Ladybugs mean love, especially in winter.

Don't you just love ladybugs?

A snapshot from my childhood --

Scavenging ladybugs, their

tickly legs prickling my skin,

their effervescent wings

unfolding into hearts.

Hundreds of them, all bound together into a huge nest.

I was six then,

and Angela lala was the girl down the street.

I had a crush on Angela,

along with the other six-year-olds from my neighborhood.

Us younger kids - not yet jaded about nature,

not wanting to point our magnifying glasses at the ants

percolating through the cracks in our moms' front steps,

igniting and killing them.

Or putting salt on poor, unsuspecting snails to make them shrink into themselves,

like dogs who had seen too much of the world.

No.

Junie, my friend, and I were innocent. Cruelty hadn't tangled our hearts.

So we swarmed around the bush in front of Angela's house,

stuffing the sidewalks with chubby arms. In angular, not-quite-grown knees.

The older kids just shook their heads.

We peered into the nest of black and red

Irridescent in the sun

and said, "Look!" "Wow!" "Awe!"

These friendly insects let us touch them,

gently.

Almost like the sea anemones at the beach,

With their sensitive blush of tendrils,

they responded to us.

Tiny slick browns when we angled our hands, caught one

- or many -

weeding their way through tiny-child-sized hairs.

No wonder I gasped,

as my dad lay dying,

at a single ladybug lounging on the back porch,

effervescent on a February morning.

#Ladybugs #Childhood #Death #Grief #Magic

How does an agnostic pray?

They pray beside the still waters.

They pray in the bask of quiet music.

An agnosic prays just to everyone, gone and alive, for guidance, sensation, flashes of insight.

Agnostics notice the flowers beside the crooked sidewalk.

And the birdsong in the air.

Their god/God being not fixed to a personhood, they find God in unfamiliar places.

God or no god, their worship is everywhere.

Contigo

Take in a breath. Suck it in, then blow it out. Feel it pass away on your lips, that wind that your spirit creates. Your inspiration, your aspirations. All here with you in the breath making your chest heave and your heart beat. Breath that makes you live.

Now, sing.

“Recuérdame….”

The Spanish form of “with you” is contigo. In Recuerdame, the Spanish version of the theme song Remember Me from Disney’s Coco, I’m struck by how poetic Contigo is. A single word, containing worlds, as Walt Whitman says.

Lafourcade sings, “Ahora me tenqo que ir mi amor,” - Listen, I have to go, my love.

“Contigo ya estare,” - With you I’ll always be, I shall be, the poetry of Spanish bringing a formality to the -are.

“You contigo siempre voy” - I, with you, shall always go.

Where you go, I’ll go, where you follow, I’ll follow. Your people shall be my people. In death, as in life. To bring in a little bit of Ruth.

I attend a church that does its best to be culturally inclusive. My fellow church member, Mikayla, who is Mexican American, told us that the members of her family let you celebrate someone in the moment, while they were still here with you. At a Dia+Halloween+Samhain event at church, she said this - “If you love someone, do it now. You can make a sugar skull for them now. You can celebrate them in life as well as after they’ve died.”

Her grandfather was ill when she said this; now I can relate.

I think of the bright colors of our altar for that day, a deep orange with black and so much white from bones and cabezas, a mishmash of Halloween and Dia decorations, bringing influences with it from European markers of liminality (witches and cats) to Aztec ancestor celebration (calaveras and cempasulchi marigolds), mine blending with my friends’ and my pastor’s. With one another, poised together, seeming to say, “and also with you,” only in a bit of a cackle instead of a reflexive clap.

The veil is something that the Celts and other Europeans brought with them to the Americas. A veil separating us from our departed loved ones. Two realms, estranged yet connected, thin=close around death times and the annual fall holy days.

Contigo, pregnant. Just like death was before dad passed beyond. His mother waiting beyond the veil, touching him almost, right there in the room with us. I wonder if it was a joyous occasion for her. Pregnant with love, with expectation, pregnant on our side, with grief and curiosity.

Contigo, no breath between words, you and me stuck together as we were in life.

Dad and I were a pair. He was my father, yes, but he was so much more than that. A model of how to live a good life, he tipped a truck driver from his old neighborhood $100 as he drove us back to town after dad’s old Mirage died after a Harry Connick Jr. concert at the Berkeley Bowl. The guy had lived differently, a whole other life, but, my dad, social worker that he was, said that they had lived parallel to each other. Connected by the gauzy threads of a common origin. A veil?

Remember me has “in my arms again,” and as far as I can tell, Contigo suffices in Recuerdame.

Dad and contigo. Dad and me. We combined our travel photos from the Grand Canyon and the Eastern side of the Sierras when I was a young thing, barely 11 or 12. You couldn’t tell them apart, unless you looked hard. Dad’s were better, mine were salvaged from the best of my shiny photo-paper rolls. But in the end, that was our trip: contigo.

Our relationship was a contigo. Even at the very end, he shared his visions of death with me and Geoff intimately, like a contigo. We, or rather I, didn’t realize how family-centered he was until afterwards. Contigo with all of us, contigo with his work friends, contigo with Buddhism and the world.

I remember playing “if it be your will” during a journey, in southern Idaho, to a Tibetan peace garden. My camera turned off on its own, and he and I walked together but apart, a contigo contemplating the fragile and fleeting nature of this realm.

I’ll miss that contigo. Dad was the first great love of my life and I’ve got him to thank for how to live. How to love. I’m not perfect, and my history has pain like anyone else, but the sharing everything and the communion, the contigo, is with me now. As it ever will be.

It’s like the Stockton Rocks painted rock that an Uber driver gave me before he died. Two black palm trees against a deep pink sunset, with white dots like chakra stones, entwined. That’s how I’ll remember dad. In a way it’s going to be hard to find someone to replace him because he’s irreplaceable. I have my pastor-dad, and I have a few male friends. But maybe I’ll always be entwined with dad in some ways, and maybe it’s meant to be.

Contigo ever and always with me, dad. Yes you shall be.

Let me tell you a story.

Once there was a prince who thought he was a commoner. He was right and the world was right and they were both a little wrong, too.

The prince wanted to go among the saddest people in his shire, and there he found anger and desperation. The prince was scared and he ran to the suburbs.

But the anger and desperation followed the prince. It festered in others - in himself - until a huge blister grew on the tender skin of the prince's arm.

As the blister festered, others saw it and ran away or turned to him in anger. "Take care of this blister yourself!" they yelled. They didn't know, though, that the prince-commoner didn't have a way of doing so.

On the last day of the prince's time in the angry suburbs, a man came to the prince. He had brown hair and gentle eyes. "How are you?" asked the man.

"Go fuck yourself!" spat the prince. He was tired of commoners mistreating him. He was also scared of his own tenderness that he couldn't even look the kind man in the eyes.

The kind man didn't move. He cocked his head instead.

"Take this," he said with an outreached hand. There was a silver ring, gleaming. The prince shakily took the ring. He was unsure of what to do with it.

The ring began to grow a balm, gentle and green, in the middle. It shimmered. And when the prince raised it above the blister on his arm, the blister calmed and he felt less

angry and less desperate.

The prince put the ring-balm in his heart. To this very day, when he feels unfeelable emotions he brings the balm out, places it above his blister - now a faint scar on his arm - and squeezes balm into the blister.

The anger and the desperation subside, and the prince continues on his way.

He never saw the kind man again, but when he returns in his memory to the blistery shire, he enters through that man's eyes.

The end.

#fantasy #allegory #queer #queeringtheology

Protective

big brother fish

Confident when

with the guys but somehow

agitated, disconcerted

when walking alone.

Gleaming eyes

tightly furrowed

woodchuck brows

intent upon

returning home

successful

with the needed provisions

in his arms.

Granny

My grandmother was a maid for a while - a maid-nanny. In New York City, for a Jewish family. She never really encountered difference, springing from her slave-holding, Southern Methodist culture in central Texas. To add to things, she was from a sundowner town where all people who weren't or didn't pass as white were chased out of town with metal chains and horses. Even Granny, segregationism pounded into her by her abusive father, would open her eyes wide when she told me about that Coleman in hushed tones. Granny was good, and had struggled for that goodness in the face of evil.

I imagine Coleman to be like the little town in Huck Finn, where the miscreants are literally tarred and feathered before being run out of that small-minded piece of civilization. I used to feel romantic about Coleman and The South, and how couldn’t I? Granny was born there, and my Grandpa came from somewhere not too far away from her, also in Texas. I could taste the gentility of Southern Culture in them, even though they were born miles away from the old Planters’ homes. Gentility is like the star jasmine flowers that I grew up smelling outside of my dad’s apartment in Stockton - sweet on its own, but sickly-sweet when it’s planted to cover the stench of sewage, of violence, below the pavement or the sidewalk. Granny and Grandpa had that Southern gentility, and gentleness, when I knew them. Did they soften and turn sweet in the face of violence? Or did they, like all of us, take what they could from their culture, their religion, that was good and discard the rest?

Granny spent exactly one year in the Big Apple. That was enough for her. In her time there, she stared down a gang of rapists and threatened them so bad with prison that they didn't take away the choice that she fought so hard to preserve. Thanks be to God, the Methodists and their ilk would clap with their tongues - cue Sunday morning church and dust suspended in sunlight.

Granny ran and ran, like Hedwig - both the owl and the restless songwriter in John Cameron Mitchell's movie. When describing that film - and I do often - I segregate the plot from the story. The plot is complex, about an erstwhile East German slip of a girly boy (Hedwig's words) who married a cabronish GI and got stranded in the bland military outpost of Junction City, Kansas. Then she fell in love with an underage Evangelical musician, eventually dubbing him Tommy Gnosis.

Tommy was doe-eyed and dopey; obsessed with Jesus and the Fall. His take was rebellious, and Hedwig's hands, wet with clay and bathwater, sculpted Tommy into a kind of Nine-Inch-Nails lookalike with heartbreaker tendencies. Her creature became a heartthrob and took the credit for all of the songs that she wrote. Ouch.

Hedwig finally catches up with Tommy when she’s down on her luck, trying to turn tricks in a seedy corner of New York City. They drink, they drive a limo, they wreck it, Hedwig rises to fame and crashes hard from it, and then meets Tommy at his last-ever concert. There, dreamlike, Tommy finally acknowledges Hedwig’s pain - and her resilience. She’s able to sing a new song, to quote U2 who themselves were quoting Psalm 21. Tommy’s song goes, “When everything starts breaking down / you pick the pieces off the ground / and show this wicked town something beautiful and new.”

Hedwig’s ending is something I don’t want to spoil for you, but it’s worthy of its circuitous plot. In the end, Hedwig is whole, which means that we are, too. And that we have been all along.

Granny, like Hedwig, never settled down until she landed in Stockton. She was married by now, also to a GI, like Hedwig; she had tenuous ties to an uncle twice-removed who lived in the better part of town, the part with parks and brick-built schoolyards. She and Grandpa hunkered down on the South side of Eighth street, and Granny became settled. There, where gauzy strips of redwood are embedded in the dirt, the old carriageways that I always imagined lining Eighth Street. There was an article about the sidewalkless ways south of Charter Way / MLK Avenue: the city’s message seemed to be that we had far more pressing issues to paint into color than building sidewalks for South-Side families. I didn’t live there, so the sidwalkless ways and the redwood strips took hold of my imagination. If I lived there, I might clap my hands, silently cursing the city and its loose-ended history as I dodged swerving cars between the gravel and the wire fences.

In South Stockton, and in its strips of history embedded in the carriageways, Granny’s mind wandered like Hedwig’s. She was a student of culture, which is where my own globetrotting fantasies come from. More about them later. Granny went to Delta College in her 50's - like the 1970's - after her last bickerment with Grandpa. He moved into a sunny loft-style house just behind Oak Park and stayed there til my aunt Betty moved in to take care of him a few months before he died. I imagine Grandpa like a barn owl, perched high above the scurrying things of the earth, yearning to fly high like the eagles, so high that he could almost touch God for a second. That was his great yearning.

So, Granny took her avocado-green Datsun(?) past Charter Way up to Delta in the 1970’s. She studied history, anthropology, sociology and multiple Associate of Arts degrees. Her finest achievement was writing several papers about the Miwuk and the Yokuts, who are the indigenous peoples who live here now and who populated the Stockton area before the bear-slaughtering white settlers and the indigenous-people enslaving Spaniards. Somehow I didn’t learn too much about the reality of those groups until well after I graduated from high school. Granny’s connection to indigenous folks was from an old Texas / Oklahoma story: her name was said to have derived from a Cherokee girl’s name. The research that I’ve done on the name Era, though, doesn’t bear this out. Still, a connection is a connection, and she had a lifelong fascination if dated, with the people who were here before the Europeans / white folks. She even pronounced my cousin Vanessa to “look just like an Indian papoose!” when my aunt Betty brought Vanessa, a newborn, to her a few weeks after she had been born.

I know how memory, and interest, stray during life. Sometimes the things that you’re engrossed in during college are like fond memories after you’ve embarked on your life after you’ve graduated, clutching your cap and certificate of completion. That was true for Granny, as well. Twenty years after her Delta excursions, she didn’t say much about her studies of Miwuk and Yokuts cultures. Tragically, her papers were stolen in a break-in of the house on Eighth Street that she never recovered from. Family photos, historical artifacts from her Southwest travels, and her beloved Anthropology papers all disappeared like smoke from a cauldron in an evil spell one night. After the break-in, she’d occasionally bemoan the things that she lost, but she never spoke in detail about her studies of indigenous Americans, even though she speculated that her professor had stolen her work and used it in a book.

Decades later, I would at last earn my degree: a Bachelor’s in Anthropology from Stanislaus State. I took exactly two classes about Indigenous American folks, and for some reason, I never thought much about Granny’s and my affinity for exploring cultures, just landscapes. Now I see how much we are alike.

Grandpa once bought my mom a dutch oven. In its heaping box, wrapped carefully, bottom and all, I thought it was a late birthday present for me. His face was ashen, and he interrupted the silence in a good Texas drawl. “This one’s for your mom, youngin’, but I’ll see what I can do for you.” A week later, Grandpa appeared at mom’s door again, asking me to help him take something out of the trunk. It was my dutch oven. Not wrapped, but still beautiful in its 20-pound glory. He beamed a bit more when he gave Mom hers.

Like I said earlier, Grandma and Grandpa fought. They also divided boys between them. My aunt Betty was left alone in the deal. She remembered that, like you do, when she moved in to take care of Grandpa. “Junk,” she said. “So much Junk!” Among it, an old gramophone that he played 40's swing dance on. So much dance, I’d counter in my head.

Grandpa had a Bible that Betty still has. Notes spilling from the silver-rimmed tips onto the margins, snippets of hymns, everything that he held dear, centered mainly on Jesus. I remember Grandpa’s warbling voice, singing the deep-South church songs to me while I crunched on butter made into a batter with tiny crystals of table sugar. His blue Formica tabletop was reminiscent of a 1950’s diner, and his hair was always slicked to the side like a gentle/genteel greaser. Like Brandon Flowers - or Bruce Springsteen - in The Killers’ A Dustland Fairytale video.

Whenever I came Grandpa’s to spend the night, I’d want to cuddle with him up in his sunny loft and gradually fall asleep while gazing sleepily at the curvy branches of his old oak tree in the back yard. His loft was so high - so high to a kid like me, grounded in a single-story Ranch house and an ordinary two-story l apartment at Dad’s - that looking out his bedroom window I felt like I could jump out and sail like a particle of dust down onto his Doberman, Lady’s, handmade doghouse - which was 20 feet away from the tree.

But he’d say it. He had to say it. So, gently as he could, he’d tell me that I was a little girl and, besides, that older people couldn’t fall asleep with younger people. It just was, even though we both knew that he was incapable of hurting me in that way.

In the mornings at Grandpa’s house, I’d rush up the stairs to cuddle with him anyway. Or sometimes he’d already be up, brewing his percolator coffee and slapping thick ham slices on his griddle. They’d sizzle and burn black, and we’d eat their crunchy slivers, salt mingling with fat and cast iron to luscious delight. He had what felt like Formica plates, too, although they were probably just Melmac. Those were brown and green and cream-colored with flowers on them. Grandpa would make a spread and pile vegetables and homemade ranch dip on them during the afternoon. He’d wash up the Melmac from the morning in a tiny kitchen sink, setting them aside for a later meal.

Granny, I went with her to an appointment as she was getting older. I stayed the night before to take care that she made it, her old toilet was acting up again as always. I remember the cardboard look of the walls in her hallway and her small windowless bedroom. It had lost its awe. At night, I stood there, and she teasingly asked me to sleep with her. “Where else are you gonna sleep, girl???” “On the couch,” I said. I said no again, and then desperation pierced her face. I could tell how lonely she was, how she had been looking forward to sleeping beside someone after so many years alone. I changed my words.

Granny and I bundled that night, sleeping side-by-side in her little full-sized bed, chatting about this and that. At one point, our conversation shifted to the Culture Wars and, like a 20-year-old, I interjected her lecture by defending evolution. She was aghast. “Are you a …. Communist?” Her Little Bit - my pet name - had grown in that moment for her. Had I lost my way? I said I wasn’t one, and we drifted to a more comfy topic. For her part, there was oatmeal with butter, brown sugar, and plump raisins waiting on the kitchen table for me in the morning.

A few years later, Granny developed dementia. My Aunt Betty, not knowing then what she’d get into as the family’s first caregiver, moved her up to Redding. The cousins and I and my brother came down to the eighth-street house to clean it out for selling.

There was so much stuff in her house, like her curio cabinet, displaying unopened toys, frozen in time. As children, we were never allowed to touch those dollies and Ninja Turtle villains. My cousin Rachel and I avoided the task of dismantling her cabinet, holding onto that last thread of childhood awe for her while we could. The “adults” of our moving party - Dad and Aunt Betty - took care of that task. Later they’d learn that her house, and her treasures inside it, was in fact quite ordinary. The antiques amounted to less than $20,000. Betty found a buyer for most of them, including the 1940’s-style stove that always beguiled me, her forties-style jewelry (mainly plastic beads and tin-spoon silver). The housing bubble of the late 2000’s inflated her house's price and afforded Betty a nice truck soon after and my dad a house of his own, several years later. A blue house that he’d visit me from in a dream after he died, talking, walking, and gesturing along a levee until he said that I couldn’t come with him anymore because I couldn’t go barefoot.

We kept her letters. I found them first, in her narrow, dark bedroom closet. Were they on the top shelf above her clothing? I think so, because that’s where everyone stores their treasures. Granny’s handwriting was small and a little cramped, her blotted pencil fitting as much as she could on each sheet of precious paper.

I kept one of her letters. In that one, she admonished Aunt Betty to turn to God and pray to Him for help when she needed it. Betty had run away to San Francisco by that time. Later, she’d tell me that she had been in the Anti crowd in the City and, later, in Davis. She and her friends were rudimentarily dismantling all oppressions - Western colonialism, American arrogance, and soul-piercing religion. They didn’t quite know what to mouth after their tirades, and, perhaps given totalitarianism’s enthusiasm in jumping into alternate histories, I think that was probably good. Her friends weren’t fascists, by any means. Intellectuals, readers of Proust, artists who doubled as Baby Boomers is more like it.

Granny’s letter to Betty repeated the Jesus formula to her - the prayer that makes you Saved, in her and my corner of the Christian world. Even though 20-year-olds are mostly self-absorbed and I was no exception, I could tell Aunt Betty was struggling in a letter that had asked for Granny’s response.

I still have two music boxes, one that plays Somewhere Over the Rainbow. In days past, there was a plastic bluebird that circuited a track on the mirror that served as that music box’s focal point. It took strange little tracks, here and there and hairpin turns that I’ve never seen a bird in real life take. Circle around the mirror, circle around its little dark mirror.

The other music box was a pounded copper-brass piano, with a player perched on a metal bench, that spun The Entertainer as its tune.

I remember crying a lot that day; feeling as though Granny was already gone, memories being taken away right in front of me and with my own hands. And we were saying goodbye in a way - to the days of struggle for her, to her autonomy, to her infectious cackle that forever drew a grin out of me. She was sad and had hard times, and now it was time for someone to take care of her. My stalwart Granny, the one who cut her giant yard with a butcher knife, was preparing to come

home. This time, a truck took her there instead of her knobby worn feet.

"To pray means to open your hands before God." What does it mean for you to pray?

I stood at the seashore, the same seashore I had voyaged to throughout my life. I climbed the bluffs and snapped pictures of "Love is All You Need," painted on a flat granite rock beside some straggling yellow flowers. How thorny they are, I thought. They need that extra skelature to hang onto themselves and each other in the swift winds that bellow through the pacific coast. I marvelled at them for a minute, then trekked down the side of the bluff overlooking the sea, down to a beach that was wider and broader than the one I usually call home. Pacifica. For some reason, I felt self-conscious playing in the surf at Rockaway, that touchstone of beaches where I usually stay when I visit my little seaside hamlet a short trip from San Francisco. This beach seemed easier somehow, less rocky. As I made my descent I also set an intention - to ask why.

I approached the waves, smooth and shiny like cellophane being wrinkling and unwrinkling. I looked up at the blue-blue sky - it was a perfect summer day. Cool enough to feel the salt breeze on my skin, yet warm enough to go exploring in a t-shirt. I would approach the sea with questions again, years later and on a hot day, but that's a tale for another time. This was my time with whatever it was that had told me that it was here with me. The Love that kept me company when I was shell-shocked from a terrible voyage in the metal trains whizzing through cities. The translucent green light that wafted into my mother's house's bedroom window and told me that everything would be okay. The Love that sent my grandma to me during that my most uncertain time. This was my time with what I called, "You."

Was it my mother's faith that led me to the sea? She certainly loved nature, and she has a belief in a loving God who cares, who stays, to quote the Christian singer Matthew West. But hers, hers is more specific than mine. When she saw me approaching my You, she recited, half to herslef, a simple, beautiful prayer that can make you a Christian. I was touched but I didn't say it. Haven't. Following a formula someone else gave me is such a firstborn thing to do, and I'm the middle child. And I'm also the baby, so there.

I delve down into the warm sand on the bluff. Brace myself for the steep descent that

I must take to get to the shoreline. I'm wearing sneakers, ones that have been with me for over a year, and I shake them off so that I'm barefoot when I reach the sea.

Looking at the waves, I start asking, pouring my heart out, "Why?" Why am I in so much pain? Why did you take the thing away from me that I so loved? Why won't you let me recover, and move on from, a lost relationship? I raised my face to the sun, its white light blinding me. My ears buzzed. I was lost in my own sad revery.

As my heartbeat stilled, I looked towards the rivulets of water snaking in and out and in front of me. I waded further out, up past my calves, until a blue-green wave made me run back towards the shore.

Focus on the now, something seemed to tell me.

But I didn't want to. I wanted to cry some more. I breathed the salty air again, torn about what to do.

Just then, a shimmering pillar of water came up from behind me, getting all me wet, standing in the shallows. It soaked my hair! My whole body was full of salt water! I laughed - Surpirse! You seemed to be saying. I'm still here.

Later, I'd sit in my best friend's church weeping as his minister talked about C.S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy was one of Lewis' essays, or maybe folios, on God. I don't know the exact context that Lewis wrote it for, but it was also after a loss.

Surprise! It wasn't an accident.

"To pray means to open your hands before God." What does it mean for you to pray?

I stood at the seashore, the same seashore I had voyaged to throughout my life. I climbed the bluffs and snapped pictures of "Love is All You Need," painted on a flat granite rock beside some straggling yellow flowers. How thorny they are, I thought. They need that extra skelature to hang onto themselves and each other in the swift winds that bellow through the pacific coast. I marvelled at them for a minute, then trekked down the side of the bluff overlooking the sea, down to a beach that was wider and broader than the one I usually call home. Pacifica. For some reason, I felt self-conscious playing in the surf at Rockaway, that touchstone of beaches where I usually stay when I visit my little seaside hamlet a short trip from San Francisco. This beach seemed easier somehow, less rocky. As I made my descent I also set an intention - to ask why.

I approached the waves, smooth and shiny like cellophane being wrinkling and unwrinkling. I looked up at the blue-blue sky - it was a perfect summer day. Cool enough to feel the salt breeze on my skin, yet warm enough to go exploring in a t-shirt. I would approach the sea with questions again, years later and on a hot day, but that's a tale for another time. This was my time with whatever it was that had told me that it was here with me. The Love that kept me company when I was shell-shocked from a terrible voyage in the metal trains whizzing through cities. The translucent green light that wafted into my mother's house's bedroom window and told me that everything would be okay. The Love that sent my grandma to me during that my most uncertain time. This was my time with what I called, "You."

Was it my mother's faith that led me to the sea? She certainly loved nature, and she has a belief in a loving God who cares, who stays, to quote the Christian singer Matthew West. But hers, hers is more specific than mine. When she saw me approaching my You, she recited, half to herslef, a simple, beautiful prayer that can make you a Christian. I was touched but I didn't say it. Haven't. Following a formula someone else gave me is such a firstborn thing to do, and I'm the middle child. And I'm also the baby, so there.

I delve down into the warm sand on the bluff. Brace myself for the steep descent that I must take to get to the shoreline. I'm wearing sneakers, ones that have been with me for over a year, and I shake them off so that I'm barefoot when I reach the sea.

Looking at the waves, I start asking, pouring my heart out, "Why?" Why am I in so much pain? Why did you take the thing away from me that I so loved? Why won't you let me recover, and move on from, a lost relationship? I raised my face to the sun, its white light blinding me. My ears buzzed. I was lost in my own sad revery.

As my heartbeat stilled, I looked towards the rivulets of water snaking in and out and in front of me. I waded further out, up past my calves, until a blue-green wave made me run back towards the shore.

Focus on the now, something seemed to tell me.

But I didn't want to. I wanted to cry some more. I breathed the salty air again, torn about what to do.

Just then, a shimmering pillar of water came up from behind me, getting all me wet, standing in the shallows. It soaked my hair! My whole body was full of salt water! I laughed - Surpirse! You seemed to be saying. I'm still here.

Later, I'd sit in my best friend's church weeping as his minister talked about C.S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy was one of Lewis' essays, or maybe folios, on God. I don't know the exact context that Lewis wrote it for, but it was also after a loss.

Surprise! It wasn't an accident.

The concha is crusted with sugar. Pastel crystals that create small crunches(?) onto your teeth, your tongue, the roof of your mouth. And then there’s the butter and the layers of dough. The proper way of eating a concha is by tearing it apart, spilling its sugary shell onto its layered fluff, and into your mouth like plip, plip, plip. La Superior’s dough melts in your mouth - fat layers of yellow bread overwhelming your senses and claiming them, just for a moment, as their own. Conchas eat you, not the other way around.

I grew up visiting La Superior, and Mrs. Chan, the autodidact of all things cultural, was my first mentor. She would spend her own Money to bring theatre troupes to Monroe Elementary where she reigned as its Principal for decades, it seemed. Every Cinco de Mayo, each classroom at Monroe would explode into sugary glee at the sight of a pink pastry box from La Victoria’s Panderia on El Dorado. We’d each get to pick one concha, paid for by none other than Mrs. Chan. I remember the soft off-white ones and how I’d try to peel back the sugar topping with my teeth.

Mrs. Chan. A lesson I took from her is that it’s okay to treat your students - to give back to your school with your own salary. At Delta College, I stocked my workplace with fruit snacks and holiday cookies for my kiddos. They called me their class mom/dad/person, and one comic book-inclined student even went so far as to reference X-Men in calling me their Mr. X, the head of the mutants who were learning to use their powers for good. All this from filling their space - our space - with love. If that meant sugar cookies for Thanksgiving and deep purple gummies for Easter, then so be it.

So, back to La Superior and las conchas. I grew up right by there, and dusted off my rusty old Spanish from high school whenever I went in. Dos pounds de chorizo salvadoreno, por favor, I’d ask the deli person. Salvadorian chorizo has a warmth to it - seeds and aromatic spices escaping from the little pink carnicieria bags and up your nostrils. Little chubs snipped and folded and weighed and handed to you. Anything else? No, es todo, gracias!

One time I had a conversation in Spanglish with the lady at the pastry counter. She recognized me from my visits, and I fumbled a little with the words that don’t flow off my tongue. Do - you - espeak - Spanish? Un poco, I replied. A little. Where’d you learn? She gestured to me, conjuring a school or the neighborhoods that were full of my friends learning English, me a little Spanish, on those long summer sunsets when I’d ride across a map of the United States at Grunsky. Oh, escuela secundaria, I said. Pero me gusta aprender mas. Me-too, she replied. Yo quiero aprender Ingles tambien.

We smiled at each other. Two residents of a multicultural city, two people who could be divided by language but who, in that moment, took the time to make it through to each other.

The sugar on the conchas tasted especially sweet that day.

I think of the tree in Narnia, something that A. wrote on in an earlier rendition of this group.  The tree that became the Wardrobe, the looking-glass to another world.  The fawn, Mr. Tumnus, with his sparkling eyes and cowering shuffle.  Did the siblings-turned-royals save him?  Did he survive the Troublesome Times?  I wonder about these times, how the trees have scabies - beetle infestations - and how they still stand tall.  A friend of mine traveled to Humboldt County to be among the trees in August - she wants to be buried there, under a tall, majestic redwood who has withstood the centuries.  It's comforting to think about - some of the Giant Sequoias up north near the coast cling to their mist, grow strong, mother entire ecosystems that we short humans are still discovering.  Some of them have been around in the B.C. period - before Jesus, before the Dark Ages even though there was food and music and life during those times as ever, before and through the many conflicts, conquests, and wars that have scoured our earth over and over again.  

One of poems that has journeyed with me through this life is Walt Whitman's Reconciliation -  Word over all, beautiful as the sky!

Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world:

I see this world soiled again, sullied, and I don't know who will come back to it to clean it.  And words, they're symbols with meaning.  Even though my dad thought words last forever, and they do in memory I suppose, I don't know how eternal they are.  Especially opusues.  I see people's magnum opuses at Dollar Tree for a buck, marked for so much more.  It's democratic in a way, the John Green and David Levithan stories tucked away at the cusp of a hill before its descent into Jackson, beside the white churches and the oaks-becoming-pines.  Words get out, they get everywhere, they're viral things that can infect or purify.  And those trees - those trees are the clean sheets that we are able to tuck into night after night after night.