I am hugely addicted to instant gratification and no-hassle living, so it is an act of great faith in the future when I write this stuff on my Apple text editor, since I then have to e-mail it to myself in Smallville, go thru it and add all the formatting, etc. before posting.  However much I italicize, space, and otherwise bell as well as whistle, my stuff arrives in any Microsoft venue such as Spaces as an unformatted lump, much like yesterday's cold oatmeal.  But - am I a river to my people or what? - I do it.  

I have been thinking that I ought to make a few connections between people I write about, not that these connections make a difference, but growing up in a small town, I tend to think everyone is connected - we have about one degree of separation in Reedville.  Folks fall into two groups: relatives to whom you haven't been married and relatives to whom you have.  I wish someone would show me how to make those "hot button" links to prior posts when one mentions something and wants to refer back (hint! hint!).  I'll just make one small one hook-up here - you know the lady that told my Mom to be sure and get the towel back from the hospital, when Liam dropped the weights on his forehead?  Well, she was the mother of Trooper Law, of whom I once wrote.  And when she was first married she and her hub lived in the apartment upstairs over our neighbor Marie Scarpelli, that same apartment where Mona Lisa later lived.  Later the Laws bought what I now can see is a lovely old Victorian home next to our church in Reedville - a Victorian being kind of appropriate since her name was Victoria.  It is odd but I realized a while ago that I saw houses as grand and beautiful, or small and humble all while I lived in Reedville based on who lived in them.  I have come to see that the actual buildings that some of my poorer friend lived in were magnificent, and that some I once thought rather grand were little more than cubes with windows.  Talk about subjective!  

Last night the wind was howling like crazy - and making a roar like that freight train to which people always compare the sound of a tornado on the Nightly News.  Don't you think that if your life was miraculously spared, you would strive to honor the occasion with a metaphor that was not quite so shop-worn?  One almost wonders if the common thread among those whom god chooses to enjoy a little carnage is lack of imagination.  How about sounding like a raging river (although that too is actually a cliché, albeit not one ever, to my knowledge, applied to a tornado).  Or a speeding tank?  Or a giant mad tuba?  Anyway, as I have mentioned before, I have about a hundred ash trees on the back of my property, a grove which spills over into the adjoining wetlands where there are probably a hundred more.  And the sound of the wind tearing through them when they are exfoliated is wondrous to hear.  It is entirely different from the way they sound in the summer, and I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.  I love hearing wind, when it is not accompanied by the sound of falling roofing materials, so I lay awake and gave myself over to deep thought.  Actually I was thinking about words - making some up for fun.  Here's something a lot of people don't know consciously - though surprisingly many get the right sense when they see it (and even more don't care, including you-all, I am sure) but when a word has 'esc' in it, it almost always has a meaning of 'to grow or become'.  They are - you'll love this - inchoative words.  Adolescents are becoming adults.  Even the moon is only crescent when it is waxing; when it is shrinking toward the new moon it is gibbous, not crescent.  'Effervescent' actually means - or came from a word that meant 'beginning to boil'.  So I lay there making up words like fececapitesce, a verb to describe the action of those people who are becoming a shithead.  (Someone who has had too much to drink could be termed fecevised.)  I don't do well, as you can see, when the mind is idle.  

What I have been thinking about lately, as I continue to play that awesomely awesome song by Steve Earle called Goodbye, of which I wrote as long as two years ago (some of my enthusiasms are long-lived) is how often you don't realize you are leaving people behind forever and, even if you do rationally realize it, you are so caught up in the life change you are making that you don't fully realize what you are leaving behind.  At graduation from high school, few look around and truly realize that this is the very last time they will ever see some of these folks in their lifetime.  In college, this is even truer.  Or one day somebody leaves from a visit - or you leave from visiting them and you just never see them again.  People get all dramatic when someone dear dies, about the things unsaid, or the unpatched quarrel or what have you, but once a person is out of one's life, he or she is as dead as the fallen.  At my Aunt Connie's recent funeral, there was a surprisingly large attendance of cousins of whom I once thought as part of my daily life and concerning whom I now had to nudge my brother and ask, "Who is that?"  How does it get like this?  

I recall, and you do too if you are worthy of reading here, how Holden Caulfield made such a point of trying to actually experience the farewell aspect of his expulsion from Pencey Prep.  He goes to visit an old teacher who had a bit more meaning to him than most, dreading doing it the whole time, and the visit is indeed unsatisfactory.  It is like the last day of a home visit when you live far away and may not be back for a year at least (or it is when you are part of such a repressed family as I have).  You drop by a lot of people who are already planning next weekend, or who are busy cleaning the gutters or whatever they do in their daily lives and you wish that just once you could have a two sentence exchange that came close to saying, "Look at me.  I am leaving.  We will be two different people when next we see each other."  But no one ever does say anything like that.  Even when there is some formal affair, such as the restaurant dinner to which my Indian roomies bade me when I left Saudi, it just seems like that which needs to be said never is.   Everyone is cheery and bright and already, really, gone.  Those guys were my room mates and best friends for five or six years; we wallpapered our apartment, and painted; we taught each other to cook various things (Papa's wife had me teach her to make chili when they visited the U.S. of A. a few years back - at his insistence); we rode together and shopped together and ate together and bitched about conditions.   And then - gone.  What can one say?  

One tends to think there will be visits - but even when these occur, you are either in their house or they in yours, and it isn't 'ours' any longer.  The person visiting isn't really the person one lived with.  A vacation spent back home is not being home again, really.  Goodbye is everywhere and people never really say it properly.  I think this is why I never forgot my fellow surfer Rob, whom I loved more than I realized at the time, who cried when I told him I was leaving Southern L.A.  Maybe my one proper goodbye in all my life.  

All this, of course, is about expected goodbyes.  There are worse ones, those where someone leaves in the morning and is dead by nightfall.  My Brother Liam's son was killed at 16 in a car accident which took the lives of all three boys in the car.  He later wrote a song called The Loneliness Birds about this, and he included a verse which went:

I remember a time

A few years ago:

My son got off of the school bus; 

It had started to snow.

His coat was unbuttoned

And, as he walked up the drive,

It was like watching a tear

Sliding down from the sky.  

This gets at what I am saying.  Later you realize the goodbye.  Later you wonder, "What did we say last?"  You begin to split the departed into snapshot memories, these often endowed with a foreshadowing that wasn't actually there at the time.  Dead - or gone - is SO dead.  One clings desperately to an alive detail, like the unbuttoned jacket.  I DO remember!  I actually was fully present in at least one of our moments together.  If someone has moved away, rather than died, a visit is like hauling out an old high school yearbook and flipping through the pages.  "Remember when we...?"  "Remember how we all...?"  Gone is the smell of them, the mild irritation, the quiet pleasure of them.  It is a Greyline Tour of the high - or low - spots.  No one says, "Remember that day we sat around and did nothing?"  "Remember the time we made yet another meal together, that was in no way different from those we made before and after?"  Everyone of a certain age remembers exactly what he or she was doing when they heard JFK was shot.  Tell me, what were you doing the week before at the same hour?  And yet, most likely, that was your life then.  The dailyness, the oh-so-gone part.  Who did you see that day, a week earlier?  Where are they now?  Who are they now?  No matter how many memories you may have, they are freeze-framed; they are never a narrative as they were when they were happening.  Look: there is Mom at the kitchen sink; we don't remember her going there, or where she was the moment before, or what she did the next minute or two.  The picnic at the lake!  The party at Mike's!  The high school play!  But who remembers dinner at six o'clock Tuesday Feb 11th in 1993?  Or all the other zillions of times like that which made up the whole of what the folks we knew really were, and how we held them in our lives?  They are become a list of vices and virtues, a few anecdotes, a scattering of frozen moments.  No flow.  Nothing real.  Nothing alive.  

I was going to get into saying goodbye to Tumwell, but I have blathered on long enough, I think.  Certainly everyone under 30 left me long ago (probably when they noticed there was more than a paragraph to this entry), and some of you were doing two other things as you read, weren't you?  Yadda yadda yadda - and then gone.  Like everybody else.