5 Years Ago: Rootless: The Last Monday Letter

 

Five years later, there's nothing more I can add to this. I think of my mom often. 

Monday, March 29, 2021

Rootless: The Last Monday Letter

 

Carol Cottage, Missouri. January 2011.

Dear Mom, 

I've written you a letter almost every Monday since mid-December 2018. 

In that first weekly letter, I was at the end of an interregnum Missouri visit, about to depart for a Christmas-New Year layover in South Louisiana before heading westward to my next tourist-in-residency --> Tucson.  

When I wrote you that letter, I still had my 1995 Toyota Camry. When I wrote you that letter, I didn't know that, two weeks later, I would say good-bye forever to that sturdy stalwart of my rootless life.

It looks like this will be my last Monday letter to you, and I'm putting it here, seeing as how you don't live at Carol Cottage anymore, seeing as how you've died, of course. You, too, were a sturdy stalwart in my life. I think you'd chuckle at being compared to a car. Or you'd be annoyed. 

Carol Cottage, Missouri. January 2011.

So let me tell you about your funeral and burial.  It was everything you'd asked for.

You lay in your casket in a long-sleeved, white cotton nightgown. White-thread embroidery just below the neckline, a band of hand-stitched eyelets below the neckline, a pleated bodice. Pretty details, yet still in the range one can call simple. Exactly your style.

The James Lee Burke book, Pegasus Descending, featuring our mutual hero, Dave Robicheaux, rested on your belly, propped against the open half-lid of the casket. You had a perverse fondness for Dave's violent, psychopathic side-kick, Clete Purvis. 

As you'd asked, we ordered your casket from an online supplier and had it shipped to the funeral home to side-step the markup costs assessed by funeral homes for their caskets. We selected a poplar casket in a cherry finish that, like your nightgown, had pleasing details of interest, but overall, evoked the comfortable warmth and intimacy of your living room. And, gosh, did you know you can buy a casket at Costco? We chose yours from a different company, but knowing Costco's got caskets is something to tuck away for future reference.

As for how you looked in the casket, you didn't just "look good" like in the cliche about such things. You were beautiful. Astonishingly so. I'm serious, Mom. Even your nails were manicured and polished (with the barest of pink blush), just as you would like. And you wore the exact right shade of lipstick for your complexion. I'm not saying you looked beautiful "for your age," a woman of 91. No, you were beautiful in that casket irrespective of age. 

You wanted Ave Maria sung at your funeral. The soloist, a young woman, sang it to you, to us, in a clear, warm, mezzo-soprano voice, from the balcony behind us. The notes of that transcendent song washed over me.

Your Ave Maria was gorgeous. But when the young singer began to serenade you with Amazing Grace while your descendants escorted you from the altar to the waiting funeral car, well, that took my breath away.   

 

 

The car procession that followed you to the cemetery ... an unremarkable journey. 

No Fellini-esque plot twists on the way, as happened after your brother, Clement's, funeral. Remember? When dozens of us, including you and Dad, idled outside the church, seemingly forever, waiting for the priest to lead the vehicular cavalry? And when you asked the funeral director what was taking so long for us to get started, he conjectured that maybe the priest was eating a sandwich. 

We eventually did get going, one car following another, as they do in a funeral procession. We seemed to drive a long time, first on a congested arterial road, then on the highway, then off the highway onto another arterial road and then, oddly, the funeral car took a right turn onto a small side street. A dead-end, in fact. We followed, of course, only to understand that the funeral car driver had taken a wrong turn somewhere and he'd only entered this street so he could turn around (turn all of us around) and get onto the right path. Remember how we all poked our vehicles' noses into residents' driveways so we could then back up and restore our places in line behind the retreating funeral car?

There had been so much idling in front of the church before getting underway that your youngest child had to pull out of the funeral procession so he could gas up his truck before he ran out of fuel.

Oh, what a dramatic third act that was!

But getting back to your memorial day. It had rained earlier, but the rain abated for the final stop of our long good-bye to you. Chilly, though. If you'd been among us en vivo, at the cemetery, under the final-words canopy, you'd have been rolling your eyes and sighing while the priest used his bully pulpit to convince us of how fun it is to be in heaven. Me, I just shivered in the cold and waited impatiently for him to cut the commercial and get back to the program: you. 

Daughter Kit had a mission to visit Dad's grave (where you were about to join him) and her paternal grandfather's grave. She'd already obtained their grave 'addresses' and their locations on the cemetery map, and following your closing ceremony under the canopy, she and her family and I drove to Dad's cemetery neighborhood. 

So it was that we came upon the newly dug grave, into which you would be interred. We watched while the cemetery crew brought you to the grave in, let's call it a carriage, albeit a humble, utilitarian one. We watched how the crew pulled your casket from the carriage, centered you into a harness of sorts, and carefully lowered you into your grave with straps and winches, guiding your slow descent by hand. 

You would have been quite interested in watching this process. 

It felt good to be with you in your most final of final moments.

OK, then. This is my last Monday letter, Mom.

Love, 

Mzuri

 

Related posts

• Love Note For a Waning Moon
• Travels with Carol
• We Stop for Carcasses

 

Post office and cows, Topawa, Tohono O'odham Nation, Arizona. July 2019.

 

Rootless: The Last Monday Letter

 

Carol Cottage, Missouri. January 2011.

Dear Mom, 

I've written you a letter almost every Monday since mid-December 2018. 

In that first weekly letter, I was at the end of an interregnum Missouri visit, about to depart for a Christmas-New Year layover in South Louisiana before heading westward to my next tourist-in-residency --> Tucson.  

When I wrote you that letter, I still had my 1995 Toyota Camry. When I wrote you that letter, I didn't know that, two weeks later, I would say good-bye forever to that sturdy stalwart of my rootless life.

It looks like this will be my last Monday letter to you, and I'm putting it here, seeing as how you don't live at Carol Cottage anymore, seeing as how you've died, of course. You, too, were a sturdy stalwart in my life. I think you'd chuckle at being compared to a car. Or you'd be annoyed. 

Carol Cottage, Missouri. January 2011.

So let me tell you about your funeral and burial.  It was everything you'd asked for.

You lay in your casket in a long-sleeved, white cotton nightgown. White-thread embroidery just below the neckline, a band of hand-stitched eyelets below the neckline, a pleated bodice. Pretty details, yet still in the range one can call simple. Exactly your style.

The James Lee Burke book, Pegasus Descending, featuring our mutual hero, Dave Robicheaux, rested on your belly, propped against the open half-lid of the casket. You had a perverse fondness for Dave's violent, psychopathic side-kick, Clete Purvis. 

As you'd asked, we ordered your casket from an online supplier and had it shipped to the funeral home to side-step the markup costs assessed by funeral homes for their caskets. We selected a poplar casket in a cherry finish that, like your nightgown, had pleasing details of interest, but overall, evoked the comfortable warmth and intimacy of your living room. And, gosh, did you know you can buy a casket at Costco? We chose yours from a different company, but knowing Costco's got caskets is something to tuck away for future reference.

As for how you looked in the casket, you didn't just "look good" like in the cliche about such things. You were beautiful. Astonishingly so. I'm serious, Mom. Even your nails were manicured and polished (with the barest of pink blush), just as you would like. And you wore the exact right shade of lipstick for your complexion. I'm not saying you looked beautiful "for your age," a woman of 91. No, you were beautiful in that casket irrespective of age. 

You wanted Ave Maria sung at your funeral. The soloist, a young woman, sang it to you, to us, in a clear, warm, mezzo-soprano voice, from the balcony behind us. The notes of that transcendent song washed over me.

Your Ave Maria was gorgeous. But when the young singer began to serenade you with Amazing Grace while your descendants escorted you from the altar to the waiting funeral car, well, that took my breath away.   

 

 

The car procession that followed you to the cemetery ... an unremarkable journey. 

No Fellini-esque plot twists on the way, as happened after your brother, Clement's, funeral. Remember? When dozens of us, including you and Dad, idled outside the church, seemingly forever, waiting for the priest to lead the vehicular cavalry? And when you asked the funeral director what was taking so long for us to get started, he conjectured that maybe the priest was eating a sandwich. 

We eventually did get going, one car following another, as they do in a funeral procession. We seemed to drive a long time, first on a congested arterial road, then on the highway, then off the highway onto another arterial road and then, oddly, the funeral car took a right turn onto a small side street. A dead-end, in fact. We followed, of course, only to understand that the funeral car driver had taken a wrong turn somewhere and he'd only entered this street so he could turn around (turn all of us around) and get onto the right path. Remember how we all poked our vehicles' noses into residents' driveways so we could then back up and restore our places in line behind the retreating funeral car?

There had been so much idling in front of the church before getting underway that your youngest child had to pull out of the funeral procession so he could gas up his truck before he ran out of fuel.

Oh, what a dramatic third act that was!

But getting back to your memorial day. It had rained earlier, but the rain abated for the final stop of our long good-bye to you. Chilly, though. If you'd been among us en vivo, at the cemetery, under the final-words canopy, you'd have been rolling your eyes and sighing while the priest used his bully pulpit to convince us of how fun it is to be in heaven. Me, I just shivered in the cold and waited impatiently for him to cut the commercial and get back to the program: you. 

Daughter Kit had a mission to visit Dad's grave (where you were about to join him) and her paternal grandfather's grave. She'd already obtained their grave 'addresses' and their locations on the cemetery map, and following your closing ceremony under the canopy, she and her family and I drove to Dad's cemetery neighborhood. 

So it was that we came upon the newly dug grave, into which you would be interred. We watched while the cemetery crew brought you to the grave in, let's call it a carriage, albeit a humble, utilitarian one. We watched how the crew pulled your casket from the carriage, centered you into a harness of sorts, and carefully lowered you into your grave with straps and winches, guiding your slow descent by hand. 

You would have been quite interested in watching this process. 

It felt good to be with you in your most final of final moments.

OK, then. This is my last Monday letter, Mom.

Love, 

Mzuri

 

Related posts

• Love Note For a Waning Moon
• Travels with Carol
• We Stop for Carcasses

 

Post office and cows, Topawa, Tohono O'odham Nation, Arizona. July 2019.

 

 

Back to Texas: COVID-19 Unfolding, Part 888: A Toast to Dan

 

 

Yesterday afternoon, when I neared Livingston, Texas, I pulled into a Walmart to select a sparking white wine. 

I prefer reds such as a pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon, but the wine wasn't for me. 

It was for my best Tucson buddy, Dan. He liked good sparkling whites. I bought a prosecco that he would have likely sniffed his nose at (both literally and figuratively), good-naturedly, but, well, he wasn't there, so ...

Dan wasn't there because two weeks ago, he died. 

Last night, in the dark, beneath the lacy lingerie of treetops and a deep blue sky, I lifted a toast to Dan, and thanked him for enriching my Tucson year. 

 

We met in 2019 at the weekly blues fusion dance event, held at CeeCee's Jamaican restaurant on Speedway. Dan was a superb dance partner! He liked a little drama in his dance step, as do I. He was all about both of us enjoying the dance, and he forgave all of my missteps. Dan made me look good and we synced well. He made it easy to be a follow.

Dan took me to my very first hockey game. He took me to my first football game since I was a high schooler. As an alum, he proudly showed me around the UA campus before the football game. 

We took a day trip together so that Dan could introduce me to various Arizona points of interest. A man who liked organized planning, I drove, but he carefully plotted all of our stopping points for the day, including a lunch break in Sierra Vista. Dan showed me Tombstone, Bisbee, Naco, Miller Peak, and even Miracle Valley. 

Dan loved good wine, especially white sparkling wines. I'd call him a sensualist, with his love for blues fusion and tango dancing, for the flavors of cheeses and meats and olives and sweets, an ear for the instrumentals in music of all genres, for the visual and perhaps tactile adventure of his cactus collection. 

I know this sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but: death wasn't in Dan's plan for this year. 

However, even before COVID's heavy blanket descended, 2019-2020 was different for Dan. 

There were unsettling, seemingly discrete, medical things that cropped up. Not trivial, but not un-fixable. A treatable this. A treatable that. An elevated this. An ophthalmological issue that popped up, and which required prompt treatment and slow recovery. Then a scarier thing presented itself, for which he underwent a course of treatment of some months, which resulted, he was told (at least at first?) in a clear report.

There were disconcerting and unexpected changes, too, in some social and cultural activities that he'd lovingly participated in for decades, which became suddenly, somehow elusive, for a variety of reasons.

The cloud of COVID settled in, and Dan sometimes struggled with the isolation. 

Dan suffered a grief, as well, for someone close to him, who was gravely ill. 

Twelve months, being worn down, bit by bit.  

There is a gap in the universe where he once stood. Where he danced.

Goodbye, Dan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tucson, AZ: Goodbye: A Soft Close

My Louisiana coffee mug in my Tucson apartment. April 2019.

Yesterday was my last day in Tucson.


I expected an unexpected, unpleasant surprise on my move-out day.

Although there was an annoying location glitch in dropping off my internet provider's router, it was relatively mild, so it didn't rise to the unpleasant surprise level. After I accomplished that mission, I thought, wow, it looks like this will be a smooth exit!

But then, when I traversed a side street on my way out of Tucson, I didn't see a speed hump quickly enough to ratchet down my speed to prevent a clunk as I went over the hump. And I thought, oh, HERE is my move-out surprise! Vehicle damage!

But, no, Chez P(rius) incurred no damage, and I was on my way.

The move-out gods granted mercy this year.    

Stuff: Goodbye, Georgia Towel

My Georgian towel. May 2019.

This towel looks homely, doesn't it? Colors dimmed and dull, threads worn, edges frayed? The colors, even when they were fresh, never fashionable?

It's not a soft towel, and that's why I favored it, because its ridged texture felt like a luxe exfoliating cloth on my skin after a shower. It's the towel of hearty Svans of the Caucasus Mountains.

I brought this towel back from Georgia, the result of a swap of towels with my hostess in Old Rustavi, Nely. I gave her one of my softer, thick towels in exchange for this thin, austere one, because I'd become so fond of it.

After eight happy years with my towel of the Caucasus, yesterday was the day that I cut it into rectangles so I could re-purpose it into cleaning rags.

I'll toss it away, bit by bit, after I distribute some of its Georgian DNA, accompanied by scouring powder or bleachy spray, over my kitchen and bathroom surfaces in the Sonoran Desert, far from the Black Sea.

An honorable end to its years of service to softer humanoid surfaces.

My Georgian towel. May 2019.

Goodbye, Dear Old

Hwy 380 outside Carrizozo, New Mexico - Valley of Fire vista. October 2012.

Last week, it came time to say goodbye to a stalwart friend. 

Being rootless and, therefore, a minimalist by necessity, I don't have a lot of stuff. And I don't think I have much emotional attachment to the bulk of the stuff I do have. There are exceptions, however, due to sentimental memories associated with an item, or by the longevity of our relationship.

Here, I said goodbye to a crossover bag that had accompanied me to so many festivals and travels.

My "festival" bag.

Here, I said goodbye to an airbed. To my accumulation of Mardi Gras beads. To my cherished, red chairbed.

My red chairbed in New Mexico and Louisiana.

Here I said goodbye to my Nokia brick phone (and its symbolic content of human connections, literal and figurative) given to me in Caucasus Georgia.

My Nokia "brick" in Caucasus Georgia. 2011-2012.

But today my goodbye is big. Really, really big. 

I've had to say goodbye to my car, my 1995 Toyota Camry.

The car I bought when it was already more than 10 years old. The car I bought when I lived a whole different life than I do now, a rooted one, when I had a:

• Mate;
• House; and a
• "Regular" job. 

I bought the car with a little more than 80,000 miles on it. I'm releasing it with more than 240,000 miles on the odometer.

It was a comfortable car. Because it was an older vehicle, I had no worries about someone singling it out for nefarious doings. I loved all things about this car except for three - the:

• Stingy cupholder that was far too particular about what it allowed in its space;
• Low ground clearance, which made it not-so-handy on uneven roads (well, sort of roads); and
• Expensive sensitivity of the driver's side door handle. (I think I bought THREE replacements.)

I saw the world in its side mirror.

Sunset view from my side mirror, I-10 from Texas to Louisiana. September 2017.

 And through the rear mirror.

View of Monument Valley through my rear window. November 2008.

• I ate breakfast, lunch, or dinners in it. I snacked in it.
• I spilled stuff in it. 

• I slept in it.
• I camped with it.
• I got lost in it.
• I found my way in it.

• I meditated in it, solved all of the world's problems in it, imagined futures in it, re-imagined pasts in it. 
• I sang in it, swore vile epithets in it, cried in it, laughed in it, worried in it, yelled at the universe in it, and asked it questions it could not answer.

• I parked in it, crept in it, sped in it.

• I laughed with others in it, argued with others in it, and enjoyed companionable silences with others in it.

• I saw suns rise and suns set in it.

• I saw innumerable dead creatures on the roads from it.

• I drove by hundreds of past death scenes in it, memorialized by descansos, crosses, signs, flowers.

I loaded, unloaded, loaded, unloaded, loaded, and unloaded the Camry.

My car packed for year in El Paso. August 2016.

My car packed for year in El Paso. August 2016.

Goodbye, dear old.



A slide show:

Good Night, Newm.

I left New Mexico in September 2013. This is a lost love letter, found.


Good night, Newm.

Good night, trains going east, west, north, and south.

Good night, dancing skeletons.

Good night, soaptree yuccas, my waving roadside soldiers.

Good night, American, Navajo, Mescalero, Chiricahua, Lipan, Jicarillo, Zuni, Hopi, Pueblo, Tortuga, Spanish, Mexican, German, and all of the ghost residents who rest below your soil.

Good night, fragrant roasted chiles.

Good night, Sacramento, Organ, San Andres, Jemez, Guadalupe, Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Good night, twin sunrises and twin sunsets.

Good night, shimmery White Sands.

Good night, grandiose Tularosa Basin.

Good night, sonic booms.

Good night, little red ants.

Good night, tarantulas.

Good night, pretty tamarisk.

Good night, tumbleweeds.

 

When I left New Mexico and entered Texas, back in September 2013, on my way to Missouri, I felt the slightest physical tug, as if I pushed through a living membrane that separated one world from the next.