Güd wrtr

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.“
—Virginia Woolf
from her novel, “Mrs. Dalloway,” 1925

•••

Of course, she would. She could choose
what she wanted that way, the just-right

nosegays and peonies with some merry
daisies thrown in for her party. And each

time I walk into the store where I intend
to buy groceries, I am distracted—truly

tempted—by the seductive bouquets
wrapped in their alluring mylar, whispering,

“You really want to take me home,
don’t you?” And I do—I so do—though

flowers just for me, for no occasion,
seems so frivolous, so unnecessary

when all summer long hollyhocks
and roses, cosmos and daisies have

bloomed their fool heads off in my yard.
But, now September, there’s nothing

vase-worthy in the yard, so I pause—as
I envision the fictional Mrs. Dalloway

might do—amid buckets so ripe with
greenhouse specimens that they barely

resemble anything most of us could
ever grow. And that’s the point—

to scoop up such beauty just for
the sake of loveliness, bring it home

and distribute it into one or more vases
begging for floral sustenance.

For, as a friend likes to say,
Flowers are always appropriate,

which justifies my swoon as,
standing among the dazzlers,

I allow myself to be enticed,
and choose a bundle, lift it

dripping from its temporary
home to take to mine

for no good reason.
Or just because—

the best reason of all.

•••

For Connie Raub, florist and friend extraordinare

(in memory of Nell Lester)

At the end of the afternoon
we three stand on the small deck
overlooking the unfenced yard that
yawns into a green swath of trees,
as Sue, after filling the big feeder,
also spreads a thick seed ribbon
across the deck for the birds.

Her mother kept the birds fed—
at their lakeside house next to ours
where we all grew up, and this one,
her last, in the foothills—and Sue
shows up a few times a week
to continue the tradition.

The birds don’t realize that
the nice lady who fed them flew
into mystery nine months ago, that
her tall daughter who offers them
sustenance does this as kindness
of wildlife as well as in tribute to
the one who fed her, who fed us all,

with homemade holey bread that
peanut butter adhered to like glue
and jelly fell through—along with
endless rounds of hefty cookies and
tuna and noodle casserole, which
still defines comfort food for me.

We three sisters under the skin—
who grew up next door to each other,
who walked to the bus stop and
Girl Scout’d and played in the band
together—gather as 60-somethings
to pull books off Sue’s mother’s shelves,
crack them open like time capsules
to discover tucked-in notes and delight
in flyleaf inscriptions in the hand
of the dearly departed.

Empty boxes fill; keepers find
their way to an emptied set of shelves.
Treasures emerge—her own neatly typed
poems, a tiny French dictionary that
Sue, age seven, inscribed in 1964 to her
mother, whose high school graduation
photo we pass from hand to hand to hand.

We three, who would not know her
till years later, admire this young woman’s
dark hair and shining eyes, her future
stretching ahead of her, this one who
loved birds and raised one of us to fledge
and fly, the one who, in so many ways,
helped the girls from Granite Oaks Drive
become the us,

the we who endure to this day.

(For Deb)

On a glorious windless morning
walk by the river, we admire
the longstanding trees still

loaded with the season’s
full complement of green.
Surely they must gaze

at their reflections on
the unusually glassy surface,
as we do, and think,

in this snapshot of a moment,
Lookin’ good, friends.
So, so good.

(for Mom)

Our shadows walk side by side,
yours pushing the apparatus that

helps you stand taller, ache less,
and in our shadows I imagine

a much younger you pushing
a much younger me

in a different kind of rolling
contraption, perhaps just as

slowly, with great deliberation,
moving the two of us then

from there to here. And
here we are now,

in a here we could not have
envisioned in the then.

But here we still are,
walking beside each other,

me and my shadow,
you and yours.

And this is what I promise
to remember in the someday

when my shadow walks
alone—our silhouettes,

just like this,
in the forever here.

We forgave. We remembered. We made cocktails. We got tender.
— Jenny Hollowell from “A History of Everything”

If we live long enough, with luck,
we soften around the edges,
some of us growing doughy,
most of us wrinkly, even in places
that surprise us—the corners of our eyes,
around the ankles, like elephants, whose
famed memories we wish we possessed.

If we live long enough, we will watch others leave,
we imagine, before their time. Which means
before we want them to. This, too, tenderizes us.
We let go of old grudges; we forget long ago hurts
as we realize that we are not entirely blameless.

We remember things that surprise us:
the quality of light on her hair when
she said, “I love you,” or the tremor
in his voice when he said, “I’m proud of you.”

The way the baseball thunked into the mitt.
The shock of diving into cool water.
The way fall leaves annually performed
perfect pirouettes to the ground.
How we twisted or jived or jitterbugged
away that enchanted evening we hadn’t
thought of in decades.

If we’re lucky, we live long enough to let go
of unpleasantries, let bygones be truly gone.

We forgive and forget because in the end,
if we do this right, our hearts pump only love,
churn pure gratitude through our old blue veins
that river our hands, that hold each other tenderly—
our last, best memory.

So let’s invent some:

• All the Stuff That Bloomed in June
Had Died—Do I Have Time or Energy
To Plant More Before It All Dies Again?

• Time For a Rain Dance Because One More
Damn Day of 100-Degree Weather and
I’m Gonna Move Into the Freezer.

• No, I’m Not Sick of Barbecuing
All Summer Long. Really, I’m Not.
Fire Up That Grill.

• Squeeze In One More Getaway
To the Waterside Location
Dearest to Your Overheated Heart.

• Do Everything to Ignore the Fact
That School Starts Way Too Early,
(Students’ Edition)

• Put Off Till the Last Possible
Moment Getting Ready for School,
(Teachers’ Edition)

• Hallelujah! Free At Last!
No More Students’ Dirty Looks!
(Retired Teachers’ Edition)

•••

(For my teacher friends and family launching into another school year…
this retired teacher salutes you!)

Way back in the previous century,
I soloed Saturdays in the office
of an international wire service,
posted there to cover the newfangled
California lottery.

I’d have the TV on, glancing up
from my huge CRT monitor
at the Big Spin, a game show-style
program where lucky Californians
hoping for a big win got to twirl
a huge roulette wheel mounted
vertically for the camera—
all the force of their hope
thrumming through their arm.

Lucky ones went home with something,
though nothing like the millions
now coursing around the state
as people put money down on a series
of numbers that they hope will make
them rich.

Now, on a Momday of driving and
dropping her off at appointments,
as I fuel up her car, the vertically
spinning numbers stop precisely
at $47. And when I go inside to claim
my three dollars in change, the clerk
hands it to me saying,
That’s lottery ticket kinda luck.

I chuckle, head back outside to look
again at the digits lined up neatly
on the pump, and think,
Why not?

I go back inside with my three bucks
and say to the same clerk,
What kind of tickets can I get for this?

She laughs, points to the $2
scratchers, then the $1 ones,
or, she says, I can also have three
shots at the big jackpot, hovering
around $500 million at the moment,
though I’d have to stand there
and choose a hopeful combination
of numbers.

Needing to retrieve Mom, I land
on the fastest option—two brightly
decorated scratchers—imagining how
long the odds might be to even win
back my three bucks.

Good luck! grins the clerk.

And before I even get in the car,
before I scratch those little cards,
I behold the delighted smiles and squeals
of people who once spun the big
wheel on TV and went home with
a little more cash in their pockets
and a little more faith in their
brilliantly lucky stars.

(for the good folks at Vic’s Ice Cream in Sacramento)

The thing is that it’s real turkey,
carved off the bird, all the way
to the carcass, like the afters
of Thanksgiving

when you hack off a piece
of white meat, slap on it on some
good sourdough and layer it up
with, say, with your favorite (savory)
greenery and maybe a tomato,
not to mention the close-to-
your-heart condiments.

Vic’s does this. Burr’s used to.

How we miss Jim Burr’s old spot
across town, its windows long
covered in paper, no sign that
ice cream and sandwiches will
ever emerge again from our go-to
place,

where parents took kids after school,
after baseball, before Halloween runs,
where folks our age took their ancient
parents until they faded away.

Now we’re the old ones.

And now Vic’s is for sale, and we
worry that if it sells, it will get
cleaned up and fancified, the turkey
will morph into slimy, store-bought stuff,
the ice cream no longer conceived
in the back room,

the counters presided over by
teenage judges wielding scoops
and issuing cones with authority
they won’t otherwise acquire
for years.

Everything changes, of course;
businesses, too, have lifespans,
coming and going—the going often
much sooner than we’d like.

But isn’t that life?

So we hustle ourselves over to Vic’s
and snag the last booth in the snug shop
to watch red-shirted baseball kids
twisting on the stools at the 1940s
counter, high school girls giggling
loudly in the booth behind us.

And when the turkey arrives for me,
and the hot dog sliced onto fresh
sourdough for you, we sigh after
our first bites, aware of this precious
moment, wanting to somehow
store more than sandwiches and
ice cream into our cellular memory.

We leave a big tip for the tall boy
with the fabulous ’fro who flashes
two thumbs up when we tell
him how great everything is.

“See you next time,” he says
when we pay at the tablet
on the counter where the cash
register used to be.

We catch that hope like a gently
lobbed ball, and return it.
“Yes,” we say. “Till next time.”

We asked for a map
but, as she accepts,
she gives us a compass,

not directions exactly,
but pointing the way to
more of what we hold

in our hearts—away
from fear and meanness
to y’all come and

everyone in the pool.
It’s summer, and she
makes us all welcome.

Here, she offers,
let me dab a bit of
sunscreen on your nose,

and you can do mine.
Then let’s make our
way to the edge, you

jumping in like a kid
loosed from school, me
sitting, feet dangling,

until I’m ready to enter.
All ways are good, she insists.
Kindness prevails.

We accept, as she does,
with grace and goodwill,
for isn’t summer our

treasured season of
warmth, of friendly water
beckoning to everyone?

Of hope?

I wonder sometimes if I am writing the same poem over and over.
If I’ve lived in the rooms of the lines so long, I’ve left crease marks on the furniture.

—Maya Stein

•••

Perhaps this is why I don’t invite many
people in for a visit. Not just because of

the too-much-stuff issue, or because
someone might step into a bit of hairball

one of the four-leggeds left on the floor,
and I missed, but because a sharp-eyed

guest might notice the pile of “lovely”s
in the corner—one of my overused words—

not to mention my tendency toward
three-line stanzas, linguistic tripods

holding up the coffee table. And oh,
dear, though I sweep regularly,

I’ll never clear out all the love poems
to a dead husband, or the ones to

the gloriously resurrected partner,
or, for that matter, the gratitude

oozing from every houseplant
that has seeped into me and onto

the page for so long, you could
say that we are more than a bit

overwatered. But I like it this way,
up to my knees in metaphor,

redolent with repetition, not to
mention giddy with alliteration.

I wouldn’t trade it for a squeaky
clean, spotless life, free of cliché

for all the tea in my happily
overfull cupboard.