Güd wrtr

for Cora Johnson

She once played a two-bit
dancehall girl in a small
Nevada town—a bit of
a floozy, Peachy Keen—

but we know her as
the most loyal of friends,
a gal who’d upend her life,
grab her best college buddy

from Colorado and fly
to Hawaii—nowhere near
a beach—to care for a fella
fresh from a triple bypass,

shivering in an unheated
rental house in the clouds,
the ladies bundling him up
burrito-style in a bedspread,

feeding and pilling him
like an ailing cat, toweling
him dry after showers,
coaxing him into short

walks down the block,
then flying him home
to me, the two of us
beyond grateful to

the two of them for
a half century of love
and friendship, for this
woman—who truly is

Peachy Keen.

•••

(With thanks and love also to Connie Raub, the other half of this dynamic duo.)

Lazy clouds meander like legless sheep
across the blue-eyed sky, pencil-pointed
peaks jutting into it, mountains we

haven’t seen in ages, ones swathed
so long in snow it seemed that their
rocky faces would never reappear.

But there they are, the old reliables,
Sierra sentinels that range north
to south for 400 miles, the western

backbone of the Americas. We drive
through these mountains that one
of us used to traverse on foot,

that feel like dear friends, spreading
their craggy arms wide to embrace
the great bowl of lake where we

will land for a while, where we
will sit ourselves on a bench
overlooking the shore to watch

a trio of ducks unzip the impossibly
blue water in their wake. We find
ourselves transfixed, resting,

just happy to be here, as my
blue-eyed love likes to say, in this
place that will certainly outlast

us reliable oldsters, young in
geologic time, rocky ancestors
beaming the day’s last rays at us,

like proud grandparents
whose cherished descendants
just dropped in for a visit.

No, Ma, you are not a size 14 or an XL—
you’re the incredible shrinking woman,
well below your high school weight
of 118, a whopping 101 now,

a size 8 at best and certainly
a petite. No, you’re not 5-feet-4
any more. I’m 5-feet-4, and look,
you’re at least two inches shorter,

so yes, that makes you a petite.
So here, I ordered you some
8P pants to see how they fit.
I know your 12s still sort of fit

thanks to the stretchy waists,
but you look like you’re wearing
bloomers—there’s so much extra
fabric around your hips and thighs.

Though size doesn’t matter, Ma.
Look at you on a typical Momday:
acupuncturist, then lunch and
chiropractor, then to Curves

to do all the machines twice, and,
come evening, singing baritone
at Sweet Adelines rehearsal.
There may be less of you, but

you’re wringing every bit of life
out of this one. Yes, I know
you hope for reincarnation,
and you plan to make it to 120,

but Ma, I’m having a hard time
keeping up with you. And see?
Those 8Ps fit you just right.
How ’bout that?

And look at you—going through
the too-bigs, letting me bag them
for donation, keeping some
favorites, ordering smaller sizes.

Smaller does not mean less
than, Ma. You’re a pint-sized
pack of strong woman, and
your daughters are taking

notes on How to Be a Vibrant
92-year-old. Yes, vivacious
too. Full of vim and vigor.
And with, God help us all,

no small amount of spunk.*

(*Lou Grant may have hated spunk,
but we love yours!)

(for Donna Gail)
•••
Granite Bay, summer 1966

We are fish out of water, little sister,
far from where we started:
flat land close to ocean
choked with palm trees
and orange groves, sidewalks
for roller skates and bikes,
Disneyland, four grandparents,
two aunts and an uncle and
two older girl cousins we adore.

Now we find ourselves
hundreds of miles north,
amid hills laced with giant-armed
oaks and long, waving grasses
that lighten under summer sun,
like our hair that grows more
blonde each day. Our skin pinkens,
too, with itchy poison oak
bumps that teach us:
leaves of three, let them be.

We live next to a big lake
that floats the wooden ski boat
Daddy built with Grandpa.
And next summer, after we
finish all our swimming lessons,
Mommy will float with us
in the deep blue, steady us
until we are pulled to our feet,
on long, wooden planks,
wobble a bit, then magically skim
across this liquid expanse.

We are girl fish growing gills
that allow us to breathe
this new kind of air.

Permission granted to:

• let your brain roll around in its hard shell
• grasp at this thought or that
• mull over the to-do list (or avoid it)
• allow your monkey mind to leap from branch to branch
until it settles into a perfect spot in a just-right tree,
to get itself out of the way & allow what wants
to emerge to emerge

Permission granted to forgive:

• the hard stuff
• the missteps
• the mistakes
• the blunders
• the embarrassing I-can’t-write/talk-about-this stuff
• the parent/teacher/adult in charge who got it wrong/yelled/
blamed you/made you feel less than/maybe didn’t mean to
• the adored one who said, It’s not you, it’s me
• the ones who were not the best choices
• the ones who were good choices but had some less-than-good moments
• your own less-than-good moments
• leaving when it got too hard
• staying longer than was wise
• the things you ingested/inhaled/imbibed that did not
serve you well
• the dying pet you had euthanized perhaps too soon—
or not soon enough
• the friends/family/lovers/spouses/partners/kind-hearted ones
whom you did not tell nearly often enough thank you/
I love you/you’re the best/I’m so lucky to find myself
in your orbit

Permission granted to:

• let go of all the woulda/coulda/shouldas
• love anyway
• apologize
• be forgiven
• cry if you want to (it’s your party)
• let the world work its healing magic
on your cracked-open heart
& (best of all)
• remember that it’s all story, so write it down
& watch those malleable words turn to art in your
kindly/capable/compassionate hands.

Last light blazes horizontally through
the urban jungle of volunteers in all shades
of green, around the thick, old sycamore
flashing leaves the size of bread plates.
Sunbeams strike the century-old house,
turning its pink stucco vaguely tangerine.

On the deck, two slender ficus rise from
their pots, grateful to spend summer outside,
unaware that coming cooling nights will
require relocation inside over winter.

On the lawn the orange cat snoozes
belly up, more golden than usual
in the waning light, his spine comfortably
twisted, rabbit feet twitching on some dreamy
adventure. The older brown tabby stalks
tiny bugs lifting skyward, swats at them
with surprising speed for an old girl.

And you, caretaker of this place for now,
sit crossed-legged on the grass, remember
sultry evenings when, just over there,

small nieces and nephews splashed in
a blow-up pool, when young men wielded
long-handled forks and spatulas before
a spherical black barbecue, when elders
sat in homemade Adirondack chairs
on the deck they helped build, hands
wrapped around cold beer bottles,

when, for a spot of a moment,
family gathered for occasions
you can no longer name—

when you were half of that couple,
when he still breathed,
when you tumbled into bed,
exhausted and happy, next to him,
the one with whom you made this place
a home.

Well, you may go to college
You may go to school
You may have a pink Cadillac
But don’t you be nobody’s fool.

—from Arthur Gunter’s “Baby, Let’s Play House,”
recorded in 1955 by Elvis Presley with additional lyrics

•••

On this day in 1957
Elvis plays the Lincoln Bowl
in Tacoma, Washington,
before 6,000 screaming fans—

two years after he hits the national
charts and signs a record deal, when he
buys his first Caddy, a 1954 Fleetwood
Series 60. In pink. Which, several months
later, goes up in flames and dies by side
of the road between Hope and Texarkana.

But he’s Elvis. He buys a replacement.
In blue. Has a neighbor on Lamar Avenue
repaint the new model in a shade later
dubbed Elvis Rose, which he gives to his
mama, who does not drive. So Elvis does.

It’s the thought, of course.

But it is Bruce who, seven years
after the King’s death, brings the pink
Cadillac to life for me in his raspy baritone,
on the B side of a 45 with a driving bass
line and Clarence’s wailing sax:

I love you for your pink Cadillac,
crushed velvet seats, riding in the back
cruising down the street, waving to the girls,
feeling out of sight, spending all my money
on a Saturday night….

Elvis’s ride lives enshrined at Graceland,
of course, and I wonder how many older
ladies and perhaps not a few men swoon
over that glamorous symbol of luxury
and pizzazz. I fear, should I find myself
there one day, I might do the same—
not because of the man who owned it
but because of the song that has thrummed
through my brain for nearly four decades:

Some folks say it’s too big
and uses too much gas.
But my love is bigger than a Honda.
Yeah, it’s bigger than a Subaru.
Man, there’s only one thing,
only one car that’ll do….

And though my love is bigger than
the Hyundai in my driveway, it’s gotta
sound system that’ll crank up Bruce
so he and Elvis and I can motor down
the highway singing with all our might:

Honey, I just wonder what you do there
in the back of your pink Cadillac,
pink Cadillac,
pink Cadillac,
pink Cadillac….

•••

You can listen to Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 recording of “Pink Cadillac” here.

In these summer months named
for Roman emperors—Julius
and his adopted son Augustus—
we find ourselves happily full
of two sets of 31 days,

and on this, the 31st day of
the eighth month, the moon
tonight rises super full, closer
to Earth, looking larger and
brighter, but not blue,

though this one is called that,
its perfect roundness appearing
twice in a calendar month.

On nights like these I stop
wherever I am to watch her
stately climb into the eastern sky,
though I know that we’re the ones
slowly rotating on the planet
below her magnificence,

remembering Augustus’s
famous last words:
Have I played the part well?
Then applaud as I exit.

And I do, every time—
putting my hands together
for our blesséd super moon,
a major player making her
grand entrance so brilliantly,

reflecting the light of our
nearest star and, before
making a graceful exit,
casting puddles of sweet
moonshine on earthly
beings like me.

(for National Grief Awareness Day)

•••
I want to praise things that cannot last…
I want to praise everything brief and finite.
—poet Barbara Crooker
•••

Praise the too-soon gone:
the leaves that decorated spring
with their green hands months ago,
brittling in the last days of summer,
soon turning to detritus underfoot
as fall falls,

as the year itself soon ends—
another one almost gone.
Where, we always ask,
did it go?

Like the ones we imagine gone,
no longer embodied because
we don’t see them walking
through our lives—

we think them vanished,
when, like the leaves,
like all the days of our lives,
we have drunk them deep,
absorbed them into our cells
where they now live.

They never disappear,
just as we have embedded
ourselves into the loved ones
we will one day leave behind—

we, the too-soon gone,
who will turn from mourning
into the mourned.

(for our father Roger, who art, we imagine, in heaven,
and my sister Donna, who, happily, is still embodied)

I invoked your names today on the driveway
where more than a half century ago

one of you taught us how to wash a car,
and the other promptly set about doing so

weekly for 50 cents a vehicle, always beating
me to the punch and doing a bang-up job

on the Toyota and Chevy that lived in our
garage—where, just outside today, I stood

spraying off Mother’s Elantra, which I am
now driving, because, Father and Sister

forgive me, it has been three weeks since
its last wash and detailing to a fare-thee-well

by the Car Wash Goddess, then entrusted
into my care squeaky clean for Momdays

(which, I understand, some call Mondays)
when I drive her around and on other days

when I drive just me around. And though
I am not doing a thorough wash with

bucket and soap and sponge and chamois,
I have also watered the thirsty plants in

both front and back yards where we once
climbed oak trees and soaked up sun like

lizards on days like today that will top out
at the century mark. And I am reasonably

sure that Mother’s baby car will dry just fine,
no spots, with a clean windshield, and if I

get a little wet in the process, no problem
on this near-the-end-of-summer afternoon,

all of you here in spirit, giving me, I like
to think, a thumb’s up for a job, while

not up to your impeccable standards,
that’s close enough, as Father would say,

for government work.