Written years ago. 

Some things live on in other ways.

Some people remain in memory, and for a moment, in that memory, the past continues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Original Introduction

I wrote this story last year (the summer of 2006) after a jolt from the universe; like everything I write, it is based on experience. It is about love and loss.

I had a very dear friend who I actually never met in person, but we had a sweet platonic friendship from afar; we were on the same wavelength, enjoyed many of the same things, helped and supported each other like mutual guardian angels, gave each other courage and resilience.

Our friendship would have been 8 years old last week.

People change.

Something crashed a year ago.. Like a death. Went silent. Became disabled.

Actually, I saw the signs even before. The periods of withdrawal, the depression, the meltdowns.
I saw them but didn’t see them.

I felt like I lost my forever life guard and had to fend for myself. I dog paddled for months. I stayed in the pool where no on could see me crying. It’s almost a year since this event and I am just coming out of the water and drying off.

Now I understand: some people need to turn inward or away to grow. I provided the water, the food, the nurturing; the plant must change it into energy.

With this in mind, you will understand that this piece is layered; its branches reach out to the sky and to the depths of its roots. It bares leaves, as we must bear leavings. It will be presented in its parts. It is dedicated to friends in the past and to future friends. Flora and fauna included.

It is dedicated to growth and to love.

It is shared in the hope that as trees go bare in life, new buds will emerge. Grow into flowers, and drop new seeds.

As always, my story is my truth.

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Branches and Leaves
©6/2006SRK

1

When it arrived in a box, it was knee-high to my palm and its eyes blinked green in its first light of arrival.When I unpacked it, I was wearing bell bottom jeans, a tie dye shirt and red clogs—the ones that Johanna Dossick sold to me for $26.00 because they were too high for her. Or maybe that’s not what I was wearing; maybe it was something else entirely, I can only imagine.It was 1969 or ‘70 or ‘71. One of those years when my hair was brown and long, my career was about to plant itself, and I could be 20 and float in my neighbor’s above ground pool in the Bronx.“So I’d like to know where you got the notion, said I’d like to know where you got the notion…rock the boat, don’t rock the boat baby, rock the boat, don’t tip the boat ovahhhhhh”. Someone over the back fence played the song over and over again. Smoking weed, too, no doubt. I was baking in the water. That’s what we did in those days; we floated. Or smoked, then floated. Or observed people smoking and floating through their lives. We floated and dreamed that we were going to save the world, or at least change it.

We were promised forever.

Greenery was in: under 2 shelves of grow lights there were watermelon pepperomia, begonias, geraniums, violets, jade trees, kalanchoe, cacti, dracaenea. There was a rubber tree that I moved from place to place in search of light (but it looked so much better over there)…and on and on, I had them all. Some I bought from a little bohemian shop off Allerton Avenue. I had to have them all, like a living collection, acquire them, possess them. I read about them, nurtured them, talked to them, watered them. I was obsessed by them. Then there was the discovery of mail order, a whole other animal, where I could armchair shop and pore over the pictures, fill out the order form and mail away my check. Boxes came labeled, “living things.”

One day I unpacked a baby fig tree. My landlord, who lived downstairs, a young, volatile Sicilian peasant named, Bruno, insisted that I plant it in the small plot of grass he referred to as a yard. This way it would eventually become his, I knew what he was all about, he was a plant napper.He was a misery. If I opened my window to air the place out and he thought I was wasting heat, he’d throw eggs at the glass, a bitch to clean off, especially in cool weather. And he was always complaining that we (I was married) woke his baby. Like Bruno, Margie, his Irish wife, was smaller than a munchkin.Their infant daughter, Michelle, was smaller than that.Margie fed Michelle minestrone soup while Bruno marched around the squalid basement apartment like Mussolini and knocked on the ceiling or rang our bell if he thought we were the cause of Michelle’s sudden burst of crying.

Can you imagine how nerve wracking life was when you could be wrongfully accused of baby-waking at any moment? Can you imagine how upsetting it was when I dropped a can of contraceptive foam to the floor at midnight-ish, after engaging in a 20-year old’s passion, and then having Bruno pounding on the door because Michelle woke up? Do you understand now why having plants, greenery, color, and form were needed to squelch the insanity of 1970 while living under the same roof as Bruno Tozzi?

Jessie and Fran were 18 and jaunting around in a VW bus, in their jeans and no underwear. “You just wash the crotch real good,” Jessie drawled in his long haired hippy speak. He was no southerner—he lived down the block and had a mild hearing impairment. And smoked a lot of dope. I was cleaning out a closet recently and sorting through my endless collection of 35mm slides that documented my life.There was Jessie and Frannie’s wedding. It took place in the evening; we rode our motorcycles to a clearing in a field and hiked up a hill to where a hippy ordained someone in a robe performed the ceremony. Jessie was Jewish and Frannie was Italian, and the joints were passed, Bogarded and passed again. Words were spoken and then they were married. MARRIED. And soon after they took off in the brown and tan VW bus and lived happily. For a while. Like all married couples. I don’t know for how long they lived happily. I venture to think that somewhere between Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Carol King, and after Janis Joplin, somebody had a reality bite.

 Continued here, part 2

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this could be read as an SOS …. Walking with a guardian angel makes me think of a dream, of faith, of hope ~ Thank God, you knew how to doggie paddle at least and were able to remain afloat. “…some people need to turn inward to grow…” that is something i need to ponder as i reflect ~ because what about everyone else ~..in..me Sorry honey for your loss.It really is a sunny day shining just for you…can you feel it, bask in its radiance. Life im coming to truly believe is a learning process about and between us and the One who made us ~

 

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