Home

The man came home but it wasn’t quite home anymore.

This was not an unexpected turn of events so the man just shrugged and dumped his bags on the floor and reached for the light switch.

The light didn’t make much of a difference.

The man stood in the doorway looking around, the familiar touching off only the vaguest feelings of belonging in him. Time and circumstance had done what they could to make this a place of ghosts and they had, in large measure, succeeded admirably.

The man closed the door and paused for a long moment as though waiting for something…was though waiting for someone to come out of the kitchen…out of the bedroom…out of the office…and then, when nothing happened at all, he picked up his bags and moved towards the bedroom door.

He thought he caught echoes of life…a child’s unapologetic laugh, a woman’s casual song, a man’s rueful grunting…but he dismissed them as indulgent, foolish memories and pushed them aside brusquely.

The bedroom… the still air perfumed with stubborn whispers of jasmine and Chanel No. 5, of Right Guard and Secret and that godawful musk cologne he used to think made him smell sexy…stirred little in the man either.

The man undid his tie and tossed it aside. He fell on the bed…the quilt he had dreamed under and wrestled upon and copulated under was there was there having seemingly waited patiently for his return…and looked up at the ceiling.

In the coolness of the bedroom, the man took deep breaths…taking in the air and its defiantly lingering perfumes as he tried to will himself to remember when this place meant something powerful and undeniable, something gloriously bittersweet and compelling, to him. He closed his eyes, laughing silently at his own hubris, and let his mind go quiet.

The night was what it was and the place was what it was. It was home but it wasn’t quite home anymore.

The Big One

April 18th is the 100th anniversary of the "great San Francisco quake" and they're talking about it a lot this weekend of course.

For me, the "big one" happened in 1971 when the greater Los Angeles area was shook up something fierce. I was sleeping at the time (soon enough I would have to be up to face another day at Louis Pasteur Junior High) and for the first couple of instants I just incorporated the earthquake into the dream I was having.

And then I woke up...and I rode it out under my blanket. My brother, sleeping in the bed across the room, did likewise.

My mother, an early riser, had leapt up out of bed and ran down the hall telling us not to panic. She needn't have bothered...neither my brother nor I came up from under our blankets until we were sure the shaking was over. Outside I could hear the crackling of downed powerlines and the combined murmuring of people who had run outside their houses and were now recounting the experience.

Parts of the city were heavily damaged but we, our little house apparently located in a hardy part of the sprawling metropolis, had nothing much to complain about (one drinking glass fell off a kitchen counter and broke and a small crack appeared in our driveway.)

I grew up here in Southern California and I've experienced a good number of quakes...I don't take them for granted but neither do I sit around waiting for "the big one" to turn us into the island state of California (most of us who've lived here for any good length of time tend not to think about quakes much...at least until one large enough to actually get our attention strikes...)

One day the next "big one" will indeed strike (the slumbering giant that is the San Andreas Fault will wake up sooner or later, there's no getting around that) but until it does life goes on (knock on wood :-)

The Audience

She regaled us with a symphony of sighs which, though she was uninvited and free to leave anytime she chose to, was her way of letting us all know how utterly bored she was with our company and our conversations.

We did our best to ignore her.

She redoubled her efforts to bend the room to her will by adding flourishes of deep hacking coughs and sneezes like banshee wailing.

“Bless you,” we said, each in our turn, before turning back to pick up the threads of conversations.

Undaunted she continued her campaign to draw the spotlights in the room…all of the spotlights in the room…to her. The theatrics of practiced sighs and stage-whisper coughs and throat-clearings rising until a crescendo until, at last, we surrender.

“So what’s going on with you?” Someone asked her.

She cleared her throat…demurely this time…and smiled ever so slightly. She gazed…contentedly, a little contemptuously…at her audience and nodded with satisfaction. “Well, as a matter of fact…” she began.

She happily held court for the better part of the next two hours.