place, I hate the hippies and the rain and the cold. I hate my job, I hate how far it is to the city, and I feel like you don't even acknowledge me anymore."

She burst into tears and I remember holding her as she cried on our old green couch, whispering my love to her.

"You don't tell me anything anymore," she said. "We have sex and you don't talk to me, you don't say nice things to me, you just take me for granted and I'm too scared to complain because you're so happy here."

"I don't know why you are just soo distant from me now," she said, wracked by hitches and moans.

I was crestfallen. I had no idea how it had come to this. I remembered how I had spent the morning admiring her as she prepared for work, watching her from the bathroom doorway that morning.

I loved watching her put on her makeup. But I most enjoyed watching her put on her clothes in the soft twilight, her nude form silhouetted by the light in the bathroom, the smell of her lotion my own little alarm clock.

Then it struck me. I had become caught up in my own head. I thought about how hot Marcie was, and I thought about how good she was to me, but I was just not saying it.

Marcie always told me how sweet I was, how good I looked dressed up and how proud she was of me. I was ashamed.

I promised to improve, and I did. At first, she thought that it would pass. But I added little bunches of hand-picked flowers from the roadside and my long hikes in the woods and fields, just because.

I would always try to pick a flower or two with a special connection in my head to her.

"This bunch is for your red hair and your white skin," I said once, holding a bunch of what I did not know was a rare lily in Humboldt County. "It captures my eyes and makes me want to lean over and inhale you."

They were corny but honest, and with them and a conscious effort, I slowly moved my thoughts into words. Now it is habit.

From time to time, when I grew slack in my attentions, I would revive them with an occasion, not noting them but simply reinstating my conscious will to honor her.

She noticed last year the difference and as we cleared our hearts of all our pains and all our unsaid things, she told me about it.

"You have never stopped telling em how you love me, how beautiful I am to you and how happy I have made you and bearable I make the world for you," she said. "I always thought you would just need to be reminded from time to time."

I nodded and kissed her tears as they welled up and slid down her pale cheeks. I was dying inside.

"You have never stopped telling me, not since we had our talk in Humboldt," she said. "Do you remember our talk?"

I nodded and held her close. I whispered to her that I would never stop telling her all of the things she deserved to hear. She wound my fingers with hers, squeezing and massaging them between her own.

My last compliment to Marcie was how good she smelled with her lotions and creams after I had sponge-bathed her on her little hospital bed. I kissed her and she smiled and nodded, mouthed a thank you and rested. She never awoke.

That I kept my promise was the first soothing realization I came to when some of my pain passed, but that it was no longer possible to keep holding up was the most painful one I had to acknowledge with it, despite the honor I pay her here.

I never took her for granted, and I know I never will.

The places of our early love (pt 1) Casa Arleda

When we met, Marcie lived in one of the coolest old buildings in the Banker's Hill area. Cool in the sense that its architecture was distinct, its design discernibly grander than other old apartments and its decay utter and to the bone. Casa Arleda.


Casa Arleda, previously a drab off-white decaying hulk. Now in more color and higher rent brackets, and offering less entertaining drama, I am sure

Marcie had moved within the building once before I met her. While renting that unit, a pipe burst in her closet, soaking and ruining much of her clothing with rust-loaded, yellow water. She was able to recoup the loss from the building's insurance, and she moved to another studio.

Within months of that move, the building came under assault by the Health Department for innumerable complaints. Rent was suspended because of the landlords' inability to resolve its legally unlivable state. Crack heads literally roamed the halls. It looked it. Badly.

One of the aforementioned rock cocaine and/or amphetamine aficionados took it upon himself to steal cable from the elevator. He failed. He failed rather spectacularly, too.

Apparently not thinking before hacksawing, he was still working when the elevator cables snapped and he hurtled atop the old thing two full floors into the basement. He smashed his face on the edge of the roof hatch with the impact before falling through, limp, into the elevator's graffiti-splashed interior.

He lived to tell the story to me one day as I tried the elevator button. He had a long, face-spanning scab and two bad split lips. I believed him, and he was more explanatory than apologetic.

The landlord hired a security guard who apparently took over the drug trade. It was funny in its own grim, sordid way.

Marcie thrived, though. She was loved by everyone there, from the man she called "My tweaker next-door neighbor gay friend," to "The little boy with a crush on me whose mother is a freelance clown in Balboa Park." Seriously.

Whenever I visited, we had breakfast and walked out to her little third-floor hallway bay windows, which always triggered some paranoid looks through peepholes and occasionally sudden door openings.


Here was the place I would look up at when I came to her in the night, and the balcony we smoked overlooking the city on. Until someone stole the intercom system, Marcie would buzz me in. Usually, though, the gate was propped open.

But it mattered little. We looked out over the bay and the city south of us and simply lived in our little love spell. When eventually the place was shuttered, each tenant received $6,000. Marcie began looking for her new place weeks before.

Marcie and I moved in together when she left Casa Arleda. I will admit that it was not a long time between the day we met and the day we took up residence together, but it was also true that our motivation to do so was purely lust and love. But we dressed it up well.

But Marcie did have an excuse to dispel my romantic notions, indeed. Far be it from her to admit sentiment over practicality.

When she asked if I wanted to move in with her, I pretended it was not on my mind at all, pride besting both my growing need for her and our relationship's honesty for the moment.

"Oh, Jesus, Frank," I remember her saying. "Do you really need to live in a little hotel room downtown when we are sleeping together every night anyways? It's so stupid. It's a total waste of money."

I held out for four hours and whispered in her bed, panting and stroking her back and butt. "You know, you're right," I said. "It does seem like a waste of money."

I was rewarded with her happy snort, a drawn-out, delighted "hee hee hee," a happy kiss on the mouth and her quick dismount to the shower.

I suddenly realized we had both been playing it cool. But I was happy, because it was a great thing to know that she was as smitten as me. I joined her in the shower.

I moved in my meager possessions, books, textbooks, clothes, a computer and some utensils, the next day. It was my best move ever.

Catching up

I have some wonderful pictures of the places Marcie and I lived, but I want to take a few more of the places and things we loved before I publish. I intend to write a post in story form, using slide shows to enhance the readers' understanding of the settings. I will keep you all posted.

I am getting ready to make another pass at selling everything which has no real meaning. When I do, I will let everyone know. Furniture, clothes, excess books, and computer junk, electronics... think, "garage sale with estate overtones."

I have begin planning the next version of the web site/blog, which will actually be one focused on the upcoming sojourn and my preparations for it.

I will be locking off all of my previous posts and backing them onto a local drive soon. This is mostly to allow me to redo the whole site and pull of any content I will want to sharpen up for the book, which I have started sending queries on. I'll keep you all posted on that, too.

I have been preparing for some serious cuts at the school and have options already on the table in case I am caught up in the chopping of positions. I have less than a year on the books, so I do not even get to have seniority factored in. Nonetheless, I am and will be fine either way.

You're all up to date, the plan progresses, and I hope that president's day has been good to all of you. Maybe something more substantial will appear later for you to chew on, you never know.

F.

Marcie and Hiking

Marcie and I shared one passion which I like to think I won her over to. Hiking was a natural, as Marcie loved to walk for her exercise, but the territory we wanted to hike in was always a point of contention. I could hike anything, and the sweatier the walk, the better.

Marcie, on the other hand, was not so adaptable. To Marcie, everything east of us was part of a vast, dry wasteland of sand and skin-drying Santa Ana winds. Dry skin was a mortal sin in Marcie's world. It finally took the promise (true) of a nice waterfall and a tree-lined walk to it to get her to Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, where she enjoyed Green Valley Falls.

Winning her over on Federal parkland was a different story. Cleveland National Forest and it wonderful Laguna Mountain Recreation Area veered way too close to the desert for Marcie. But she had expressed a desire to visit when the snow was on the hills.

We never did get to, but I decided that I would go up and hike the places I had known as a kid, including Kitchen Creek and the Sunrise Highway. I felt her presence with me as I walked, and I managed to take a few shots of the stark contrast of desert and snow, the amazing eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and some views I thought she would ahve "ooh'd and aah'd" at.

Certainly, these forests are nothing like the redwoods and moist conifer forests she loved in Northern California, but they have a beauty all their own. I hope you enjoy these snapshots, and please click on the slide show to visit the web album.

Soulwarmer soup

I have been eating soup lately. Not some salty, canned nastiness, but real soup. I used to make it for Marcie and me, and now I make it to feed me for days at a time. It's healthy, relatively light and wonderfully nutritious. I thought I would share the recipe.

The newest incarnation of the soup is heavy on the chiles, but they are not very hot chiles, so don't shy away yet... Also, remember that soup recipes can be modified to remove what you don't want. But don't change the base, if you can avoid it. It's delicious.

-The base-
1 cup water
1 cup tomatillo, sliced and steamed until done (about 5-7 minutes)
1/2 cup pan-wilted white onion slivers (chunks okay, too)
1 Anaheim chile (very mild), charred and peeled, then sliced into pieces
6 Roma tomatoes, chopped or processed to small chunks
optional:
2 tablespoons ground, dried chipotle
1 tablespoon cayenne
or (milder):
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon cumin
1/2 package of "Soyrizo" vegetarian chorizo replacement
Salt and pepper to taste (I use no salt)
1 tsp sage
1 pinch of mesquite salt if available (or flavor to taste)

Mix these ingredients to start your base, then let the whole thing simmer in a big pot of water while you add your ingredients.

The recommended ingredients

1/2 pound mushrooms
3-4 sliced potatoes in large chunks
1/2 bunch kale
1-2 cups beans (pinto, black or kidney, perhaps all of them)
1/4 pound green beans
6 stalks celery, cut into 1" pieces
1 red onion, chopped into large chunks
1 poblano pepper, roasted or charred then peeled and sliced into strips
1 serrano pepper, roasted or charred then peeled and chopped (substitute green bell for milder palates)
1 red bell pepper, sliced

Once the base is simmering, add the vegetables a bit at a time, stirring everything as it cooks and adding water to keep the ingredients covered. after all the ingredients are in, let it simmer, bubbling lightly, for about two hours.

If you are lucky and patient, you will end up with something like this, including the heavily spattered stovetop:


Enjoy. Tomorrow, perhaps I will share some pictures of places we lived.

Night, folks. F.

The Pizza Pie of Hearts

I decided not to sit in DiMille's, lest I burst into tears like some kind of freak. I didn't when I ate, and pizza tasted very, very good after so many months without it. Back on the wagon I go, though. I need to be in top form for the trip and whatever comes after, if anything.

Here is a fine example of what we enjoyed as our Valentine's ritual (yes, from DiMille's). I did set two places at the table and I had to shoo Seamus away (and lock him in the room, as Marcie would have demanded):

Our pizza pie, and the last Valentine's heart-shaped pizza I will ever eat of.

Good night, folks. Happy Valentine's Day.

The Valentine Tradition

As is the case with many women, Marcie loved Valentine's day. And though I did a number of things for her over the years surrounding the lovers' holiday, one little thing we saved for special Valentine's occasions.

It was not grand, or expensive, or even overly romantic. In fact, it was inexpensive, inauspicious and simple.

I remember well her excitement that morning as I prepared for school. It was the Thursday before Valentine's, 1994. The holiday fell on a Monday that year, and she was holding an ad up festooned with roses and hearts... and a pizza.

DiMille's was offering a special. Now, neither of us knew about this little restaurant in Normal Heights, being downtown-oriented and bus riders.

"Let's see," I said. "A pizza, heart-shaped, a salad, and a heart-shaped brownie for dessert. Hmmm. That's not sounding all that promising."

She dropped her hands and her lips pursed. She looked up and stepped in close and whispered, "You don't want to have a little evening out on the town and then maybe a big night back here?"

"Well, that's different, then," I said, my ears red as she played her hands up and down my chest with the ad still in one of them.

She laughed shortly and triumphantly, then the excited enthusiasm returned to her voice and she stepped away, manipulation utterly successful. "We can catch the 11 after you get out of school, and then after we eat, we can take a taxi if we're too tired to wait for the bus."

She slapped the ad on the refrigerator with a magnet and grabbed her coat, kissing me on the lips as she headed out for work. I simply shook my head and watched her walk, a favorite thign for me back then.

I thought once would be the limit, a simple experiment that would go somewhat awry or that would taste bad. Either way, I would bring her a gift or two, and she would have flowers, if not See's to go with it. Monday came and we set off.

I was quite wrong. Even the bus ride went well. We played all the way up, kissing and whispering into each others' ears about the people around us. Marcie played at moving around the bus, "avoiding me," calling me a "masher" and putting on a show.

For my part, I would slide into a seat behind her after she moved, ,or next to her and wait a moment or two, playing along behind my dark shades. Then, as soon as she was distracted, tickle her or nibble her neck.

I loved to hear her squeal and playfully say "Noooo, stoooop," in her cute falsetto. It rings in my ears even now.

When we got up to debark across Adam's Avenue from DiMille's, she took my hand. A senior who had observed our shenanigans all the way from Downtown stopped us by the disabled seats at the front of the bus.

"You two are just too cute," she said. "I hope you kids have a good Valentine's tonight. You are such a perfect little couple, it warms a heart."

Her words sank in with Marcie, and she would cite them to me in times troubled and serene. They were innocuous enough, but heartfelt and sweet, and though they are fond in my memory, they were always so soothing to hear Marcie recall in her impression of the anonymous elder.

The bus driver was less interested in it all. "Y'all are rascals," he said in a southern drawl. "Are you getting off here or do you want to have to walk a little?"

Marcie pulled me by the hand to the exit, but I managed to whip my head back and wish the old lady a happy Valentine's Day. We went in and had a seat.

The decor was simple and yet warm, with lots of family restaurant touches and pictures on the walls. We ordered the house Chianti , which was actually very good. Marcie was at first put off but she sipped it and decided she agreed.

"To our first Valentine's Day," she toasted.

"To my redheaded Valentine bombshell," I said, clinking my glass against hers.

The staff were friendly and pretty attentive. The waitress was apparently charmed by us, and commented on how I stood when Marcie left, pushed her chair in and was "such a gentleman."

I witnessed the jealous Marcie for the first time when she returned from the bathroom. "What was that girl saying to you?" she asked.

"She said it was nice that I help you sit and stand up when you leave," I said. "She told me I was a gentleman, nothing much else."

"Uh huh," she said. "She'd better watch it. Do you think she's cute?"

I shook my head "No" as I sipped my wine. "Not my type," I said. "She's way too blonde, way too young and seems pretty naive."

"Yeah, well, she can keep her fluttering eyes and her blond hair to her naive self," Marcie said. "And you better not be looking at her."

I slid out of my seat and into Marcie's bench, moving her over. I kissed her and leaned into her a little and whispered, "I'm all yours, so just either enjoy the wine or you're cut off."

"Oh, ho ho, I am going to be cut off now, huh? You think so? Really?" she said, rather indignantly.

I had already met Argument Marcie, so I just kissed her and whispered, "Of course not, but I am with you, and I have something for you."

I changed the subject by reaching into my jacket and pulling out a little set of earrings I had bought her, made from moonstones. She looked at the vintage jewelry and smiled, and then shooed me to my side of the table before handing me a card. I still own that card, and cherish it.

The salad arrived and was delicious and fresh-tossed, the house dressing simple and light, but flavorful. The pizza won a very enthusiastic approval from Marcie, who found it to have plenty of tasty sauce and, "not too much cheese."

The only miss was the brownie, which my unrefined baking palate adjudged acceptable but Marcie's more exacting tastes panned wholly.

"Honey, it is totally dry like they just cut up industrial brownies and iced 'I love you' on it," she said.

I conceded, but had them pack it, as well, to avoid hurting their feelings. I eventually tossed it when she kept referring to it as "that nasty thing." She made brownies that weekend to "show me" what a "real brownie" was like.

As we waited for a taxi, which the DiMille's hostess called for us, she kissed me on the cheek and said, "Let's come back next year. It will be our little getaway."

I agreed to, and we came back every year except for the two we lived in Humboldt County. Last year, we ordered it in, just the pizza. It was our tradition, and we did what we could to honor it, though neither of us ate much that night.

Tonight, I will go enjoy one last heart-shaped pizza at DiMille's, half cheese and half pepperoni, with a table for two and a couple of glasses of Chianti. Perhaps I will dream of her tonight, and perhaps I won't. But I will never have that heart-shaped pizza again.

Chasing Marcie

*Warning* TASTEFUL adult stuff in this post.

So, when we left off, I was walking away from Marcie's house after our first (if platonic) sleepover with my jacket tied around my waist. Classes went by in a blur. I decided to call Marcie after a quick workout at the gym. When I got no answer, I headed back to my little hotel room.

"Hey, Frank-o!" the front desk clerk called to me as I entered.

His name was Gus and he was a retired Navy man with a drinking habit that had outgrown his pension but not his spirit. He always had a salty comment to make, usually to a greatly mirthful reception. I stopped.

"Somebody left you a message," he said. "Marcie called and said she'll see you in class tomorrow, she's working late at CVS."

"Thanks, Gus," I said, taking the message from him and pocketing it. "She's really cute, man."

Gus looked at me funny. Then he shrugged a little and spit his New York accent at me with a little barb. "Huh. No shit? You like girls, then? Hell, I thought you were a queer."

"Sorry to disappoint, Gus, but I like the ladies," I said.

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "Until one of them finally drives you into bad habits, too, huh? We're not so different, you and I."

Gus went back to reading the Reader's Digest, one of the little lodger hotels' subscriptions, pressing the button to buzz me in as if to dismiss me. He was a quirky old guy.

The night passed slowly, and the morning classes seemed to go on forever. Then, when speech class began, she was not there. Stood up! I knew angst for the first half hour of the hour-and-a-half class, wondering where she was.

She floated in while Ken discussed rhetoric and persuasive speaking. I turned and watched her walk in, shooting her a win. She rolled her eyes and slid into her chair, giving me a critical look.

The class dragged but we were let out early because we had had no break.

"Stop it," she said as I tried to hold her hand. "Hold on."

We were out of sight of the classroom when she finally let me take her hand. But she set her book bag down and slipped into a deep, wet kiss under the City College bridge that doubled as a plaza above B street.

"Come on," she said. "Let's catch the 7 and go to Balboa Park."

I picked up her bag and she held my free hand. We both had passes and within 15 minutes were at the Balboa Park Fountain. We strolled through the park and stopped in various places to kiss. we ended up making out for a long while on the western end's soft, unkempt grass.

"I have to eat," she said.

"What would you like?" I asked. "Some French food?"

"No, no," she said. "Just something simple. Are you hungry?"

I was less interested in nutrition than she was, but I nodded. "Sure."

We covered the ground between her house and the park in no time. She sat me down on her bed and turned on her television to the news.

Within 15 minutes, we were eating Macaroni and Cheese, the Kraft kind. It was a lifelong favorite of hers, thought not mine by any means. Some red wine helped wash it down, and we enjoyed a cigarette afterward. She told me we were being "very French."

She handed me the toothbrush I had used before

"Go brush your teeth," she said. "Close the door, too."

I did, and brushed giddily. There would be more kissing, at least.

I was on the right track. When she opened the door as I still brushed, she was in her robe. She slide it against me and I got the feel of her nipples against my back. She hugged me from behind and whispered, "Go finish out there," before she kissed my nape.

I was completely turned on and just threw the toothbrush into the sink and rinsed my mouth. I half expected her to shower or something, but she came out of the bathroom and turned off all but the nightstand light.

She stood silhouetted in her clingy bright green baby doll, massing her hair on her head with her hands, then clipping it in place.

"Well, do you need a written invitation?" she asked me.

"No," I remember I said. "But I do enjoy the view."

"Oh, that's cute," she said. "But you're sure talking a lot, aren't you. Are you nervous?"

I most certainly was not, but decided to show her, not tell her. My clothes practically flew off me and in seconds, I had slid my hands around her little waist and kissed her.

She giggled in our kiss but broke it and handed me a condom from a fresh pack in her purse. "Now," she said. "Or no way."

"Now" sounded really good.

Marcie was an amazing lover, even the first time. Before we slept, I remember holding her in my lap as I sat "Indian-style" on the bed in a gently rocking straddle as we talked and kissed playfully, somewhere between an afterglow and another go around.

"So now we have to slow down and get to know more about each other," she said. "I don't completely trust you, I just want you to know that."

I nodded and kissed her lips, smiled at her. "Okay, we'll do that."

She bit her lip and shuddered a little, then smiled at me, "But that doesn't mean we stop or anything. That just means there are strings attached, mister."

I nodded, looking up at her with what had to be a pretty sated, stupid, dopey smile. "Uh huh."

She laughed a little and kissed my neck, then set her elbows on my shoulders and nuzzled me. "Oh, my god, this is so fast."

I whispered in her ear, "No, it's ten o'clock. I think we're taking out time."

She laughed and kissed me, and sometime later that night we went to sleep in a tight, comforting spoon. I remember waking up to the smell of her skin, and sex, and golden, dust-stained rays of sun over the building's eastern side.

I kissed her neck and she slid against me. I remember feeling, secretly, that I was in love already, and I remember feeling great comfort in her little studio, tucked away together.


I am grateful that it was not the last time, but the first of many mornings like that, and I am pained that I wake and look for her still, until my mind remembers and my heart, and eyes, burn yet again.

The witch tree

Marcie and I used to often discuss the strange plants and animals that adorn our home and its vicinity in Normal Heights. One element of our landscaping which is a constant source of change and seems permanently out of tune with nature is a tree in our back yard which I take for a flowering dogwood.

Today, as I tried to get outside for some air (bad idea... the air tastes like a cloud of exhaust and made me choke), I noticed Seamus staring into the tree. Mind you, this tree has hosted hawks with fresh pigeons in their claws as they ate them, an owl, hummingbird colonies and even a woodpecker.

Even without those odd visitors, an early lesson in the environs here usually means I take note of Seamus taking interest.

I saw nothing, but then I realized he was watching the petals of the little white flowers on the tree as they drifted down onto the ground. I took a "Seamus' eye view" picture for you:

The cat's eye view of a dogwood

Marcie and I dubbed this tree the "witch tree" because of the creepy things that have fallen out of it over the years we lived here together. The tree, firstly, has a knack for dropping very well-aimed leaves down your shirt, usually the back of the shirt, in fact. It constantly sheds.

The leaves would not be bad, unless you knew what lived in the tree. The tree hosts a multispecies community of spiders. No, the tree is infested with spiders. I am not saying they are social spiders, but they seem to have plenty to eat as they multiply and winter over in the thing.

I can likely be fogiven for thinking, at first, that this lovely 12" construct was a webbed-up bat:

A grim cocoon

That thought, of a small mammal webbed up in that mass of tightly-woven but chaotic webbing, may be macabre, but it is wholly fictional, obviously. However, what is not fictional is that, in the many, many webbed clusters like this in the tree, one runs a good chance of finding black widows.

How do I know? Why, I am glad you asked.

The tree, when we moved in, was one giant nasty collection of leaves in webbing. When one day I decided to water our hanging plant, Marcie asked me to knock some of the webs down and clean the tree up a bit. Bad idea.

As I gleefully sprayed down the nasty chunks of dead leaves and branches, adding them to the growing pile under the tree, something caught my eye. A jet black, fat, lurching body clambered over the leaves from a soggy cluster of gummy detritus. I spray it and the round, clumsy thing flipped over for a moment. A big red hourglass stared back.

Squish. Buh-bye. Black widows are not fun. I don't like small animals which can kill, spider or not, useful or not. I kept working but then saw another. Squish. Then two more, smaller ones, and an immature juvenile whose more colorful pattern I recognized from an article on the latrodectus morphology. Squish-squishity-splorp.

There were other spiders, not all of them black widows, the bigger of which I sprayed away from me, the smaller of which I ignored. I could not believe how many of the widows there were, however, especially in a tree. I believed them to be more interested in being more hidden and near moisture and darkness.

I was rolling up the hose when I noted a black, shiny body nestled between my shoelaces, legs drawn in tight. I sprayed it off carefully and swear it tried to bite me as I did. Squish.

As if this entire experience was not getting unnerving, Marcie chose that time to retrieve some laundry. As she walked out and the occasional branch of deadness and spider fell from the weight of the water, a bag of black plastic fell and plopped onto the ground, scaring her and me both.

It was shaped like a little human.

Now, our neighbors at the time had children who loved to throw each others' toys onto our roof. In retrospect, I had no reason to think it was a baby, except for the meaty, wet splat the bagged form made. In other words, it had me thinking.

"Honey, go inside," I said.

She looked at it and then at me. "Just throw it away, honey." she said. "It's junk."

I checked it anyways. It was a cheap doll with a soft middle, covered in mud and obviously having gathered a lot of leaves. I dropped it back in the bag and went to toss it in the trash, when my grip set off a little wheezing cry.

"Maaaaaamaaa," it said.

I paused and got a shudder down my spine, then dumped it. As if did, I shook off a spider whose thick web was making it hard to shake, stomping it as it finally landed on the ground. Squish.

It was a fat, brown, "golden garden spider." But I was done with the creepy mess. I have never sprayed that tree out since, and likely never will. But Marcie decided that the tree would be called the "Witch tree."

"It looks like a tree a witch would fly out of on her broom," she said. "It's totally creepy, honey."

Or perhaps a bunch of spiders and a soggy, infested baby doll could fall out and cry for mama.

But that tree is just one of many little wild features and woodland creatures our abode sports. I will sprinkle in our experiences in that realm as we go along.

In fact, the white flowers mean that it is almost time for the skunks and possums to make their appearance and move in under the house. That's a lot more fun than spiders, by far. And a lot more story, too.

Home sick

So, I am home sick AGAIN. I started coughing late last night and the hacking just did not stop. I slept three hours and woke with my voice going out, almost late for work, with a massive headache, the pain of which went from my sinuses to the back of my neck. I hate the polluted, Santa Ana-blasted Southern California deathscape we call the environment, I really do.

I seem to have dried out, but I wake up every morning clogged, drain by noon, then just cough and try to stay hydrated. That is hard to do at a school district office where the heat is on even if the building is warm enough for reasonable people. It just dries me out.

I hope I wake up in passable form tomorrow. We are supposed teach a grant writing class at a school. I love that part of my job, actually. We'll see.

This is not today's post, but yesterday's needs a makeup, so I will post later (maybe twice). I'm a tired, sleepy guy right now. I wish Marcie was here to take care of me. She was always good at making the sympathetic noises I needed to hear when I was ill, whether asked to or not.

*Sigh* *COUGH!*

Chicken Fettucine Alfredo Marcelina

I prepared Marcie her meal with some consideration which you may not find common in a recipe of this type. She told me she liked shrimp, so I cooked her some and added it in. She liked pine nuts, so I integrated those in a couple of ways, too. Finally, I did not use light cream but half and half (with a little added marscapone).

Chicken Fettucine Alfredo (plus shrimp)

1/4 lb shrimp, cooked as detailed below
1/2 lb fettucine, cooked al dente
2 tbsp marscapone (optional)
2 boneless chicken breasts, cooked and cubed
half & half (light cream is okay, too)
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese, OR Parmesan mixed with Pecorino Romano
1 egg yolk (you don't need all of it)
1/4 stick of butter


Alfredo Sauce: Take a handful of pine nuts and roast them lightly in a dry pan, then set them into a steel bowl. Mash them into a paste with a spoon while still warm. Melt butter in a small saucepan. Put half & half in, add the yolk. Beat until well-mixed. Add Parmesan cheese, reserving some for later, and heat gently, adding a tablespoon or two of marscapone, stirring it all until it melts into a thickish liquid.

Do not boil or bubble the sauce, if you can avoid it. Heat it until it steams a bit.

To cook the shrimp, clean them (if necessary) and toss them into a pan with a good olive oil (say, McEvoy Ranch?) and cook them until they are opaque and firm, adding a squeeze of lemon juice and some pepper to taste.

Toss chicken, noodles and shrimp. You can serve it sprinkled with the extra Parmesan or Parmesan/Romano mix, or step it up a little by broiling it for a few minutes in a casserole dish. Sprinkle the rest of the pine nuts (lightly roasted while you broil the dish) around the plate as a tasty garnish, with a leaf or two of basil to boot.

The recipe above, with all of the richest and most delicious additions, are what I fed Marcie. I recommend adding a wonderful greens salad with tomato and crumbled Gorgonzola and a balsamic vinaigrette.

Wine... Must. Have. Wine. Red is okay, as Marcie demanded that with hers, but a good Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc is good, too.

Chasing Marcie

When Marcie and I first met, at a San Diego City College speech class, there were a lot of obstacles to overcome for us to be a couple. I was certainly smitten by her red hair and saucy, flirty way of engaging me, but I was also eying a few other girls. She had other suitors, too.

Internally, I was not interested in pairing off right away as college just began. I had determined that, with a love life built of long relationships and no really short affairs to speak of, college should be a long string of trysts. Yeah, right.

Our first date was to Café Chabalaba, a 1990s "San Diego is the next Seattle" mini-venue of some fame. Owner Cristina let me and my pal Mark Veno run (read: hold) the door for a parade of quality shows.

Marcie and I had some coffee and a long conversation. Effectively, this conversation ended my dream of a parade of little hussies weaving a thread of lusty debauch through my college education.

"I like going out to eat once in a while, but I really like to cook for myself," she said after shooting down an invitation to Mr. A's.

"Oh?" I asked. "I like to cook, too. Maybe I could cook for you sometime and you can tell me how I did."

She rolled her eyes and looked up into the corner of the café, then rolled them back down at me. "You cook, huh? Yeaaah, right."

"What do you mean, 'yeah right'?" I asked. "I cook. I have cooked for myself for years, occasionally for other people, and I am pretty good at it, too."

Marcie looked at me intently and played with the coffee cup in front of her. She did not believe me, and she did not seem too impressed.

"I'll prove it to you," I said. "Let me cook for you, and you'll see."

"What would you cook?" she asked, as if she would catch me in a lie, or unprepared.

No such luck.

"Chicken fettuccine Alfredo, from scratch," I said. "No mix, no sauce, I make it from scratch."

She smiled and looked at the cup again. "But you live in a hotel downtown. Where are you going to cook this meal for me?"

The C Street Inn had no kitchen, but I decided to fib a little and see where she went with this. I could always use another kitchen.

"We have a kitchen at the hotel," I said. "Do you think I eat at La Gran Tapa every night?"

"Well, I don't want to eat at your hotel room," she said. "We are going to have to do this some other way."

"Oh, so you want me to cook for you?" I asked.

She smiled and then narrowed her eyes and watched me closely. That gotcha look again... again mislaid.

"Are you chickening out? Are you lying to me?" she asked, noting I shook my head. "Because if you are, we are not going out again. You can cook for me next week, Tuesday, my day off. You can use my kitchen and you have to clean it up afterward."

"Cool. You got a deal and a meal," I said. "Wine?"

"You're the cook, or so you say, so you choose," she said. "And don't be thinking that you can fake it. My friend's mom taught me to cook and she was from an Italian family. It had better be for real, mister."

I met her later that week outside the Museum of Man for crackers and cheese with Madame Harms, a friend of mine at City and her professor of French.

Marcie and another girl, a German who I learned later Marcie simply called "Eurotrash," had been charged with bringing wine. Marcie had brought three bottles, two reds and a white, and ET brought one, with a screw cap. Port, actually. Bad Port.

We drank and snacked as the sun slid low and Madame Harms came and sat with us. She was cute, in a middle-aged-but-sassy way, and she teased us, a bit drunk.

"You two lovers should go make a mess somewhere pleasant," she said, poking me on the nose.

Marcie let out her unbridled joy. It was the first time I had heard it. It was abrupt and sharp, then wound down melodiously as she laughed and tried to speak through it. I only speak a little French, but I deciphered what she asked.

"Madame Harms êtes vous en état d'ébriété?" she asked.

"Oui, Marcie, oui," Madame Harms slurred cheerfully. "Je vous remercie beaucoup pour le vin."

Marcie squinted and I said, "She said wine and thanks in there."

Madame Harms looked at me oddly. "I did not," she indignantly proclaimed. "I said 'I thank you for the wine,' and... yes, I guess I did. But not like that, silly boy. Not in little pieces like that."

With that she touched Marcie's nose, gave her a hug, then me, and rose unsteadily, our bottle rising with her.

"No more for you," she said. "You should go make your mess now."

I smiled at Marcie, but she rolled her eyes.

"I don't know what you're thinking, mister, but I am going home and studying," she said. "I work early tomorrow"

"May I walk you home?" I asked.

"I only live a few blocks away," she said. "I'll be fine."

"I have to see where you live if I am going to cook for you Tuesday," I said, smiling. "Besides, it doesn't take even one block to get robbed, right? And you have to go through the west side of the park."

West Balboa Park was a nightmare of crackheads and homeless people, gay prostitutes and ornery drunks at night. From dusk until dawn, the crime rate rose dramatically. A few years earlier, a man had been stabbed to death on the bridge, an Old Globe Actor.

"Oh, fine, pushy boy," she said, packing her things. "You can walk me to my building, but you cannot come up."

I got her home and we saw not one threat, which she was careful to point out as we walked. "I live here, she said. "I know where I am, so don't be thinking you're the man or something just because I let you walk me home."

"Oh, I won't," I said. "But I will think I must be because you let me even though you don't need me to."

She turned and looked at me as if to say "Oh really?" she did not comment, but handed me her bags. "You can be the mule, at least, since I don't need a bodyguard."

I carried her bags and she slipped her arm around mine and kissed me on the cheek. It was our first lip contact. I was suddenly high. She stopped me on Kalmia.

"I live here," she said. "Thank you for walking me home, and thank you for coming to the park tonight."

I waited as she took her bags and when she went to walk away, I touched her elbow gently. "Thank you for the kiss," I said quietly, my ears turning red.

She tilted her head down and looked up at me askance as if to say "Oh, come ON."

So I did, and I slipped my arms around her waist and pulled her into me for a kiss. At first, she put her hands against my chest as if to push me away. But they slid up over my shoulder and around my neck. We kissed until one of her neighbors chimed in.

"Yow! You go, Marcie!" a woman I would later learn was Marcie's amphetamine-driven lesbian property manager, and who actually was not much for men touching Marcie. It broke the kiss well enough.

"I'll see you Tuesday in class," she said. "Don't call me Saturday, I have to study for my English final and i have to go to my parents on Sunday."

Tuesday took forever to come and she did not answer the phone Monday. I remember the number, 338-8063. I must have dialed it fifty times, hanging up at the third ring.

I would find out later that Joey, her other suitor, had struck himself out sometime Saturday with a reference to her joining his gym while they ate at Golden Dragon. I did not learn that until months later, though.

When Tuesday did come, I tossed her notes in class the whole time, which I had prepared the night before. Every time our teacher turned away, another landed on her desk. She was mortified, and the whole class saw it.

She could not have known that Ken, our instructor, was in on the whole thing. He and I had a good rapport. I learned he started a theater company in Seattle after that semester. It was a loss for City. Mr. Norton was good to the shy speakers.

"You gonna eeeeeat," I remember one note said. The rest were variations on the theme. "You gonna get yo' grub on," "I feel like chicken tonight," was perhaps the cheesiest.

"Stop it!" she mouthed quietly, biting her lower lip and covering her eyes... but she read each one and smiled, then tucked them in her purse, shaking her head, red-faced.

The last one simply said. "Class is over. I have to go pick up the groceries. See you at 4:00 sharp."

I was gone before she was done reading it.

The meal went perfectly, but she admitted that it was too much for her. Far too rich for the time of day, she said, but delicious.

She did not like the expensive white wine I brought, but I had also picked up some Kendall Jackson Cabernet Sauvignon, which she drank two glasses of. We ended up making out for a couple of hours.

"You can stay tonight, but I have to get to sleep," she said. "And you have to shower. You can sleep on the couch."

I did, wearing her far too small robe and no covers in the September heat. When I woke up the next morning I brushed my teeth with a brush she gave me and slipped on my grubby clothes. She stopped me as I gathered my things and gave me a long kiss.

"I'll see you tomorrow at school," she whispered. "I had a lovely time and I believe you can cook very well. I will cook for you next time."

I enjoyed the feel of her body against me a little more than I could hide, so I held onto her a bit when she went to let me go. She giggled knowingly in my ear.

"Something wrong?" she asked.

I simply answered her with a kiss and slapped her ass, which she giggled at, her teeth against mine, our mouths open. I made my exit with my jacket around my waist, as a practical consideration.

But Marcie had apparently not had to wait until the morning to get her measure of me.




Tomorrow, I will post the recipe for the Alfredo sauce I used. I will continue this story of our early romance as well, but the next post will be somewhat adult in nature. You are warned.

To my wonderfully supportive coworker

To my generous and kind coworker,

You have not told me your name, and I understand that. Whatever it is and whoever you are, I wanted to thank you with a special post.

You have sent me cards and posted comments, and now you have sent flowers. I am deeply touched. I received it today, and I thank you for your prayers and thoughts as well as the wonderful tulips. Marcie would have loved them.

So that you know, since I cannot tell you in person, it has been difficult, but the burden has been lightened by the people who surround me at work and in my personal life, all of whom have been very good to me and extremely supportive. That means you, too, of course. I am floored by your patronage and thoughtfulness.

I will have the tulips on my desk at work, as they seem ill-suited to my porch, but I had to bring them home and put them among my little arrangement of plants. Here they are, comfy and surrounded but highlighted, not obscured, by their duller peers:



And here they are in a closeup for the rest of you:



Thank you to all of my coworkers, friends, family and readers. You have all been wonderful and I hope that I can return that in some small way through this and other endeavors I intend to share with you all.

Good night,

F.

The secret signal

Marcie and I were, to the day that she suddenly was knocked down and unable to walk, hopeful of her recovery. Certainly, her condition was not good, her setbacks disheartening and her episodes frightening.

But her brain metastases had been shrinking, the cancer had disappeared from other parts of her body, and there was a glimmer of hope. There was also more than a touch of desperate, stubborn and fierce determination from us both. We were alike that way.

But it did not mean we avoided preparing. We did what we could in case she did die, and we let other things that were too hard simply go.

But one night, up in Julian, when Marcie's tired legs had given out in a restaurant and she had been tucked in at the little bed and breakfast we had taken a break at, we talked of what would come after.

It was so difficult a weekend that I journaled it in my reporter's notebook, especially her touching words.

"I don't know what comes after you die," she said. "Maybe nothing, maybe Hell or Heaven, or maybe something more pagan. Maybe we're reincarnated."

She squeezed my hand and I listened, the dark making my tears invisible but my gulps and breathing telling on me.

"I hope there is something after," she said.

I did not know what to say. I have no answers. Faith and belief are not knowledge and I hold more in doubt than I do either of those. But I did think of something to say.

"So if I die first," I said. "I'll send a sign so that you know there is something and I am there."

She squeezed my hand and this time her own breathing gave her away. It was ridiculous, but she understood I wanted her to live, outlive me, or simply not to die without me. I had said it before, long before she was sick

We clung together and let the sadness pass through us. She finally spoke after she cleared her nose, and she tweaked the conversation.

"How should we signal each other?" she asked, squeezing my hand again and sliding herself back into me in a close spoon.

I gulped but maintained and I said, trying to break the tension, "Maybe email?"

She laughed her tired, chemo-strained laugh and rasped "No, honey, seriously. What will our signal be?"

I considered it for a long time. I am a romantic, and she was to a degree as romantic as I was. But both of us were skeptics of most things supernatural and intangible.

Except for ghosts.

Both of us firmly believed in hauntings after a strange sequence of events at our apartment in downtown San Diego. At first, the shower curtain whipped open in front of Marcie while I was showering, both my hands in my hair, covered in shampoo.

I had thought to admonish her, but she was in the hallway looking bewildered. I put on my dirty clothes and we stayed outside for a few minutes until we decided we were being impractical. I must have brushed it open with an elbow.

The next day, during an argument in the kitchen, the stove fell open and we both watched the cookie tray rattle out. We reasoned that away as well. And we reasoned away a remote sliding across the table and onto the floor, and the closet doors opening and cabinets closing.

We admitted once we moved to Humboldt that the place had been haunted.

"No whipping open the curtain to the shower, okay?" I said.

She "hmm'd" and sighed. "I will move something and you will know it is me moving it."

"Really?" I asked. "How about trying to talk to each other? Can we do that?"

"Yes, honey," she said. "I talk to my friend from New York who committed suicide once in a while in my dreams, but that's not easy to tell if it's real or not."

I pondered this, and my dream about my old cat Garfield Siamese, who had popped in to say hi a few times in my own dreams, my dead relatives and their appearances. They all seemed so real. But it was hard to tell.

"Well," I said, tugging on her hip a little. "I won't care if I know it's real or not, you'll be required to resume wifely duties if you visit my twisted dreams."

She laughed at first, but I had miscalculated and the unintended reminder of her state and inability to engage me in our heretofore most bonding act made her cry. I soothed her.

"I will send you my poems in email," I said. "And you won't be able to tell, because if I know I am dying, I will set them up to come on certain days."

"You'll never have to do that for me, honey," she said. "I wish I knew how to do that for you."

We went quiet and I stroked her. She slept the sleep of the exhausted long before I could close my eyes in the dark of our mountain retreat. When we woke, she brought the subject up once more.

"When I die, I will haunt you until you know there is something to look forward to," she said. "If I don't, then I will see you in your dreams and I know that will never be the same, but it's something."

I hugged her and I loaded her into the car. We took the long way home. As we wound our way through the hills, I considered a sharp turn or two gloomily. I pulled over after I took one of several far too quickly.

She had not commented as I had sped through them, but when I pulled over, she did.

"Honey," she said, taking my hand and sobbing. "I know you want to be with me. But you have to live how you are supposed to or it might not happen."

I held her hand and closed my eyes, squeezing the tears from them for a second. "I wasn't trying to kill us, I was just thinking 'what if,' and I guess I wasn't paying much attention."

She shook her head and she mouthed, "I love you" silently. "Be careful," she croaked.

When we got home and I helped her into the house, she laid down and watched me from the couch as I carried in our things. She patted the seat next to her when I closed the door. I sat.

"You are my brave man, and I already know you love me and will be just devastated without me," she said. "But you have to live even if I don't, because you are closer to me than anyone and I want you to be happy again someday."

I could not hold back my tears. I did not want to consider life without her, even if I had accepted she could die, the aftermath was such an enormity that I wondered (and still do) whether I could carry it at all.

"You are a rare man with a pure soul," she said, breaking my heart with each word. "You can't hide anything, you just say what you have to and share what you have in your heart. It's a precious thing, really."

"You took so long to open up, and I can't have you just shut down again over this, because I would feel terrible," she said. "You can't just clam up and hide yourself, because I want someone else to experience you, just how you are now, because I think I helped you get this way again."

We spent the afternoon on the couch, snoozing under a blanket and waking for little snacks, until I helped her into the shower and then to the bed.

And so, last night, as I dreamed, I went to a computer and logged into my email account. I watched the messages load and clicked on one that read "I love you, honey."

I sobbed in my sleep as I read a beautiful poem I cannot recreate, not typed but written on my screen in her hand, and I pondered how she had figured out sending timed emails, or who she had scan and email them, because I forgot I was asleep.

And when I awoke in the middle of the early morning and walked into the bathroom, my foot caught a mesh bag that I had put off to the side, far out of my path, but somehow in it now.

I stopped and put it back, and wondered how it had stood up in its own, but reasoned Seamus was to blame. But I did stop as I returned and felt a chill down my spine, and I asked, gently "Baby?"

And though I received no answer, I am still haunted beyond my skepticism, and this is signal enough.

The hiatus is over

So much for a break.

I am still sick. I apparently ate some rye that had developed penicillium mold of a type that caused an allergic reaction. I have been fevered but not infectious, and my workload has been heavy. I am down sick, but not out, and I am yet productive.

Yes, that's right. I went to work sick (mostly to make sure a couple of projects did not founder), though I took Tuesday to rest.

The hiatus is over because I am being bombarded by Marcie moment dreams. One of those I have shared with a friend who had a cameo in it and should share with another who was also in the dream. If they are okay with it, I will post that one, though it was a fever dream, and a very odd one at that. I remember it vividly.

The other dream concerns our secret signal, though I admit that dreaming the secret signal to indicate life after death is not exactly the strongest of proofs. Nonetheless, I had a dream in which Marcie sent our prearranged secret signal, and I will share it tonight.

Caveats in place, of course.

Until then, my break at work ends and I must go. Check in later...

F.

Possible hiatus

I am pretty ill at the moment and may need to take a break from blogging and life in general to deal with it. Then again, maybe being sick will inspire more nostalgia and the time to think will override the fevered state of my mind. We'll see.

A new blogger calls

Everyone say hello to Lana Banana, a blogger who popped in to say hello and show a little support. She's a teacher, journalism adviser (I'd love to use the "o" but the AP says, "no") and blogger from LaLa (LA) land.

The perfect life game

Marcie was a big fan of board games. Long before I met her, she was a big fan of Life, Payday, Monopoly and Scrabble. But her favorite game was one I called, "Perfect Life," and it was played on the template of our hopes.

There was no board, just the afterglow of some meal or thrill in the bedroom or in the car. Something to set the mood. Just as a nice rainy day in her youth might bring on a long session of spinning and moving plastic with her brother, a quiet, happy moment could sometimes tease out Marcie's playful, speculative side with me.

Usually such little sessions were preceded by her plopping into a seat on the couch as I read. Either under the pretense of reading our New Yorker, or after some time silently spent flipping through her movie book or the listings for her favorite theaters, she would push her feet into my lap.

Sometimes she put them under the book or magazine I read, sometimes pushing the item against my chest so that I made space. It didn't matter. I always surrendered, if sometimes with a touch of exasperation.

"Yes, my love?" I would ask, my stock indication that I was resigned to sating her desire for attention, or a favor, a massage, or any number of wants. One never could tell when Marcie's feet were involved. It could go anywhere from the feet.

"If you could have any house you wanted, what would it look like?" she usually asked.

Our first time having this conversation, two days before her birthday, elicited the grandiose response of a young man who thought law school and an MBA with an International Business focus might be a ticket to riches.

"It will look like a castle," I said. "It will have at least one drum tower, and it will be built with an open courtyard in the middle. The inside will be all wood, dark or slightly burned, with textured wallpaper in the narrow halls. Every corner will have a room, a dining room, a library, a music and dance room and a guest quarters, with an extra one in the tower. At the back will be a kind of keep, added onto the middle of the curtain wall, which will house the master bedroom, with French doors to the courtyard and a spiral stair to the second floor."

I remember she rolled her eyes, so I asked her, abit miffed, "If you could have a house built to your tastes, what would it look like?" I asked.

She looked around at her humble studio at Casa Arleda and smiled, "It would look like this," she said. "But it would be bigger and it would have a yard big enough for whatever animals I decided I wanted, and it would be screened from the street, but it would be near downtown or Hillcrest."

The next day, we toured the area and looked at the houses. She found one or two she liked, but thefact that she could see them detracted from their appeal in her eyes.

She asked every year, but rarely, in retrospect, more often than that.

The descriptions changed as we grew, and grew up, together. My homes became more modest, overgrown cocoons with vines and moving water around them, shelters from a place not kind to either of us, elaborate domestic shields against a callous and callow California outside our sanctum.

"What kind of house do you want us to have?" she asked me the year I married her. The message was clear. We no longer built for ourselves. This was for us now.

They were built in the city to make sure Marcie would be there, as she purported to hate the country. Now they incorporated more Victorian elements like window settees and complex inside woodwork. Now they had yards for animals we both wanted. Now we could speak for each other, because we had reached accommodation on accommodations.

Then, a bit over a year ago, as she suffered through her chemotherapy, she put her tired little feet in my hands and asked me a new question.

"What would the perfect house be like for you?" she asked, her eyes a little glazed from pain and exhaustion. I began rubbing her feet and gulped. I carefully avoided her cracked heels and little abrasions where skin had torn from being worn too thin.

I smiled and sighed, and she slapped her hand on the couch impatiently, "Honey, tell me before I fall asleep. I am tired and I don't feel good."

"It would always be warm and never too dry," I whispered hoarsely. "Every wall there would have ramps and resting spots for kitties, and every room would have a climber. There would be library with a chaise lounge for you and a big easy chair for me."

As she squinted and covered her eyes, I rubbed her feet and gulped. "I would let you decorate it, because you always do that so well. It would have a basement for my junk and a courtyard for your plants and a pool, and ivy would grow over it and give us a canopy so we could be outside without the sun."

I remember pushing her foot aside and sliding in next to her, burying her head in my shoulder and under my neck as I cuddled her and she shook.

"I can't think of a perfect home, or even one I could stand to live in for very long, without you and your love there to keep me happy," I said. "But any home we have together is perfect enough."

I covered her with blankets and held her for a long time, long past the point at which she fell asleep, wide awake, petting Seamus as he integrated himself into our snuggle. When she woke and I carried her into bed and tucked her in, I went too, despite the early afternoon hour.

She never asked me again. But because she was so ill around her birthday, and the memories of birthday seasons past played in my mind at her bedside in a Poway hospital, I thought of what I would say.

I believe that she would have asked had she not been knocked down so hard by the medical misstep by hospice. So I will answer her here and now, and hope she understands the lateness of it all.

My dear wife, my perfect home would be whatever place you have prepared for us. Festoon it with your trifles and decorate it with your tastes and interests, shape it however it will please you most. Construct a paradise to lure me, no matter my travels and my future here, no matter who or what consoles me in time.

Make for me, if you can, your perfect place, and I am sure that I will recognize it as the place I need to be when I come to it.

But if such a place is not to be, or cannot be, or cannot be shared when I pass, then there is no perfect place to worry about, and the mercy of oblivion is shelter enough.

Either way, I despair that no place seems balm enough to soothe me in your absence. I miss very badly our favorite, playful, loving game and the feel of your skin as I told you my dreams.

F.