time

Time. Gary Blum died recently. There’s a memorial for him this weekend in a park. I barely recognize something about his face. Like maybe I’ve seen him before. But I think it might just be death. I think I might be seeing that. But his head is blurry and seems unstable. In the photo. It’s like something is shaking loose. In a coffee shop. It’s like something is shaking loose in a coffee shop. Him sitting there. Gary. With his back to some dark cherry wood, feeling sick, just a little, feeling like he’s floating and nothing too dramatic. Not too invested in any of it and trying to avoid too much connection because it might tighten his chest painful. And he doesn’t read his book, but lays his palm down on its cover to feel it. He doesn’t want to rush it and for him time seems especially slow now. He relishes in it and stares through the café window as a car drives by backwards down the street. He hopes he’s got time moving that slowly, but then sees a pale young man in a grey t-shirt, with a shaved head, walking in the same direction as the car. Not backwards. So then he has to imagine the car’s parking space and the parallel parking up against a meter flashing red, wanting change, and so time gets to speed up. As much as he wanted otherwise. He presses the bones of his spine hard against the dark wood, the curve of his posture bows humbly. The afternoon is broken. He feels its cracking in the movement of the air around his blurry face. The lighting from above settles like an oven glow on his forehead, warm. A man with a bag slung over his shoulder stops above him, looking down at Gary with sympathy, and they exchange words that have nothing to do with what really matters - their hug. The man bends down to cradle Gary in his arms, so softly they don’t seem to be touching at all, and Gary handles the man’s torso, his back and sides, like a trembling glass cloud, carefully, as if he knows fragility. What does he know? A man in a bright blue and black plaid shirt, with enormous tanned calves, stops at the coffee prep counter. It’s where you get your cream or honey or lids and sleeves, and stirring his coffee to a lighter brown, lighter than the color of his skin, he sees Gary’s photo, framed blood red, sitting on the ledge of the window to the right of the cream or honey or lids and sleeves, and he pauses to lean in closely, to read about the memorial, to look into Gary’s face familiarly. Gary’s head is turned just enough to ask that you not look at him any longer and the man with the dark calves and a blue stirring stick hanging out of his lightly baked face complies and will likely think little of Gary again until the following morning. Gary is indifferent and turns his head in the earth somewhere or in his lovely ashes, his lonely ashes. And I think about my mom and how she’s still clinging to the rocks at Point Reyes. Perhaps. It’s been six years in November. Thanksgiving. And I still wonder how to capture it all and think how strange it is that my most common reoccurring remembering of my mom is those last days of her life. How do I honor her, remembering her falling backwards when she stood out of my car and I reprimanded her for not letting me help her, like a child, her apology, so tired and weak… the pile of her collapse on the sidewalk outside her apartment, embarrassed, offering excuses to a neighbor while my sister and I struggle to help her to her feet… her dark room while we eat turkey and mashed and cranberry… her lying in the hospital bed going away, hearing radio sounds, confused, aching, ice in my fingers on her lips, rubbing her legs and I lean over her to shed my love… and I lean over her to shed my love…