Last night I heard from Georg who was enquiring after my missing prose.
‘Are you ok Marcia ?’
I have been all over the place ( lit. and fig. ) I explained and thanked him for the kindness in his message of enquiry.
I want to do this. I resume and find I am lost for words. I have been so caught up with living change that have had no time to report it.
I am behind.
My last episode, recalling the Canadian lodger and death of father, unleashed a torrent of thoughts rushing backwards.
The struggle to keep on with the future, far and near, all but stopped me in my tracks.
My mother sang of a creature on a railway track picking its teeth with a carpet tack, on her way to the bathroom, on our last night in Spain. Polly Wolly Doodle all the day.
Fare thee well.
I think my mother chooses good songs quite accidentally. She is ready for the journey hours in advance and enters an almost trance like state. We go up into the night sky and see the moon together. Our future holds the final farewell or as my mother calls it ‘the single ticket’.
A notoriously drug addled friend of my age says he has promised his mother that he will outlive her. I understand this and hope he does. I hope I do but dread it too.
I hate goodbyes. I have often said so out loud.
‘Best part of any visit’ once quipped a ready wit and made me laugh. It now makes me ruminate without a smile.
I haven’t got over the sixties. I was there and so was my father and then he wasn’t.
Often called ‘real’ I realise I don’t feel real. I often say this out loud.
Back in London I get stuck. I whistle ‘Polly Wolly Doodle all the day’ and protest too much that ‘I don’t give a fuck’ but I am in a jam and onwards is a revolving door.
I think of Janus as the god of doorways and the door both open and shut.
Getting on and passing through …
Getting on is a good phrase. I seize on all the meanings, ageing of course, persevering and being at ease with another. I am and am not getting on.
And passing through which hits me in the deep anatomy. We are all passing through, however stuck, so I tell myself.
I go and see a homeopath and am given remedies for grief. I lose them and after a late night search that involves my husband they are nowhere. It’s typical I think and remember to try to avoid reiterating the negative. He says they’ll turn up in the morning and only then I relax and notice I am sitting on them. He has always maintained that I have always been sitting on everything I’m looking for and he has a point.
I take the tiny sugar ball and hope it does the trick.
‘It’s only a trick’ say the doctors of rationality and so what if it is ?
Surely it’s just a matter of playing good enough tricks.
‘It’s not easy being anyone’ I say to my brother who has often mistaken me for Riley, the one whose life is famously easy.
When did you last see your father ? was once a euphemistic enquiry as to bowel movements.
My brother last saw our father on my seventh birthday. We were on a railway station. I had been given a ten bob note and went to buy my brother butterscotch. I remember it cost two shillings out of the ten I had been given. I came back to the family. My father smacked me for going missing, my mother said something about the kindness of my thought. My brother kissed my mother, said ‘goodbye little fellah’ to me and our father said something about high waves in the Cape of Good Hope and a wish for them to never meet again. My brother walked away without looking back. He never took the butterscotch and father and son never did meet again.
‘I hope you die in a wave’ I said out loud.
My father laughed.
‘You won’t forget this birthday, 7 on the 7th ‘he said.
‘I will’ I said.