Laurustina

… an unexpected bag of flour and a package of yeast, in case you didn’t know.

… on trying to remember how it feels to be OK.

I had lunch with my friend Shie last week. After lunch, we sat out on the porch and talked about this and that and whatnots. Shie’s best friend died suddenly, just a couple of months after Ash did, and that connection helped bridge the awkward conversational gap, which I’ve become accustomed to, the one where people hem and haw and I hum a lot and no one seems to know what to say.

“You know what I remembered today?” Shie said, “Giving her (Ashlie) my boobs.”

I cannot tell you how surprising and refreshing and soothing it was to have her say such a thing so casually and I laughed out loud. Because yes, as the parents of a dead child, I know that i am now scary to most people, and as the parent of a complicated dead child, i suspect that i am sometimes downright terrifying. And the more I try to explain the best way to bridge this awkwardness, the more I realize that I often don’t know it until I hear it.

The first bit, I’ve said before, which is that the worst thing people can do is to  not not say her name. I think this weird thing happens, where people completely avoid mentioning her because they think its too sensitive a subject, that if someone  mentions her, I will fall apart and drown them in my grief. Its not true.

In fact, for the next ten minutes, after Shie brought up her falsies (the in-lieu-of-a-bra-stick-on kind) we laughed and I recounted a particular afternoon when Iggy escaped into the backyard with one of them and ran in circles around our then-landlord and his kids, begging them to play tug of war, while Ash and I tried to sneak up on him and extricate the flesh-colored piece of gel-stuff from his mouth before anyone noticed.

Go ahead. Its ok to laugh. We laughed. Me and Ash on the day it happened, and then me and Shie, last week as we talked about it.  And then, we rambled off on some other subject, the road of which had been paved with a casual, comfortable understanding.

What I mean to say here is that what makes me saddest is when people avoid me completely rather than risk offending or hurting me or accidentally releasing some overwhelming ocean of emotion. I don’t want you to be  afraid of mentioning some silly memory or asking an honest question. I don’t enjoy those awkward, guilt-ridden moments when I run into someone who has been avoiding me and they admit (or don’t) that they would have called or stopped by, except that they didn’t know what to say.

Say something. Say anything.

I still like great books and zombie movies, old blues singers, spicy food and stiff drinks. I still curse like a sailor and believe in the Loch Ness Monster. I still sometimes laugh so hard it makes me cry. I am admittedly not the same person that I was two years ago, but I am also not as fragile or scary or as foreign as you might think.

That’s all.

For now.

I am eating leftover potato & pea samosas for lunch today and feeling rather smug about them.  After six weeks of fretting over the perfect samosa wrapper, (not philo dough, not pastry puffs, not egg roll wraps … so many NOTS, i’ve even forgot a few) I finally broke down two days ago and asked the woman behind the counter at Spice of India, what might work.

Now asking the woman behind the counter about  ANYTHING at all issomething I would have normally been too intimidated to do. In fact, even going into the little Indian market is something I spent most of my life being too intimidated to do until my friend Susanne The Scot scoffed at me.

“What do you think they’re going to do? Yell at you for daring to spend your money in their store?”

Well maybe.

The truth is, I grew up in a way that left me half expecting that if I dared to go explore the little ethnic markets tucked here and there around town, that someone was going to think or say or even shout, “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!”. And yes, there’s a whole other tangent I could go off on here, but let’s save my personal cultural ignorance essay for another day, because I really want to get back to these samosas.

So I ask the woman behind the counter for her suggestions, and I tell her what I’ve tried and she nods and cuts me off with a wave of her hand, and I’m thinking that she’s going to direct me down one of the crowded little aisles to some secret stash of samosa wrappers, but instead she says this:

“Mexican tortillas, the thin flour ones. You cut them in half, and use the flour with water glue, you know about the glue, right?” I nod. ”And then you make the cone and close the top.”

She’s gesturing, folding an imaginary samosa made from an imaginary tortilla, sealed with her imaginary flour paste. And I’m getting all excited because I know how to make the cone and how you close the top with your thumbs and then pinch out to make the perfect triangles, and oh oh oh, I actually have flour tortillas at home and seriously, who woulda thunk it?

“And they fry up right?”

“Yes, just right.”

I try to keep myself from clapping with glee as she’s ringing up my butter chicken sauce and minty chutney and I can hardly wait to get home, to cut up some tortillas and make the cone and shove in the filling and glue ‘em up and drop ‘em in the fryer and see if it works.

It works. And it makes me laugh, because all that time that I was running all over town and the internets and compiling my list of things that didn’t work, for that whole six weeks, I had the perfect samosa wrappers sitting right there in my fridge and it never once occurred to me to use them because what serious maker of Indian food would use a Mexican flour tortilla to wrap their appetizers in?

Now maybe, its time for that cultural ignorance essay.

When my uncle died unexpectedly a few years back, his wife and a nephew stayed up late the night before the memorial, burning a CD of some of his favorite songs to play before and after the service. In the rush of the next day, however, the CD got forgotten and their labor of love got left behind. A couple of years later, I found myself making this mental list of songs I would want someone to think to play if I was the one who’d made my early exit.

I was still working on the list when Ash died, and some of the songs I see on here now have become hers in my mind.  (In particular the Hans Zimmer, the Dylan and the Pink Floyd). Even now, I shy away from all Pink Floyd. This post has been sitting in my draft box for nearly two years now, except for the last couple of sentences. I am sick of looking at it, feeling the horror that comes with the realization that i was worrying about the music for my own memorial, not knowing that Ash would make her escape before i did, and the guilt, of course, of even considering it “my escape” in the first place. Anyway, without fanfare, or further self-flagellation, i’ll post what was once intended to be my eulogy mix, back when the idea of a memorial CD was theory rather than reality.

• I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free – Nina Simone
• The Happy Land – Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
• Ave Maria – Aaron Neville
• Latter Days – Over The Rhine
• Scarborough Faire/Canticle – Simon and Garfunkle
• You Belong to Me – Bob Dylan
• Nitemare Hippie Girl – Beck
• Muhammed My Friend – Tori Amos
• It is Well With My Soul – Mahalia Jackson
• Under the Milky Way – The Church
• House of the Rising Sun – Lester Norton’s (by personal request) cover
• If You See Her, Say Hello – Bob Dylan
• Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
• Rivers of Babylon – Sublime
• Lithium – Nirvana
• Variations on a Theme from Paganini – Rachmananov
• Leonard Cohen’s “If It Be Your Will” – Antony Haggerty’s cover
• You’re So Cool – Hans Zimmer

So there it is.

and halfway through, you realize that there is no way you can send what you’ve just written to the person you were writing it to.  You start to hit delete and then you look at it, like six or seven paragraphs, and you don’t want to just toss it because  - oh hell, i don’t know why – maybe because its the first six or seven paragraphs you’ve been able to string together in weeks, or because it feels like the truest (and by that i mean scariest) thing you’ve written in ages, or maybe it just feels like if you delete it you are wishing it away and half the point of writing it was to unburden yourself of the weight of those words, of the shame and fear and all that baggage that comes along with them, and so you think that at the very least you should save them SOMEWHERE. For me, that somewhere used to be and is still occasionally HERE. If I don’t think better of it by morning, maybe I’ll tuck those words in here for safekeeping tomorrow. Then again, maybe not.

* On Sunday, I bought a new battery for my car.

* On Monday, J. and I installed it. We also washed and cleaned out the car, something that hadn’t been done since before Ash died.

* This morning, we borrowed my nephew’s air compressor and pumped up the flat tire, which held long enough to get the car to the tire guy that my dad had recommended.

* And oh, I drove today. Which was kind of a big deal, since the whole reason  my car’s battery went dead in the first place was that one day, like eight or nine months ago, I just stopped driving.

* So with four used tires @ $25 apiece, and a battery for $90, I have rejoined the ranks of the self-transportational.

woke up from a dream crying. couldn’t find her. was being held by these people. interrogators. my mother and fathers and sister were waiting in some outer room while these people interrogated me, but before that, before that i saw her, and she had been hiding out. she was alive and well but had been hiding out. could have come home but didn’t want to. and now these  interrogators were trying to figure out what i had done to make that happen, what i had done to make her do this, play this trick.

… which i’m too tired to figure out how to embed tonight. It’s not supposed to be searchable on YouTube, so I think you have to go to it straight from this link.  Anyway, here is a little bit of  Ash with Antony and The Johnsons.