The Queen of Bohemia Teaches Her Children how to Clean

I had a dream of my late husband, Frank. I was in this enormous house of sorts, and I saw him. He was dressed up either as the clown in Il Pagliachi or as the Tin Man as a homemade Halloween Costume, but he had the box outfit and a pointy hat and some make up on his face. I was really happy to see him, unlike other dreams in past years where I dreamed he had faked his death and it was a feeling of, "Oh, NO!"

I called him over and said, "Frank! It's so good to see you! Look! Here are your children! Both of them!" And Paloma and Alejandro were standing there, but he was ashamed or embarrassed and didn't want to come over. I woke up crying.

I didn't tell my children about that dream. I didn't want to upset them. I went about my day, which was doing the Mythic Yoga Retreat. It has been intense and wonderful. Doing my bliss. It has been raining every single day and it's wonderful, however, Speer flooded again. I did not call the tenant back but just referred Tom to call them.

Finally when the retreat was over, I packed up the kids to take a mini vacation to Manitou Springs. I packed up and cleaned the house. I instructed the children how to do it. I channeled their father in that he taught me that you clean the house so that you never have to come back to a dirty house. Take out the garbage so that it's not stinking. Run the dishwasher. There was a lot of work to do and I enlisted the kids' help. I said you don't want to end up having a house like Opa's. Alejandro got angry. He didn't want to do it. Paloma stood by my side in the kitchen helping, yet Alejandro continued to resist. I told him he would stay at Opa's if he did not help. He finally helped and got in the car angry.

Time went by before he cried. "I'm just so angry at Dad for abandoning me like this." I can see how at this age of 11 he really needs a male figure in his life. I'm sure he is cursing his life that he lives with his Bohemian artist mother. How I wish he could see that we live here in this Boulder place for him, so that he can go to a good school with his friends. I told him then about the dream. We talked a little about things.

"It is a bummer. But I'm sure Dad is embarrassed about what he did. It's OK. He just had a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I'm sorry he's not in your life, but I am signing you up for the Boulder Junior Rifle Club." I taught him that all that anger isn't going to do anything but rot your heart out, so it's better just to talk about and get it out. It's called house cleaning, I told him. "From the inside out."

And now we are in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Hanging out at a Super 8 motel which is kinda dumpy but it's cheap and we could bring our dog. Kids don't care. They love the pool and the TV and I can sleep and read and write and later we will head downtown for a little bite to eat. Our little family of three.

Of Mermaids and Mermen

Well. This Mythic Yoga stuff certainly is magic. Some strange psychic energies pour out. Turns out another e-course member had a dream of a mermaid, and then others connected to it too, and our one man used a merman as his symbol and wrote a story about mermaids coming out of the water, returning to the world. Blow your mind!
The myth of the Mermaid came up with by surprise and what the mermaid's message for me is that I get to be happy. There is no story; there is no drama; there is nothing to overcome. All is healed that can be healed. It/s like the 12 swans. The Queen is healed now and she has her court to support her. Things flow easier because everybody does everything else for her. So all she has to do is create.
And even though the Queen went herself down to Speer to find out that the cottage tenants are sneaking in a dog and she went to the front unit to have the appliance guy install the new dishwasher and even though it now turns out to be something electrical that corroded the washer plug and cracked the motor head and the appliance guy won't touch anything but copper wiring, the Queen did not freak out. She just relaxed and got another credit card application in the mail and figured not to worry. Tom can deal with it from here. Everything will work out. And now the Queen waits so that the new house hold help and nanny will relieve the final worry in her life, childcare. So that she can enjoy her children more and more because they will actually listen to somebody who is not the Queen and the house will be picked up and the prince and princess will not be damaged and insane like their grand mother, but actually healthy because they had a nanny who taught them how to clean, and they just had fun with their mother who did the deep cleaning on her own because she is, after all, The Queen of Bohemia and she Cleans her Own House.

The Queen of Bohemia is Half Goat and Half Fish

I hiked up the mountain behind my house again this afternoon with my dog, Sergeant Pepe. I am most certainly acquired the powers of the mermaid, the makarasana, half fish, half animal or bird. Goats and llamas. Quezalcoatle, half serpent and half bird, and the mermaid, half fish and half beautiful Siren.
I hiked up the mountain and I proclaimed myself The Queen of Bohemia, and I paused, and looked at all the beauty. I felt at one with Shiva, as if I were Parvati participating through my body. The wind blowing the gentle reeds along the path down the mountain.
I knew that all of what I have written in the past is past. It is over. It's just a story now. And I do not dwell. So The Queen of Bohemia left all her sorrow and tragedies and story behind, ran down the mountain and crossed over the creek at the bottom. The creek was lined thick with the reeds, so the path was hard to see, but Pepe led the way, as the Queen found her way to the water.
She crossed over and proclaimed that she lives only in the present and the world view is one of optimism and joy. Like in fairy tales, it all works out for the better.
That's what I expect. Like my dream last night, some women whose emphasis was their lovely brunette hair parted extremely at the side, one said. "To know that one is to live one's destiny."
I remember this flaming gypsy told me to not live my life but live my destiny. What is my destiny?
I like the idea of feeding children and helping women. And we'll see just how well the Queen of Bohemia manifests things, now that she realizes who she is. This half goat, half fish, the powers of the makarasana. Her life, the Capricorn that she is, so slow the perseverance to the top. Late in age, is she crowned her glory, and rests in the peace of her destiny.
She loves her little house, even though she doesn't own it. In fact, she always jokes that she owns three castles but doesn't live in any of them! I guess she likes to move around! And how much the Queen loves to be with her prince and princess, and tonight they are having a sleepover at the castle in front of the mountain and the Queen loves to play cook (for once.) Although she remembers her luxurious life when the King was alive, she does not regret the loss; she does not hold on. She let that all go. She does not feel fear or dread, like her mother, the sad, sick witch, instilled in her for so long. That spell is gone. The insecurity is gone, and what is in it's place is a sense of being held in the body. A relaxation do deep it engages everything around it through the body and the senses. It is in complete harmony with the environment and in the now. It is a different mother and she brings a grounded security. And the Queen is so grateful, for she knows that nothing else really matters. She knows you get to die and start all over again in some other star system of something or whatever you darn choose to create into reality, and so the Queen, she does.

Mythic Yoga

The Queen of Bohemia loves living in Boulder and thanks God every day that she does not live in Suburbistan. With her dorky black helmet on she loves to ride her pink moped downtown to meet her friend Wendy, whose art made it into the West End Gardener shop on the Pearl Street Mall.
That's me. The Queen of Bohemia. She's loving life. Despite all the shit that can rain down on her, she knows it's all still so beautiful. People are walking their dogs, riding their bikes, talking and running, children are living on garbage dumps in Cambodia. Life goes on in all its fascination and I no longer judge, think or worry about it. It just is and it's wonderful as it floats by.
The Queen of Bohemia has a shield. Wendy and I had ceviche at Aji and talked about the Mythic Yoga workshops and retreat we are doing. I talked about the outline of the workshop and how the shield making she would teach at her cabin in Rollinsville would fit in with the story of Durga and Kali that I am telling. I'm creating a mythic body armor for fairy tales that I create for myself to cope with life, as well as the telling in this memoir. This writing of my story, this exhalation of the testament to my life, to my word and experience. I've realized that this is just a story. I can peel my life and who I think I am away through the power of story. And I regain my self in this art of self reflection. And I create art as a testament and relic of my life and my experience. It holds my secrets and my spirit.
A bird is my spirit animal. Last year Wendy and I made masks, and mine was a big, black raven. This year it's shields, as the raven in my heart protects me and i need not fear life. I surrender and this image helps me cope. The grief and pain are lifted, and a bird flies up into the sky. My heart is as open as the night sky.
Wendy saw a friend who was getting ready for retirement and said, "To do the things I've always wanted to do." Despite my difficulties, I'm so grateful that I get to do what I want to do. I'm so grateful to be supported in my life and my work. When you really look at it it's quite a miracle. So I had the image of a butterfly for the symbol at the center of my shield. That all is well.
I went to a bankruptcy lawyer on Monday and I got the options. And the reality is that I have a pretty good situation and if Justin would just sell the house I'd be in much better shape. So I believe that will happen soon. And I will keep Speer and maybe sell Arvada and my finances are actually decent, and I have a promising future ahead that I trust in so risk everything. High risk, high reward, my late husband always said.
I realize that the biggest thing that the Queen of Bohemia does is that she does not focus on bankruptcy, she does not focus on disaster and doomsday and lack and poverty and war and hell and chaos. Her mother and father do not life with her. That is old. This is new. The Queen of Bohemia has cleansed all that negativity and mess from her inside and out.
She focuses ONLY on what she wants to appear in her realm. And that is a bright and lovely future. A League of Yogic Storytellers and Storytime Yoga Mission. I'd love to start a little yoga preschool in Mexico. It would be free to all. Sponsored by the United States Social Security Office. Fighting for the betterment of women and children around the world. I got that idea in a little store. I thought it was a yuppy place, lamenting how Boulder used to be, more funky. But there was a charming display of cute toys. It harkened back to birth, babies and young children. The fresh joy of life. i bought a little llama. It's sustainable economics, so worth the $10!
But I wanted to start this mission. What else do you have to do in life? Once you get past 40 it's a blessing. You get authentic quick or die. I remember when I was a reporter in Bakersfield I did a story about three sister's who owned a restaurant in Delano on skid row, decided to stop serving alcohol, and held Pentacostal revivals every Friday night for the people in the streets. I talked to a source and I remember he said, "When you find something to die for, you find something to live for. That's what Christ did." So, my first mythology was Christ, and it sounds a lot like Krishna, the story is imbedded in me so we shall see if this turns out! And then we can't forget Miriam, the first feminist, the water appearing in the heavy rains here in Boulder for the past month, and the water in the Mythic Yoga E-courses.
Maybe that is what the orange florescent mermaid in my dream is. I have had a lot of mermaids in my life lately. The Serapha makeup ad with a sexy young mermaid girl with heavy eye make up on the 29th street mall. I am a Capricorn and I march up a mountain most mornings. Then there is my fascination with Quetzalcoatl. This plaque that caught my eye at Tamsen's house of a crane with a woman let me to Google search that they are......the sirens. And the Siren's biggest power is their SILENCE.

Deep Cleaning

It has become the Queen of Bohemia's personal ritual to weekly clean the house. For there is a certain satisfaction to getting the dirt, the loss, the shame, the fear and all that goes with it in life's little tragedies, out. It is erased, like sand washing over the hieroglyphs. It is worn away and something new is created.
More so, it's the body that gets in there. The constant motion of the hands, the squats to get down on the floor and scrub into the corners. The mind stops; the heart opens. And whatever needs to be cleaned internally speaks its last words of reckoning and then vanishes like vapor from a tea kettle.
I realize that my father was the biggest wounding. Yes, my mother was a doozy, but he who survived the concentration camp of Java was so disempowered. I think of the seeds I purchased and planted in trays at his house in March. They sprouted, but promptly died from lack of attention. We did plant a few seedlings I purchased at a greenhouse in the back. But there is always the lack of initiative. The hope and the excitement of getting ready. Only to be met with disappointment and futility.
I ask my father when visiting his house to have the children help him weed the garden. Have him read to Paloma. He does not. They watch TV all day. My father sleeps in his bed.
I helped him get a reverse mortgage for his house before Frank died. And he has taken as much equity as he can out. And now another $30 k in equity will just be eaten up. I cannot understand the reasoning in this. He says the world is going to leap into the fifth dimension and none of this will matter. I do keep myself withdrawn from things, like the Speer property and panic about financials and see this as a grand projection that the Gita epitomizes in this action of life detached. But what the?!?!?!? I get angry. Why would he do that? How selfish! But then he is in survival mode, they say. And I cannot judge. For I do not need anything. The Queen of Bohemia has her own powers to manifest whatever she wishes. I love and forgive my father. The scrubbing lets go. The body scrubs and the body let's go the energy held in it. I am grateful that Dad takes my kids. That they get an Opa. That we have Thai food every week and that he is there for me to cry on when I really freak out about things.
The Queen of Bohemia scrubs away all the self doubt, all the fear and all the poverty mentality. Where she was afraid and thought she needed to move back to 1388 Kilkenny Street and take care of her father, she does not. She does not create chaos in her life any more. For she is settled. She has a lovely court to help her achieve her dreams. She cleans her own house, however, and that makes all the difference. For there is where her power lies. It lies within.

SAMBAL BADJACK

My father sits in a white undershirt at the kitchen table and eats Sambal Badjack, a paste of onions and chilies and garlic cooked down into a dark red, almost black, yellow-seeded mash. He buys it from Asian food markets. Along with petis, a fish paste that smells as bad as it sounds, or krupouk, prawn crackers that look like chips of shrinky dink plastic that when deep fried puff up into giant tasty Styrofoam things that tingle on your tongue.
Dad eats Sambal Badjack on everything. He eats it on bread, he eats it on spaghetti, he eats it with chicken, or he takes a big spoonful and shovels it in. Dad cooks us other Indonesian food, like the stuff that Kokki, his cook, made when he was growing up on Java. Like bami chicken, or nasi goring, fried rice, or babi ketchup, pork in soy sauce, or a lot of white rice with diced up hot dogs. He told me that’s all he ate when he came to this country, hot dogs and rice, hot dogs and rice.
When Dad sits at the kitchen table eating Sambal Badjack sandwiches he tells me stories. Stories of the jungles of Java, stories of the concentration camp. I take a seat next to him. First I have to pull the pile of old newspapers, broken roller skates and ketchup-stained rags off of a chair. Then I have to push back the zillions of thimbles, coffee-stained coupons, empty thread spools, rubber bands, textbooks, lace, rusty nails, buttons, magazine clippings and open spilling Sweet ‘N’ Low packets that cover the table with a fine white dust. I make a little clearing, and I put my peanut butter and butter sandwich there to eat.
I watch my father. His light Dutch blue eyes are like sapphires pressed into his dough-white skin, shadowed by a hard forehead streaked by bushy black brows . He stares off into the distance as if he is remembering something. Something. He takes a big spoonful of Sambal Badjack, smears it on wheat bread, folds it and takes a bite. I watch his jaw chew eagerly, rhythmically, and then I see the little beads of sweat, like rock candy, form on his temples and above his upper lip.
“Arhh!” he clears his throat. “God that’s hot! Wheew.” He loves it. He rubs his fingers through his hair. It would be all white, like his father’s sugar head of premature white at 40, if it weren’t for the hair color Grecian formula for men that Mom makes him use. So it’s a peanut butter brown, long on top with sides and back buzzed short.
He leans back in his chair to pull out a white cloth handkerchief from his pocket, keys and coins competing for his hand. He takes off his glasses, dabs his temples, wipes his lip, blows his nose. He clears his throat again, takes a spoonful of white sugar and places it on his tongue. It absorbs the heat, he says, or if that doesn’t do the trick, drink some buttermilk.
I watch. It’s like he’s having an out-of-body experience, like the one he had in the camp.
“Did I tell you that story?” he asks me. “How I died in the camp?” I chew on my peanut butter and butter sandwich. I know the story. He tells it a lot. When he’s 11 years old, about a year after being separated from his mother. When he got amoebic dysentery after eating snails from the river that the locals used as a latrine. The terrible cramps and diarrhea came and he went into the corner of a room where nobody came out alive. It was the same corner that the Japanese ordered him and the other little boys to drag out the bloated corpses of old men by their rubber band wrists and pile them up. Then once a week, to dig a hole outside the camp gates to bury them. Things decompose fast in the jungle, he says.
“I was in terrible pain, with cramps so bad, and then suddenly I saw myself outside of my body. I was looking down on everything, clear as day. I saw my grandmother and some other woman I didn’t recognize.” He is all hot from the Sambal Badjack. He chews a little bit more. “She said, ‘You must go back.’ And I thought. Back there? No way! But she said I must go back. Then I felt this strong pull and I was forced into my body again. The men looking after me said I was dead, but when I awoke, there was no trace of the disease. They couldn’t believe it. I was dead, and then I wasn’t.”
He keeps on chewing. Breathing heavy heat, holding on to a threshold. I’m with my father, in our kitchen, staring at the splat pad, the plastic sheet tacked to the wall behind the trashcan that catches all the multi-colored spit and food Mom launches in that direction. I stuff my mouth with the last of the peanut butter and butter sandwich. The ones I always make myself for lunch and for dinner these days. A big dry lump of peanut butter is still stuck in my throat, it only moves a little bit with each swallow. I think about the bully Vinh Grant in class. This Viet-Nam refugee and his sister Tia whose legs are in metal braces. How in class he reaches for my tit and my head gets hot in anger, and I push him away, but I don’t say anything. I wish he’d have died in his war and never made it to Mrs. Hinkle’s third grade class. I start making another sandwich.
I watch Dad again. Dad’s with his Sambal Badjack, with his hot peppers. The moldy hot peppers he collected from those in the camp who couldn’t take the heat.
“Thereafter, it’s the hot peppers I’m sure that burned out any amoebas or anything in me.” Hot peppers saved his life. But I can’t figure out why he had to go back. Why he had to live. I swallow the peanut butter down finally and it moves down my throat like a bowling ball in the gutter. Down to my stomach without a strike.
My mother walks in.
“Are you still eating that crap? It’s burning up your guts,” she laughs. “I don’t know why you eat that stuff. It’s going to kill you. And it costs a fortune as much as you eat, Albert.” She proceeds to microwave an egg.
My father doesn’t hear her. He is chewing on his Sambal Badjack sandwich. Heating up his body.
I go with Dad to the Asian supermarket in Boulder. Its smell should’ve warned me of what was to come in our kitchen. Dad searches for his ingredients, and I wander the store. There are cans of coconut milk, chili oil, and these tiny, dried fish, their eyeballs staring right out at you, crammed into little plastic packages, screaming, “There is no God.” There are stringy packages of noodles, cookbooks in Vietnamese. I recognize the clear jars of dad’s Sambal Badjack by the funny red writing and the drawing of a red rooster.
A little old Asian woman with a brown bubble perm and bad teeth smiles from behind the register as we check out. Dad has a handful of red peppers and puts them on the counter.
“Are these hot?” he asks her.
“Oh, Thai dragon. Yes, very,” she says, with a half smile, probably thinking what the hell is this white guy going to do with these peppers and is he going to sue me if he dies from eating them?
When we come home, Mom is exercising in yellow terrycloth shorts and a black t-shirt that says, HERE COMES TROUBLE. She has on The Green Berets record full blast and she is jumping up and down. Jeanie has on a blue jean jacket swarming with dozens of music group buttons. She’s swinging her arms left-to-right too, and then starts marching like in the army.
PUT SILVER WINGS ON MY SON’S CHEST. MAKE HIM ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST. ONE HUNDRED MEN WILL TEST TODAY. BUT ONLY THREE GET A GREEN BERET.
“Come on, Patti, dance with me.” I watch the thunderous jiggling of Mom’s fat belly, like a giant slab of pizza dough stretched around her middle and forced to endure a bumpy joy ride. “Help me lose this fat off my belly,” she says and grabs it. She dances on her thin legs, pasty white, racked with varicose veins, blue like the map of a river delta. “I wish I could move some of this fat to my skinny dog bone legs,” she calls out. She lifts her knees, left, right, left. “I hate my skinny dog bone legs.”
I laugh as Dad goes into the kitchen to start cooking. I watch as he chops with precision the garlic and onions and chilies and puts them into a pan of hot oil. “SHHHHHHHH” they hiss as the oil sizzles.
I hear the needle scratch across the record and Mom puts on Eartha Kitt.

I USE MY CHARMS TO DELIGHT YOU, MY TRICKS TO ENTICE YOU, AND ALL OF THE CHARM OF THE WEAKER SEX TO VOODOO YOU. THEY SAY THAT I’M A WITCH AND THAT I WEAVE A SPELL. BUT I’LL BE A SON OF A, I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE… WELL LET ME TELL YOU BROTHER I’D RATHER BE BURNED AS A WITCH THAN NEVER BE BURNED AT ALL.

I come in to dance with Mom. She makes a funny evil face scrunching it together, so that she looks just like the puppet witch from Santa Fe that is hanging on our front door. Our front door that is covered by a white screen door that the spring is broken so it closes with a whack. Jeanie and I start slam dancing off each other, throwing our arms up in the air, laughing, jiggling.
“Hey, be careful, you’re going to break something,” she says. She touches her toes, twists left to right panting. “I wish I were beautiful, kids. Patti, Jeanie, get a rich husband. Why can’t we be rich? We could sail to Europe, move to New York and eat at fancy restaurants all the time. Beautiful, beautiful, BEAUTIFUL.” Her arms are thrown up in the air. “Marry a rich husband, girls. Don’t live in dog dump like this.”
Soon you can really smell the onions and garlic and chilies all cooked up. A heavy haze of smoke fills the house and begins to burn our eyes.
“My God! Albert! Rat, cat, dog shit. Dog tricks!” my mother cries, half laughing, running toward the kitchen. “Hurry! Open the doors and windows! Our eyes are burning up from that crap, Albert!” Dad stirs the onions and the garlic and the chilies. Stirs the onions and the garlic and the chilies, his head in all the smoke.
Jeanie and I throw open all the windows, rubbing our eyes. I can see Brad the neighbor boy across the street watching. Then Mom, Jeanie and I run out to the back yard and are flooded with yellow sunlight, hot rays on our faces. My eyes still sting, my stomach hurts from laughing. We dance. We sing. We smell the Sambal Badjack.

K’NANCY

I share a room with Nancy. Six years older than me. Nancy, my face close next to hers when we sleep in the big double bed. Her breath and skin smell like a plastic scrubbed clean, her pink nightgown body like a wood spirit, caressed by the long brown hair she brushes 100 times a night. Nancy who is in jr. high school, listens to KIMN radio top 40 under her pillow at night, We had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun. Nancy, rubs a lemon half on her face trying to lighten the soft brown freckles splashing her face. Does palming exersizes for her eyes so she won’t have to wear glasses one day.
Nancy, who takes me by the hand at the Boulder Public Library, past the smelly, bearded people who are always sleeping in the red and orange chairs, up the big steps to the metal stacks of books while Mom is off foraging through the free magazine pile. Nancy takes me to the homemaker section, books on how to change a baby’s diaper, like she used to change mine, how to square corners on sheets when making the bed. What kinds of appliances to stock in your kitchen, the hand mixer, the deep fryer, a flour sifter. Books to dream on top of our bed together, a dream house. Clean, orderly. Me the baby, Nancy the mother.
Nancy, who I sit with her in front of the black and white TV and bid on the washing machines on The Price is Right. “I won!” She cries, and she’s off to win the trip to Europe and the Broyhill living room set. Nancy, who I watch American Bandstand and Happy Days with and dream of kissing Fonzie, and Nancy tells me that the secret to a driving a guy wild with a kiss is to suck the roof of his mouth with your tongue. Nancy who looks in the mirror and combs her brown curly hair and says, “I hate my hair,” and I look in the mirror and I say, “I hate mine too.” And I do. I hate my hair forever and ever.
Nancy, who opens her yellow, plastic knickknack box. I watch the toy contents, won from gumball machines, spill open. Rat Fink, a little black smiling rat; a tiny book you look through holding up to the light that reads, “love thy neighbor;” a heart-shaped locket with a rose on it; a miniature magnifying glass; a teeny, tiny newspaper. Little things Nancy keeps in her box. Or she tells me stories and sings to me, does hand games.
Oh playmate, come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree
Slide down my rain barrel
Into my cellar door
And we’ll be jolly friends
For ever more, more, more more more.

Oh enemy, come out and fight with me
And bring your soldiers three
Climb up my ivy tree
Slide down my gun barrel
Into my trap door
And we’ll be enemies
For ever more, more more more more

Nancy. I watch her play with Barbie and Midge and Ken and Skipper and G.I. Joe. Or she teaches me to write poetry or make God’s eyes out of two chopsticks and colored yarn, or decorate tin cans with string and glued macaroni elbows, or play tennis against the garage door leaving little round marks, or play with her pink clackers that bruise our wrists, or draw house plans together and dream where our bedroom will be and our husband who he will be and our children. How many children will we have? Opening the door to the Mystery Date game. Spinning the knob on the game of LIFE, spinning it so hard because you want to land on TWIN BOYS! So hard that it flies up off the game board like a flying saucer.
“KNANCY!” mom yells, standing in our bedroom doorway. She says K’Nancy
because her false teeth don’t fit her right and she can only say her name as “K’Nancy!” “Come and sweep this floor, Damn it. It’s filthy! Albert! Where is Albert? Take out the garbage.”
Nancy snickers to me, “Knancy! Knancy!”
“Shit! You dirty little bitch. How dare you make fun of me!” Mom’s face is hard like a fist, red, like a wild dog, her teeth thrashing, spitting. Sloshing her false teeth around in her mouth. “Dirty little bitch! You get in there and clean up that kitchen. Damn you!” With each word Nancy’s chest caves in, her startled eyes flash downward in a silent daze. I am frozen too. Clubbed into concrete by Mom’s words. My heart sinks, for Nancy. I want to run away with her, to rest in Nancy’s lap, for her to show me more Teen magazines, to grow more avocado plants from a pit just like the ad in Teen for Isadora and her avocado plant. To write more in our diaries about the boys at school, or to pluck our eyebrows thin, thinner than a pencil line, thin and arched like fishhooks. Or make collages of magazine cut-outs of couples kissing, of couples in love, of babies smiling, smiling in our dream families, with their dream mother, with their dream appliances and dream hair dryers.
“Albert! Where the hell is Albert? Did he run away to the Campbell boys again? He’s got to help too. Shit, dog house. Dog tricks,” Mom says leading Nancy away to the kitchen. And I am alone. Alone in the universe.
“Nancy, Nancy,” my heart calls.

Tamsen's House

I went to visit Tamsen in Greeley. She is my best friend from the fifth grade. We’ve kept in touch all these years. She is a lesbian and lived for something like 25 years in San Francisco and earlier this year moved in with her sister because she is disabled with MS.
She was rather bored in her room, playing second life all the time, surrounded by 7 puppy mill rescued Bichon Frises. So I came up.
So did Jenny. Jenny is another friend from childhood. We were all pals. She brought lunch and some artwork Tamsen made her when we were in Jr. High School.

Tamsen’s sister’s house is pretty typical, and a lot like her mother’s neat, nursing home décor. I used to admire how neat their house was: a dollhouse, a front room that was spotless. This house is a lot like that, yet it smells bad from the dog urine in the carpet. Milo, the only male of the dog pack, bit my knee. I was on high alert from then on.

Tamsen has had a lot of different houses that I have visited over the years. The first in San Leandro when she was living with her lover from school, Jenny. (another Jenny.) The house was very fine and had about 15 ferrets living with them. But they broke up; Jenny married another woman, and Tamsen took a turn for the worse

I was working as a reporter in Bakersfield when I visited her after that. She lived in a crawl space below a house in San Francisco. There was nowhere for me to sleep, and she didn’t want me to sleep next to her, so the only other space was next to the 50 or so mice crammed into a little cage; the wheel’s whirring would have kept me awake all night, along with the wood chips flying out. So I slept on the sidewalk.

Her next house was better. On Haight Street. She kept a dead rat I her freezer. I hung out there for a couple of weeks before I moved back to Colorado.

Jenny looks great. Like a tennis coach or something, but she’s a voice coach.
She inspected her food thoroughly before she ate it. We ate outside because of the smell. It was enjoyable, as we all talked about our neuroses, yet confessed that that is what makes us so damn fun, so creative and life so alive. People like us for our wild spice.
It was made evident that Tamsen had a crush on Jenny in childhood. Hence the art she made her, and a locket. I never knew. Tamsen said I was her best friend so it couldn’t have been me! Just as well! It would turn out that my first love in high school, Gareth, would turn out gay too! C’est la vie! Amor Fati!

The interesting thing is that people this far back, they knew you when, they knew your mother and father. We talked about my mother and her mother. Mean people who destroyed your self-esteem, crushed it to the bone. But some how you survive and make art out of it. Or at least try to. Her sister said their mother, who was a nurse, always thought my mother had syphilis of the brain, because of her strange nose. I told them it was because her nose was broken as a teenager from being kicked in the face by a horse, so the story I was told. Plastic surgery wasn't too good back in the 1950s. Now I wonder. What is truth?

Tamsen’s dog is named Jenny. She said how Jenny who married another woman is having a baby with her. She talked about it three times.
It was good to see her in her house. Friends always help you remember and they also help you heal.

Myths for Grief

I realize that the steam train rolling over my wagon in the dream is grief. It can really hit you. The grief of life rolls over and busts you up like a steam train crushing your wagon, dragging you beneath. The spirit will always survive, my little dog escaping, but you do have to deal with the grief. It is heavy, dark, crushing. Unfathomable but deserving to be recognized in its own right. That's what it wants - to be recognized and taken care of and then you will be free. A lot like Ereshkigal crying and her sister Inanna coming to hear her in her grief over the death of her husband, the bull. And Inanna was reborn as a result.

I think about my husband committing suicide over the fact that his business went bankrupt. That he had no finances left. I think about him making that choice. I look at my children. I think about if I were in the same situation, and it can always be possible. Would I kill myself over money? It seems to be the American past time these days, if not globally. I was looking out the kitchen window, where on the sill a crystal vase held a giant fuchsia peony from the garden that my daughter brought in yesterday. It is next to a white candle and cobalt blue bottle and a tile from an ancestral house from 17th century Holland. The flood of light came in through the window. Could I abandon my children? There is a Native American saying that a culture is not down until its women are down, because the women always stick around for their children.

I thought of all this as I looked over at my daughter near the stove. We were making macaroni and cheese. I taught her how to open the cheese powder package and I told her, "This is your father speaking. He drove me nuts with his neatness, but I can tell you this. If you don't make a mess, you don't have more to clean up later. This is true. You can have a house that looks like Opa's, or you can make life easier on yourself and be efficient." So I channeled her father for her, because she was 2 1/2 when he died. And I looked into her eyes and we stirred the milk and butter in and I thought, this is one fucked up country to be so focused on economics and not focused on life. How can you kill yourself when there is so much beauty and life in the world? You just have to learn some myths for your grief.

My lawyer is on vacation. Justin is wheeling and dealing as usual. Foreclosure, who knows? Will I ever be paid? I have no idea. It rained all weekend and instead of rejoicing in the green that is usually brown Colorado, I worried if Speer was flooding. Miguel called. Yes it did get a little bit wet inside near his bed. They took care of it. Tom was unavailable to deal because his son was graduating from high school. But the big issue was parking. No parking for them. So I had to call around and assign parking and that's all I can deal with right now because I want to focus on the beautiful - my beautiful grief that is a story line of tragedy for the Gods to enjoy. Like the words on this computer and my heart releasing little by little all its broken arrows lodged in its flesh.