Old friends, reconnecting after 33 years

The first of November I am blessed with the company of a rare soul I know, as we walk around Golden Gate Park at night in the fall rain.
She buys me dinner of vegetables at Pluto’s after my class at State, then we stroll the blocks to the Park by the Inner Sunset. The feeling this night is of the first moments of winter, with a gentle cushion of rain. Chewie has her wool hat but I let the rain wet my gray curly hair, enjoying it.

Unlike other walks we’d taken recently, tonight we loll, not the pushing-pushing conversations that had matched our faster walking. We talk of so many things! Of this year’s sudden tragic loss of her precious Freddo… in their sixteen years they must have spent hundreds of hours hoofing it around the Park and the City. In love, in turmoil, in love again. Her thoughts are of him, and much that happens these days triggers the deepest feelings.

How horrible the stark hole, to lose the person at the center of the home, one’s connection, spirit of the nest, the shared bed… one’s core.

For the first time I understand what really happened when my father died when I was eight:

The person in our own little family with the most personality, the one who colored our space every moment, was gone suddenly, brutally. This realization starts the process, finally after 42 years, of grieving for my own precious person. As I sit typing I break down into horrible sobbing, can’t catch my breath, "My dad is gone, my dad is gone, Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy is gone…" I can’t catch my breath, it’s all sobs and heaving chest.

Oh, oh, oh.

For her, Freddo is both gone and present, floating somewhere nearby wherever she is… she talks to him, asks him questions, sends wishes for his well-being, asks for permission, "Is it alright if he comes in, Fred?" "He says yes, it’s OK (but he’s very jealous)."

In the rain she calls Fred "my oak tree," and walks over to a tree, hugs it for a long time. Not wanting to let go. The plaque at the foot of the tree says it was grown from another in the capitol that is two hundred years old. She asks me to hug the tree too and I do, for a long, quiet minute. I close my eyes, hide a sniffle.

Chewie dances away in the middle of our conversation, walks a few feet away in circles, head down, head up, responds to some thought that beckons to her. She knows if she stays "on-task" in our talk some momentary perception (during this pivotal time in her life) will disappear, like a dream forgotten in the seconds after awakening. Maybe this wee whisper is an important insight, must listen to it, stop, here now hear, the rainy night helps her hear.

She doesn’t do this all the time - sometimes she dances away because she just feels shy, self-conscious. Or needs a moment by herself. She is determined to be present for everything during this awful year, and refuses to medicate herself or otherwise run away from the truth of what is happening to her.

I wait, glad to wait, the night and rain teaching me to stop talking and enjoy silence.

Then the talk restarts. She asks me to sing some songs I’d written.

Our subjects jump from one to another with a kind of relaxed hunger – I don’t feel like we can cover enough quickly enough, and feel an old starvation being fed. I keep asking her, "What were we just talking about?" I know, but don’t remember… keep forgetting, keep walking.

At the end we sit on the edge of the band shell, quietly witnessing the first minutes of another sad delicious San Francisco winter. Running out of talk, feeling a skittering noise of curled yellow leaves and a calm wind.

When I get home after driving down the Peninsula in a blistering rainstorm there is an email checking that I arrived all right. In the lines I can hear Chewie’s voice, calm in her unique listening-talking way, standing under a trumpet flower plant talking about meditation.

"Bizzy Bee~

Thank you for the upliftment and rain dance of together solitude open space with bippity booboo deedah yeah!

Sorry, the Brussels sprouts were too al dente, but the conversation was circuitously good. Oh, the sweet scraping of sycamore leaves on rain wet sand (the cheap stuff).

And perfume umbrella of angel trumpets and more guru dojo talk. Sigh. Happiness is just like that.

Thank you, Kris Kringle!

Chew"

Happiness IS just like that. What else is there?

* * * *

Chewie grew up in East Palo Alto, the last of five children of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and currently works as a bartender, studies traditional Chinese medicine and volunteers for healing charities.

She attended high school with the author in the early 1970s, and they resumed their acquaintance in late 2006 following a 33 year hiatus. Her life partner Fred Carver was killed in early 2006 in their car "Snow Pony," as he waited to turn into a hardware store parking lot in the Castro.