Tweaked: A Crystal Memoir

Whoever said the United States is a beautiful country has never driven from Los Angeles to Iowa during a wet muddy spring. When I received a call from my father telling me that Zelma had only a few weeks to live, I decided immediately to drive to Iowa. I know something about long drives, having driven from New York to Los Angeles a decade ago. What I’d learned on that drive was that the enormity of distance marks well and appropriately the largest of decisions.

I escaped from my “near miss,” as I think of it, with my sobriety intact. However, it’s clear that I need to decide whether I’m going to recommit myself to being sober or just let the whole thing tumble down. It’s one of those decisions that can only be made by driving thousands of miles.

Perversely, I’ve skipped Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon but have stopped to see “the legendary Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming, an oasis of pine-clad mountains on the Great Plains. Home of Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorials.” When I picked up the tourist brochure for the Black Hills at a truck stop on I-90, I could think of nothing but Zelma’s old wedding ring. It seemed destined. So now I stand in front of Mount Rushmore shivering and listening to a tour guide explain, “Each head is as high as a six-story building!”

The tour guide is in her forties and is working a kind of modified mullet peculiar to midwestern women.The modification comes through the addition of a perm, giving the whole “do” the appearance of a Wheaton terrier in need of a bath. Terri, as she tells us repeatedly is her name, has been flirting with me since I arrived and was shuffled into a tour group from the Daughters of the American Revolution. Perhaps she’s simply relieved to have someone on the tour under the age of seventy but now I’m thinking that her coquettish manner (“Maybe our visitor from Los Angeles knows when the monument was completed!”) indicates that she thinks I might be a romantic interest. I’m a dry tweaker fag on his way to see his dry alcoholic granny, formerly his best friend.We see what we want to see, I guess.

“Aren’t they lifelike?” whispers a tough-looking D.A.R. broad next to me. I look around to see if this is addressed to one of her traveling companions. However, they have moved onto the outlook with Terri, who has now taken off her sunglasses and perched them on her head in exactly the same manner I have. Seeing that I’m looking at her, Terri gives me a little smile, mock stamps her foot and motions for me to join the group.

I ignore Terri and focus on the Daughter of the American Revolution. “They’re lifelike but ... they’re incredibly sad,” I say.

The D.A.R. lady doesn’t know what to make of this comment but clearly figures that she started the conversation and has to stick with it. “Now, young man, what on earth would they have to be sad about? They’re the Founding Fathers.”

“Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t a founding father.”

Now I’ve done it. She doesn’t like that. Before I was just odd and now I’m a smart ass. “He was a great American. A real patriot. That’s what he was.”

“My favorite is Abraham Lincoln.”

I’m back in her club. In fact, she takes my hand, less in a grandmotherly way than as a confirmation that I’ve been forgiven for venturing into dangerous territory.“I couldn’t agree more.” She’s smoking now, her lips leaving bright red, waxy streaks on the cigarette’s filter. “He saved this country from destruction.”

I wonder if the D.A.R lady knows that Abraham Lincoln was gay. I want to tell her that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and fathered a child with one of them. I want to tell her that I like to snort all kinds of white powders and I haven’t been to a meeting in a week. I want to scream and stamp my feet and rip out all my anger by flinging it on top of her. Instead, I hold out my arm and walk her back to the other ladies.

The D.A.R. lady, proud of male companionship, calls out to her fellow patriots, “Look girls! And they say there are no gentlemen left.”Terri beams with approval.

Upon leaving the park, a billboard urged me to visit “Cosmopolitan Rushmore Mall, Rapid City. Black Hills Gold! Handcrafted Sioux Beadwork! Star Quilts! Pottery!” The reality of the Rushmore Mall was not so much cosmopolitan as suburban. Still, I could hardly complain once I had eaten two “Rushmore Dogs” with sauerkraut and spotted the display of Black Hills gold in the jewelry store tucked in between Target and Sears.

The ring I bought could be a duplicate of Zelma’s wedding ring except that the carving of the grape leaves is more precise. The ring that I lost was cruder and, therefore, somehow more charming. Though I doubt that the original ring was hand-wrought, it still had the appearance of something old-fashioned. One can tell that this ring is one of thousands pumped out every day by some bland wholesaler. Still, for a woman near death, it will serve its purpose as a meaningful, temporary gift.

I finger the ring, flipping it back and forth like a magician, as I drive through the hills of Western Iowa, remembering my geology field trips from high school. Iowa is certainly not known for hills but those hugging the river are quite dramatic. Not only are they steep, these hills are one of the few unique landmarks of Iowa. The Loess Hills, pronounced the Luss Hills, were formed more than a hundred thousand years ago by fine particles of wind-blown quartz, pulverized by advancing and retreating glaciers. They are, more or less, enormous sand dunes made permanent.

Compacted by time, the Loess Hills follow the banks of the Missouri River for miles before giving way to Sioux City. As a child, Sioux City seemed like an unimaginably glamorous metropolis. Our infrequent trips to the mall there were exercises in frustration, framed by weeks of anticipation and the deadly frustration of returning home after only a few hours of excitement. Though I would not discover it until I was a senior in high school, Sioux City also had exactly one gay bar, predictably located near the bus station. Although I can no longer remember the bar’s name, I will never forget the excitement of parking my car on the deserted city street on a Saturday night and, shaking with excitement, walking toward the signless building with a single bare bulb over its front door. Bars in towns like Sioux City are more than just bars—they are the entirety of gay life. So when I opened the door, doubtless looking far too young to be in a bar, no one turned me away or demanded an ID. In fact, I don’t think I even drank in that bar. The excitement of being there was enough. A cowboy with a big handlebar moustache asked me to dance. The song was “I Want a Man With a Slow Hand” and, for the first time in my life, I was in the arms of a man. Later that same night, in a cheap motel on the outskirts of Sioux City, I lost my virginity and got my first case of crabs.

The Loess Hills soon give way to the interminable flatness of Iowa, still mostly gray and wet even though spring has officially begun. The Interstate soon narrows to a flat strip of two-lane highway that zigzags into the center of Iowa. Considering all that it has been through, my vehicle has performed admirably and its cruise control glides me forward, interrupted only occasionally by tiny towns with a single stoplight. It takes effort to remember that these towns were once vibrant with fairs and parades and rodeos. Now they are mostly ghost towns with falling down Main Streets surrounded by rings of metal industrial buildings and gas stations. Iowa is in such bad shape that it is considering exempting young people under thirty from state income tax as a lure. However, it’s hard to imagine that anyone makes enough money in Iowa that a state income tax exemption would keep them in this godforsaken place.

I dot the time with stops at any roadside diner with a name using a “K” where a “C” should be: Kountry Kitchen, Kozy Korner Café. Kountry Kettle. Grandma’s Kumfy Kup-board. These are always promising spots that offer Iowa favorites such as hot beef sandwiches and coconut custard pie. Many require a slight detour from the highway onto an old jumbled street where once grand houses have been converted into apartments or video rental stores, which seem to form most of the retail activity in Iowa. I wonder if I’ve somehow become a normal person because no one in the Kountry Kitchen gives me a second glance other than to nod at a stranger new to town. Maybe like most of my resentments, my fear of this place is that of a ten-year-old boy, based in the distant, painful past.

Because I make so many stops, it is dark when I near Cherokee. The town sits in a shallow valley and I pull to the side of the road to take it in. From this distance, the town of six thousand could be Los Angeles, its lights flickering in the chill of the spring night. The lips of the valley pucker around the edges of the town, disapproving. The empty fields on either side of the road look desolate and limitless with a rising moon casting a whiteness over them that looks like snow. I turn off the engine and silence sweeps over me. Only the low moans of the truck’s settling joints break the constant silence of the night here, and even that small noise seems large enough that I imagine farmers coming to their kitchen windows grumbling, “Past supper! Who’s makin’ that damn racket?” I remember this silence—so complete that it hums.

As a young man, I would sometimes sit in places like this, alone, swigging cheap vodka from the bottle that was always hidden underneath my seat. On cold, clear nights an Omaha radio station might come in, playing music that seemed like magic to me back when everything was so far off. I’d yearned for those Top Forty hits that I was sure men were listening to while they danced and touched in cities far away. I would strain my eyes on those crystal clear black nights to perhaps see the shining reflections from a distant metropolis, in the blank sky. But only the local towns with strange names like Aurelia, Alta, Paulina, Correctionville, Larrabee, and Moville gave a bit of orange glow to the horizon here and there.

On one of those cold nights, more than twenty years ago, I’d gone home and picked up the telephone. My parents were asleep so I kept my voice low in the small house. I’d dialed directory assistance for New York City and asked for the number of Studio 54. I don’t even know how I’d heard of it. Probably some article in People Magazine featuring Liza and Bianca and Andy. I remember the line being busy but I dialed again and again. Each time, the electronic bricks of a magical bridge slipped into place, connecting me to a place that might as well have been imaginary it was so far beyond my grasp. Finally, that night, the call went through and a man’s voice shot through the line, barely audible over the pounding beat of the music. “Studio,” he’d said. I had gasped, not knowing what to do. “Studio,” he yelled one more time. I could not speak but I pressed the phone hard against my ear until I heard the far away receiver slam down, cutting me off.

My parents had stalled their yearly departure for Canada, where they own a fishing camp, thinking that Zelma would die. But she wouldn’t or couldn’t. My poor mother, tortured by many visits to see Zelma, had advised me to go right before dinner time so as to have an excuse to leave. In heeding this advice, I found myself with a day to fill and no interest in calling long lost high school friends. As sometimes happens in Iowa, the warm spring air had summoned up a kind of bleak beauty with the trees sprouting their first leaves and the brown lawns displaying the first patches of green. I decided to walk without any particular destination in mind.

Iowa is strangely like Los Angeles in that no one walks. The sidewalks, where they exist, are empty and meeting another pedestrian always feels awkward. The difference between Iowa and Los Angeles is that the streets are also largely empty of cars. Only a few vehicles meander past as I wander along the edge of town to a large stand of trees. They are a reminder of when this area was largely forested, before being cleared to serve as farmland. The continued presence of this area, somewhat wild but not nearly a wilderness, is due to the railroad tracks passing through it. Although only a train or two a day now uses the tracks, roads still respectfully keep their distance.

The railroad tracks create a buffer zone well suited to the kind of secret activities enjoyed by children and, as a boy, I spent many afternoons exploring and fantasizing in this area. In the woods I would create traps from branches that were pulled sharply to the ground and fixed in place by a piece of wood that, once stepped upon, released the branch, delivering a vicious slap to the face of an unwitting intruder. I’d also dug shallow pits filled with glass or sharpened twigs that were covered over, probably too crude to fool anyone, but still with the real goal of harming others.

Gay men, like little boys, know how to reach forbidden places and squeeze through the tight openings that block the passage of all but the most determined. As a gay man, I have a special ability to find these places and always feel the lure of woods and abandoned industrial buildings. In cities around the world, as one approaches a park or a wooded area, men begin to appear, their true nature cloaked except to other gay men. Five blocks way from the park, they are businessmen and students, strolling purposefully. Three blocks away, they begin to reveal their intentions with quick looks and a leisurely pace. A block away, the veil begins to slip. A tie is loosened. A few buttons come undone. Upon entering parks around the world, the men no longer have names or occupations or any sense of the continuing business of life. Along the paths, worn by generations of other gay men, they hunt.

I hardly think I’ll find sex in these woods, along these trains tracks, but there is still something about being here that makes me vaguely horny and melancholy. I walk past a mound of burned wood where it looks as if someone has made a campfire. Zelma had always told me to avoid the train tracks because the gypsies lived there. She’d always been afraid of them and would sometimes announce, “Hear there’s a whole caravan of them gypsies camped outside of town. Lock your doors tonight!” From her ramshackle house, located on the poor side of Cherokee, she could hear the train whistle as it passed through in the middle of the night. She would often say, “Sure is a lonely sound but I like it.” After a slug of whiskey, she’d continue, “Where you think all the folks are headed, Pat?”

Aside from the campfire remains, there are other signs of activity along the tracks. I discover mysterious piles of rocks, twigs made into designs, and chalk marks that would make perfect sense to a six-year-old. These appear alongside the rails and, like the train whistle Zelma would listen to, they’re lonely but I like them. Further along, a dead bird had been carefully balanced on one of the tracks, supported on either side by pieces of wood to insure the specimen would achieve maximum splatter effect when the next train passed by.

Looking up from the bird, I see a ragged boy beating a tree branch against the train tracks a few hundred feet in the distance. I walk as quietly as possible so as not to alert him to my presence. The branch is a substantial piece of wood and it is difficult to tell whether his objective is to damage the tracks or to break the wood. In mid-swing, the boy catches sight of me and takes a step back, letting the wood thud down onto the train bed. We stare at each other until I’m a few feet away and stop.

“Hi,” I say casually, looking down at the piece of wood lying between us. In the morning sun I can see through the boy’s yellowish hair to his sweating scalp. It is not the playful sort of hair that one wants to muss and cluck over. The boy carries the sullen look of an unwashed child accustomed to spending too much time alone.

“Hi,” the boy says warily. He shows no fear of me even though he must have heard warnings about talking to strangers. But the constant refrains on television about abductions and molestations have not made him timid. Rather, he juts out his chin and moves a little closer to his branch.

“That your bird back there on the tracks?” I ask.

“No,” he lies.

“Oh. OK. What are you working on?” I ask, nudging the tree branch with my toe.

The boy steps forward protectively and picks up the branch as if I’m about to steal it. “I’m cleanin’ this off.”

“Is it dirty?”

“No, the outside.You know, its skin.”

“The bark?”

“Yeah, the bark. I’m takin’ it off.”

The boy has had enough of the inquisition and decides to turn the tables. “What about you? What you doin’?”

“Just walking.”

“Where to? Don’t got a car?”

“I got a car.”

“Then why you walkin’?” he asks.

“I’m going to see my grandmother.”

Something about the word grandmother seems to make sense to him so he picks up the branch and begins beating it against the tracks again.

I walk on without saying good-bye but, far down the track, I can still hear the dull beating of the branch and, if I step onto the tracks, can feel its vibration reverberating through the metal. Far in the distance, I hear a train whistle.

I’m looking at my future, or a possible version of it, in a too hot room in the Cherokee Villa Nursing Center. Spring is in session on the other side of a double paned window but here the world is without time or seasons. There is a constant rattle from nurses, wheelchairs, and med trays—the equipment of death. There is another rattle, or perhaps a wheeze, coming from Zelma. I recognize it. Not that I’m a great expert on death but I’ve heard this breath before. It is deceptively quiet but has the ability to fill a room because each round of inhalation and exhalation is numbered. That same breath counted down Dino’s last days in New York.

Although she would sometimes say that she “had the blues,” Zelma was more manic than depressive. She never took to her bed in the middle of the day, preferring the perch of a chair where she could doze, observe, and reach for her lined writing pad when something floated up out of the past.Today, however, she is curled up on top of a crocheted blanket, fully dressed, shrunken like a discarded little puppet. She doesn’t look like she’s dying, just like she’s sleeping.

It’s unfair that I’ve come here without telling her but my parents couldn’t bear the monologue that would have started had they told her before they left. “Oh, I worry about him on those damn airplanes.” Airplanes have replaced trains in her imagination so she would have looked wistfully out the window and sighed, “I see the little white tails of those jets goin’ by and I wonder where all those people are headed. Just makes me lonesome.” Something reassuring would have been offered about the safety of air travel to which she would have replied, again and again, “Oh, those damn planes. Why does he have to fly?”

So, instead, I stand here watching this thin brittle thing that was my grandmother and wonder whether she will, quite literally, have a heart attack when she sees me. Four years, five years. How long has it been?

I sit on the edge of the her bed, put my hand on her bony shoulder, and say softly, “Grandma. Grandma, wake up.”

She opens her eyes. They are a startling shade of light blue, intensely focused but looking elsewhere. She stares at me. Am I another nurse come to poke her or try to persuade her to bathe?

I brush her face with my hand, “It’s Patrick, Grandma.”

Now a kind of scrambling, pulling her bony limbs around, trying to go somewhere and then just laying still, looking at me until her voice emerges, still loud enough to pierce any wall. “Paaaat? I never thought I’d see you again.”

I help her out of the bed and into her chair. As she gets up, an unwashed old lady smell wafts off her. “Why, Pat? What on earth ... ?”

“I came to see you.”

And now she sits. Not smiling but taking it in. She picks at her blouse, pink roses on a light blue field, dotted with assorted stains. She is content, somewhere between here and there. Then the world rushes back to her, her head cocks and that choking voice trills again, “Why Paaaat, what on earth?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Well, God bless you dear.”

Zelma picks up a disheveled box of Russell Stover chocolates and rummages around in it. Warily extracting a bonbon, she shoves her thumb into the underside and peers at the filling. With a look of disgust, she plops it back in the box.

“I just don’t want to eat no more.”

“Do you feel sick to your stomach?”

“Noooo. Just don’t wanna eat.”

“You should eat.You’ll get weak if you don’t eat.”

She’s somewhere out the window, her eyes following something I can’t see but now she’s back on me, “Why Pat, I thought I’d never see you again.”

I’ve been here for less than a minute and I want to rush out the door. There is another lady, comatose, in the room. She is a tiny pile of bones huddled in the middle of her bed.

“Do you talk with your roommate?”

Zelma’s voice is, if anything, louder, “Heck, no. She’s ignorant.”

“Oh.”

“I wish I could get a roommate with some brains.”

“She looks like she’s sick.”

“She don’t got no brains. Ignorant.” Zelma’s eyes are extraordinarily blue. Bluer than I remember. Focused but crazy. She fixes me with them now. “You know what I’d give my left arm for?”

“What Grandma?”

“A good cold beer.”

“I guess that’s not allowed here.You know I don’t drink anymore. I’m an alcoholic.”

“Vodka was my friend,” Zelma says before she retreats, her eyes focused far away.

I reach into my pocket, thankful for the diversion of a gift. “Grandma, remember I told you that I lost your Black Hills gold ring?”

“Oh, heck, that don’t matter, Pat.”

“Well, it mattered to me and I’m really sorry.” I draw out the ring and Zelma’s eyes follow its dull sparkle. “I bought this for you in the Black Hills.”

Zelma reaches for the ring reflexively and takes it close to her face, examining it, fingering the round coolness of it. She tentatively pokes her long bony ring finger into it, sliding the ring nearly down to the knuckle before pausing.

“Well, Paaat, I don’t need no more rings.”

“I know you don’t need one but I wanted you to ...”

“No.” This is not a shy protest or even a petulant one. Zelma’s voice is flat. She pulls the ring back off her finger. “You keep it, Pat. I don’t need no more rings where I’m goin’.”

Zelma’s eyes never leave mine as she takes hold of my hand and slides the ring onto my finger. I’m surprised at the steadiness of her grip. She stares at my hand and then pulls it to her face for a moment. This feels almost unbearable. I want to pull away but, instead, I stand there with my face burning red until a plump young nurse pops her head into the room and announces dinner. Zelma drops my hand without further comment, shuffles around underneath her blanket as if to get up, but then settles back down into her chair. She lays still for a few breaths and then turns her head to look out the window. “They feed us pretty good here at the Villa.”

“Good.You should try to eat something.”

“Food ain’t got no flavor. No salt.”

“Here. Let me help you get up, Grandma.”

It seems odd to me that someone who is supposed to be near to death is asked to go to the dining room to eat but the nurse had told me, “We like to keep her moving. She’s quite a handful otherwise.”

We shuffle down the hallway together and into the dining room. Zelma seems to have a number of old men who are admirers and each of them greets her. She sails past them, without a word, to an empty table. Positioning herself at the table, across the room from the old men, she announces loudly, “This is my grandson. From California.”

They all nod at me and Zelma trills out again,“The writer. From California.”

Suddenly, I have to go and there’s no way to say anything but, “I love you, Grandma,” before the tears start to come.

She wraps her old bony arms around me and the years slip away as she says, “And I love you.You never forget.You’re a good person, Pat.”

Zelma died that night. Without warning or hospitals, she left. I’d said about all I had to say to her and I’m glad for that. Yet, there is this ache of knowing that she had waited for me before she died. I reran all the years that went by when our relationship was reduced to a series of Hallmark cards infrequently spaced throughout the year and a desultory phone call at Christmas. I’ve sat in enough Twelve-Step meetings to see that we both played a part in our estrangement. Still, I cry with regret as I turn the cool ring of Black Hills gold around my finger like I’m winding it, feeling not the ring but Zelma’s touch.

Driving back into Los Angeles, nothing feels real. Especially this city. I don’t understand how I got here.

In the late afternoon I glide past slowly bending oil wells, losing myself in the hazy light of Los Angeles. I’m like something injected into the bloodstream of the city. Foreign. Focus, I think. See this place. But it is impossible to see Los Angeles up close. Every mini-mall is a city onto itself. To keep myself from driving off the road, I force myself to register the Arab chicken joint and the special price for laundered shirts on hangers at a dry cleaner. Should check that out, I tell myself, feeling somehow useful. But I won’t because I’ve developed this fear of blocked parking lots and left turns that seem to break the flow of things. I’m moving too fast to stop.The way to see L.A. is not in the details but in the long view. From here, for example, where the road hovers high above the basin. From here, the city promises everything it promised the first time I saw it.

The drama of the Santa Ana winds makes it even lovelier. In the middle distance, lines of towering palm trees whip back and forth over the oasis of the city, hugging the green water-soaked environs of Beverly Hills. The trees, slyly prehistoric things, twist in the wind, alive. The Hollywood Hills loom over the city, so immediate that their towering mass seems in danger of collapsing.The light in California is unique, strongly angled and diffused through the particulate matter in the air, making objects appear unreal, and their distance uncertain. When the winds rise over the desert portions of the state, they do not clear the air but suspend a grainy dust that further obscures the hard lines of manmade structures, favoring instead the always-present outlines of mountains and trees. In the bleakest industrial landscape in California, I’ve often lost myself in a reverie of nature elicited by the howling desert air.

It really is as if a fever has broken in me and I am so tired. I just want to go home and sleep. But there’s something that must be done first. If I don’t do it now, it will mean less to me later. So I reach over and touch Zelma for a moment. “Is it OK?”

I’ve been sitting on the ridge of a mountain in Griffith Park for nearly an hour, waiting for night to come. The park closes at dusk and it will be difficult to find my way back to the road in the darkness but Zelma has never seen the lights of the city and I want to show them to her. I reach down and pick up the little cardboard box that contains the ground bits of my grandmother and hold it close to me. I also have the dirty little blanket from her bed and I pull it around us against the cold of the Los Angeles night.

The lights of the city are beginning to flicker down below like fireflies. They gather and surround us from our position on the ridge, perched between the expanse of the San Fernando Valley, the abrupt spires of downtown, and the sweep of the L.A. basin down to the sea. Stars are not visible through the cloak of smog but a huge yellow moon has appeared out over the desert.

Zelma wanted to be sprinkled in the Rocky Mountains. For someone whose life was such a headlong rush to nothing, she had thought about her death very clearly. I remember her regularly announcing when I was a child that she had already paid for her cremation because she didn’t want to be a burden. She had been planning her death for fifty years. She wanted no funeral, only to be sprinkled in the Rockies. Whether she had just seen the Rockies in the distance when visiting my uncle in Denver or had actually driven into the mountains with one of her husbands, I have no idea. She may have just summoned the Rockies from her brain or an old issue of Ideals Magazine. But, whatever her source, she had painted them many times. In Zelma’s paintings, the mountains were always distant and silhouetted. She wanted the dramatic outline without the distractions of trees, roads, and people.

A few days ago, my father and I stood in the Rocky Mountain National Park with this same box of Zelma. As my mother stood guard against rangers who might witness our illegal activity, we poured Zelma out into the wind over a valley that contained a meandering creek, lonely pine trees, and blue outlines of ragged mountains in the distance. It could have been one of her paintings. My Dad didn’t cry because he doesn’t and I didn’t cry because I already had but he held me close to him afterward and I knew that I’d done something for him that only I could do. It was, as they say, a gift of sobriety.

But I’d kept a little bit of Zelma to add to the gritty cloud floating over Los Angeles because, in the end, this really is my home. For all of its strangeness and frustration, I know that I will always be here in L.A. Like so many other disaffected and desperate New Yorkers, I had come here a decade ago because I’d run out of options. I still feel that way sometimes but I’m not willing to run anymore. I know I have to stay and face this thing inside of me. So if I’m to be here, I want a little bit of Zelma floating around me, catching in my throat, and lodging herself in my eye from time to time.

It is so cold in L.A. at night. I pull Zelma’s blanket closer around me. My mother laundered Zelma’s blanket and although its smeared chocolate stains and magic marker streaks will always remain, it smells of nothing but Tide detergent now. On a corner of it, Zelma had written her name, as if someone might steal this last little thing that she had all to herself.

The carpet of light spreads out around me in all directions now, only a rim of indigo remaining above the horizon. At this moment, in this physical setting, Los Angeles is the most wondrous place on earth. It is clearly time so I open up the box that still contains a substantial layer of Zelma dust. There is no wind, not even a breeze, so to shift her into the air out over the cliff will not work.

Instead, I look straight up to where I know there are stars I cannot see. I look right up into the yellow glare of the rising moon and, box and all, I throw Zelma as high as I can into the sky. I throw her to another place. I throw away her pain and try to add mine to it. As the box tumbles and spins in the air, a fine layer of Zelma drifts down on me.

I love you and I won’t forget you. I’ll try to understand and to connect. In memory of you, I’ll try again to be happy.

Please help me.