Halloween

When I think of holidays, little sweetheart, I invariably, of course, think of you. 

Spending Christmas together was one of my favorite memories of all time. Our first Valentines Day together was pretty special, even though we weren’t technically “together” until a few weeks later - you sat next me at dinner when Edna took everyone out after Tir na nOg to a restaurant that had no power and was lit only by candlelight. In Irish tradition, everyone around the table was asked to tell a story or sing a song and I sang Roberta Flack’s “Let Them Talk” with such emotion, the proceedings fell entirely silent. But you squeezed my hand and told me that you wanted me to sing it again later, to and just for you. 

Our second Valentines Day was that amazing trip your dad took everyone on to Lake Tahoe - our "trip to the snow" we came to call it. And we sure had a crazy and eventful 4th of July about a year later when your dad took us all up to stay on the Oregon Coast! Your brother Ryan shot off some fireworks from the porch that went off target and started a small brush fire at the edge of the property. 

Our gatherings never lacked for drama, little sweetheart, and as you told me that first week we were together as we raced toward some last minute appointment you were a little late and a lot panicked about, “it’s always like this.” 

All this to say, of course I think of you on every holiday but if someone were to ask me what your favorite was, although I’d be inclined to say Christmas, I think Halloween might give it a run for its money. You loved Halloween and it really revived my own affection for the day. I wrote about this in our book, little sweetheart, so it’s sort of on my mind. 

I had gone down to LA for a double-workshop reading of my plays 7PGS and Real Real Gone, you were getting ready for the transfer of the production of Rock n Roll from ACT in San Francisco to The Huntington Theatre in Boston. You flew out just a day or two before I - me back to New York and you to Boston, were I would join you the following week in advance of your birthday. I was staying with my friends from the theatre company in LA and since they lived in Van Nuys, the Burbank airport was closer, so I arrived and departed from there instead of LAX. It was a much smaller and friendlier airport and it was nice way to end the trip, which had been successful and fun. 

I’d forgotten until I got there that it was Halloween and when I got to my gate, all the Jet Blue crew and staff were in costumes. It was a really festive and cheerful atmosphere and it made me think of you instantly - how much you would love it. As I thought about that, it dawned on me that I hadn’t celebrated Halloween in years, had even come to find it a little annoying, people out on the street shouting, spilling out of bars in the wee hours. I was a curmudgeon before my time. When had I lost the joy, the childhood delight of Halloween? 

Like some many things, little sweetheart, you brought the holiday back, you gave it to me again. As ever, you brought the light back into my life. 

With all my love, always… Your Michael

A Glimpse of the Divine

Little sweetheart, today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I didn’t think you and I ever really talked about that day. It wasn’t until I was talking to your mom just now that I knew you had actually been home in Davis, not in England at school that morning and had to wait over a week to return to Oxford after.

It was such a strange day, here, little sweetheart, to say the least. I myself was just back from London having been there from Memorial Day through Labor Day. I’d barely readjusted to the time difference and was actually sleeping when the first plane hit. I infamously didn’t have a tv in those days and when a friend called to wake me up, she told me to turn on my radio. I still had a landline, then, which was good because the cell signals were jammed and you couldn’t get through. The subway shut down and eventually so too did the buses but not before the few that made it here uptown were crammed full people seemingly hanging off them like a scene out of Gandhi. All day long people covered in dust made their way on foot up the West Side Highway and 12th Avenue.

No one knew what to do. I walked over to another friend’s apartment - a normal person who actually had a television - and we just stood there watching. We got the idea that maybe we could donate blood, maybe they’d need that, so we walked up to the old St Clare’s Hospital (not there anymore) on 9th but the whole block was cordoned off by police, awaiting injured survivors who never arrived.

The bridges were closed but somehow our friend Paul got in from the outer boroughs to open up McCoy’s because he thought people should have a place to go. It was something you and I knew from our time in England - and later when I finally got to take you to Ireland, too - about how pubs are something different from bars. They’re public houses and especially out in the countryside a community gathering place. “The pub is the hub” Prince Charles famously said.

A score of us trickled in, watching the coverage and speaking in disbelief to one another into the night.

It was a few years before you found me, little sweetheart, although you would move to New York, briefly, for a year, and live just blocks down the street. Later, this place, this place from where I write this, became (and remains) your home, too. Somehow the memory of this day is intertwined with thoughts of you. Certainly great loss is a commonality but I think a larger thing, a spiritual presence, is the true linkage.

When unimaginable things happen, somehow, I think, we’re closer to the divine. We can sense, can feel its presence, almost know it. Today, I feel so close to you, little sweetheart. I know you’re near and encouraging me to carry on - with our work, with striving to be a better person each day, and to hear you calling. I will listen. Always. With all my love forever.

May 23

Little sweetheart, eleven years ago today, I learned that my mom had died. 

I was in London for the Finborough Theatre production of my play Seven Pages Unsigned. I’d just arrived two days before. Rehearsals were to begin in the morning and I was too excited to sleep, so at about 4am, I checked my email and I had one subject-lined “EMERGENCY - YOU MUST COME HOME” in all caps. 

I couldn’t dial out internationally because I didn’t know how and I was alone. I feared the worst and called the friend’s - Kris & Joy - whose flat I was staying at while they were on holiday in Wales. Joy told me how to dial out, I called and got the news. 

Then, I called you in San Francisco. When I told you, you burst into tears and then told me to get on Skype so you could see and help me. You and your mom arranged fights for me to return and even a car service from North London to Heathrow. 

While I was flying back to New York, heartbroken, you packed up one of my suits that was hanging in your closet, and got on a plane to meet me in Detroit. When I landed at JFK, you told me to go home to my apartment, sleep and get on a flight the next morning. You spent the night, all night, at Detroit Metro, waiting for me to arrive. 

When I saw you, I ran to you and you took me in your arms. Your arms, that held me up all that week through everything as I buried my mother. 

Ten months later, I would lose you, too. 

You did so much for me, little sweetheart, but this act of love and kindness may have been the most incredible. 

I will love you forever. I miss you terribly. And I pray with faith that I will be with you again, forever and soon. 

With all my love.

Early Voting

Little sweetheart, we're all terribly anxious about coming election. I won't go too long long about it here but your mom and dad are both very concerned and we're all just, honestly, stressing out. 

New York State started doing early voting a few years ago. I'd never done it before, I've just always gone to my regular polling place at the High School of Visual Arts up the street on Election Day itself. But I got something in the mail about early voting for my precinct being at Madison Square Garden. It was a bit daunting. I've not only not been in much of a crowd since the pandemic, I had barely been below W48th Street! But I walked down there yesterday afternoon. 

Early voting is from 10am-4pm. I got there about 2:30pm and the line was out on the street all the way back from the entrance at 7th Avenue to the back of Penn Station at the corner of W33rd and 8th. About 20 minutes in, a guy with a "I Voted" sticker came walking past us and said that this was the point where he had been in the line when he first arrived and that it was about one hour from here to check in and voting. As we got progressively closer, everyone was in good spirits and some poll workers even came around with free coffee for anyone that wanted a cup. 

Later, as we turned the corner onto 7th Avenue and could actually see the entrance, another came by with Kit-Kat bars for Halloween! From that point you could see that there was another line going around the block from the northside, from W34th, to meet this one here. It was an enormous amount of people, little sweetheart, but again, everyone was in great and friendly spirits. 

Once inside, it really didn't take long at all. And when I finished scanning my ballot, one of the workers raised her arms and said "Yay, you did it!". They gave me a "I Voted Early" sticker and I put it on my tee shirt walking home feeling somehow much calmer about everything. 

I just love this city, as I know you do, little sweetheart. And I feel like you are very close to me today. I told your mom and dad all about it and they were very happy too. 

Love you forever.

End of August

 Little sweetheart, tonight is the last night of August and I can feel the seasons changing. It’s cooler and the air feels fresh while still the sounds of locusts fill the air and the lushness of the season remains.

Tonight I walked out along the Hudson and just gazed over the beautiful landscape and skyscape.

I remembered how I often used to walk out here in the years before we met and wonder if things would ever get better, I was so very very sad. They did. You found me.

Now, in these days when things are so very wrong, even in the depths of anxiety and despair, I know that it will get better because you are closer than I can imagine. And I will be with you soon.

I love you so very much. Please be near me, I love you forever.

Bird Watch

Little sweetheart, I've been seeing more and more birds these last few months. 

I think maybe the reduction in air traffic has been a boon for them. A couple of weeks ago I saw a cardinal. I always thought of cardinals as winter birds and regardless of the season, I'd never seen a cardinal in the city. The first time was over by the dog run in Riverside Park near the 86th Street Gardens. I was so excited, I stopped a random passerby just to tell her. Maybe a week later, I saw another, or perhaps the same one, at the drinking fountain by the playground at the W83rd entrance. Then, a week after that, I saw two! 

I was crossing through that little common square between four apartment buildings just north of Lincoln Center, that kind of "quad" between Amsterdam and West End, and I heard a bird singing just spectacularly. I looked up and it was a cardinal, a male like the other(s) I had seen up in the W80's, but then I saw the object of his affection - a female cardinal, her colors more muted and grey but still with red highlights. 

Every time I pass any of these spots, now, I look for them. Since your ascension, little sweetheart, I often find comfort in birdsong and the sighting of the little guys. I feel a sense of closeness to you somehow. 

I think I told you in these very pages that story about how a few years ago, I went out into the hall and was startled to find the prettiest little bird, a finch, I think, sitting quite calmly, like a sentinel, atop the crash bar of the emergency exit to the roof. It turns out he'd escaped from Angelo's apartment on the second floor - he has several little birds and often lets them of out their cages to fly around his apartment at will! Somehow, this little guy got loose and flew to the highest point he could find indoors. Before we knew who he belonged to, my neighbor Eric rescued him and then got a little birdcage and gave him to me, because he has a cat that would be far too curious. I had the little guy for about a day until we discovered that he belonged to Angelo and I took him in his cage back downstairs to his home. 

But before I did, that night when we still didn't know where he belonged and I had him for safe keeping, I fed him and gave him water and talked to him and showed him your picture - I told him all about you, how much I love you and how we all miss you so very much and that this is your home, so that he would know. I wanted this little bird to know about you. 

It seemed very important, little sweetheart. And it feels very nice today, on this rainy Sunday afternoon, to remember it all. How I love you! Forever. Forever. 

Epic Walks

One of the things that I loved to do with you, little sweetheart, was going for long walks together.

We used to do that here in New York and I remember a couple of fine ones all the way to the windmill in Golden Gate Park, starting out from your apartment in the Inner Sunset.

The first day or two of our trip to Ireland with Kris & Joy, I remember you getting restless because we were going everywhere in the rental car. The scenery was spectacular along the Cork/Kerry border and we made some lovely stops along the way but it wasn’t what you wanted. The next morning we got up and went for a long walk to Doneen pier. And the next day an even longer one to the lighthouse the end of the peninsula. It made things so much better. It was the way you liked them.

Now, when I am feeling the bluest, going for one of those kind of walks, just hours long and wandering north along the river, through the park, looping back so late the light begins to go, I feel better, somehow. I think it centers me and helps me find you.

Find me again, won’t you, little sweetheart? Find me over and over until I can be with you forever and always. With all my love.

It's Summer, Summer

Little sweetheart, it’s crazy hot! It’s still June but it’s been in 90’s almost everyday.

And ya know what? I haven’t even had the a/c on yet! Isn’t that crazy?! You know how much I love a/c. I don’t know why but I’ve kind of stubbornly insisted that I didn’t want to start using a/c until at least July.

I know it seems pretty random but I’ve just been dragging that big old fan along to blow on me wherever I am in the apartment, placing it about 3 feet away, and keeping on doing whatever I’m working on or sitting to have dinner or relax and even when I go to sleep dragging it over close to the bed.

I think once I turn on the a/c it won’t be off for two months, so I guess that’s why I’m toughing it out. At least you wouldn’t be freezing here sitting on the couch with me.

Remember, I got that blue cotton blanket just for you so you could bundle up when I was boiling and needed to a/c but it was making your teeth chatter? It’s still here ready for you.

Just like me - still here and waiting for you to take me home. With all my love, forever.

Life in Quarantine

It’s so weird here right now, little sweetheart, as everyone continues to “shelter in place” throughout this global pandemic.

NYC is the hardest hit place in the world - literally ground zero, again - and your dad has volunteered to come help as medical professionals have been called, urgently, too help staff the overrun hospitals, here.

It’s so like your father - the best man I’ve ever know - but we’re all so very worried about him. He’s already exposed to virus working as chief anesthesiologist at his hospital in California and now he’s selflessly volunteering to take his leave time and come here. We’re so proud of him, always, but terribly worried, too.

He’s so like you - full of love and compassion and just wanting to make the world a better place.

Please be with him, my angel, as you are with us always, I know, and help guide him and me, too. With all my love forever.

The New Month

Little sweetheart, it’s April and a flood of memories commit the turning of the month, each year.

I remember, for instance, that it was April 1st when I flew back out for the second long stay in SF that year we tried giving the city a shot together. I’d come out for two late January til mid March, gone back to sort out my sublet in NYC then back to SF, still looking for a place. The second leg was harder than the first and then I got a series of gigs back to New York, which eventually led to you thinking maybe you’d rather we were both here, instead of there. I just wanted to be with you whenever we found ourselves.

April reminds me, too, of our first days together, really begun that first year in February but growing so strong by April and your first visit here in May. I only really got to have my birthday with you one year, the second one, when you took me to see DCfC in Sacramento and made me spectacular birthday cupcakes as we decamped to the house in Davis alone for the week - possibly the happiest one of my life.

April reminds me too of the saddest, hardest days of all. Returning to New York for the three weeks between your funeral and my speaking at your memorial, held, incredibly on my birthday.

We’re twinned, my gorgeous girl, my beautiful spirit, my little sweetheart, forever. Two halves of the soul.

Shelter

Little sweetheart, the strangest thing has happened. A very virulent strain of virus began spreading around the world, first in a tiny province of China and then pretty much everywhere. The US government still hasn’t exactly figured out what to do but some of the more forward thinking governors have taken the initiative to basically shut things down within their own states, cities and towns.

Both our home states of California and New York have done just that. It’s something called Sheltering in Place and we’re not meant to travel or really even venture out much from our homes at all except for groceries or medicine.

I’m talking to your folks everyday and your dad is very much on the frontlines being a doctor and so very essential. Your mom and I are very worried about him but he’s being careful and, as ever, looking after people and saving lives.

I’m doing my best to do what’s recommended and staying inside working on the book and the new album, listening to music and saying quiet prayers for you, as always. I know you’re watching over us and I’ll be listening even more keenly than usual for your celestial counsel. With all my love forever.

Hot Chocolate Memories

Little sweetheart, I made myself some hot chocolate last night and, of course, thought of you!

It’s so funny that I rarely think to do that for myself, I always like it once I have. At Thanksgiving I was looking for a packet of gravy starter in the little bin I keep seasonings in and I found a bit of hot chocolate mix. I set one out. That was weeks ago! I only got around to making it tonight. I’d even bought a bit of whip cream at D’ags last week when it was on sale but it had remained unopened in the fridge since then.

It was lovely sitting here on the plaid couch where you and I would often ensconce ourselves together, to sip from the mug quietly, listening to a show on WFMU and thinking of you.

I remember that although you most liked making hot chocolate with milk at home, that you kept a packet or two in your bag when we went out so you could ask for a cup of hot water and make it for yourself at the table.

There’s something so lovely in this memory of you carrying hot chocolate mix with you wherever you go, little sweetheart, and I’m so glad it came to mind tonight.

Thinking of you, on this morning after the night of the Winter Solstice - the darkest night of the year. With all my love.

Snow Squall

We had the craziest weather today, little sweetheart.

It’s been cold and rainy for days and I hadn’t been for a run in a week but it was sunny this morning, so I was able to get one in in the early afternoon. After I got back the weather was still really nice - the light bouncing off the buildings was almost a spring-like one, I noticed as I sat here at my desk. Just about 10 minutes later it had grown incredibly dark and was suddenly snow - the wind kicking it around even more.

After an hour it stopped and brightened again to twilight just before the sun went down. I walked up to the little church at 77th and West End for the Wednesday night candlelight service. They asked me to read the opening passage and later I came forward and lit a candle for you and said our prayer just like always. Both Christmas and New Year’s fall on Wednesday this year so there won’t be another service until the second week in January. I’m glad I went.

Then as I came out after, it had snowed a bit more. Everything was blanketed with a pretty covering of free snow and it looked rather magical. The walk home was cold but I was bundled up with the beautiful sweater you made for and gave me for our first Christmas.

The holidays seem especially sad this year, somehow, little sweetheart and I miss and my mom terribly. But I ask quietly to hear your guidance and to strengthen my faith that you are safely in God’s care and that I will be with you again and forever in just the blink of an eye.

With all my love.

December 8

Today is the 39th anniversary of John Lennon’s death, little sweetheart.

Although you were only one year old at the time, I think of you, of course, because you loved The Beatles and one of our first connections was you very sweetly, very thoughtfully bringing your DVD set of The Beatles Anthology to rehearsal to let me borrow. We hadn’t even spoken of it, you just knew that we both liked them so you grabbed them and brought them to work with you.

Tonight I walked up to The Dakota. There weren’t too many people around but crossing Central Park West into the park you could hear that folks were gathered there at Strawberry Fields singing along to Beatles songs. There’s often a guitar player or two there and people talking pictures but there was what sounded to be an entire band with full drums playing and a crowd circling them 10 deep singing along.

I climbed up on a park bench to get a better look. Everybody had their phones out and were taking photos or filming. And I did too. I took a little clip when everyone was singing the bridge of “A Day in The Life” - the sort of wordless bit leading into the last verse - and then the song that followed, “The Ballad of John and Yoko”.

It was a very New York kind of moment and you were, as ever, so very much in my thoughts. With all my love forever.

Theatre Dream

I had kind of a funny dream last night, little sweetheart, but was the more blessed for it because you were with me!

There were several of us all together in a group at some kind of theatre performance. It had a very fringe-y feel to it material-wise but also seemed to be in a Broadway house - like an old theatre with lots of seats, kind of cramped but grand. The show was some kind of one-woman show and a little weird, not exactly realism. The performer was even a bit confrontational and I can't remember if she directed her ire at us exactly but we were a bit unsettled and tried to slip away.

We had to go down some crazy side door stairwell, like an old emergency exit or something and we got separated at first. I was looking around for you as I headed down the stairs trying to make an escape into the street when you came out from around a corner. You'd been to "merch" table or something because you had on a tee shirt and had a bag of a bunch of other things. Crazy, right?

I'm not sure what all this means aside from let's-get-the-hell-out of-here-as-fast-as-we-can-but-first-you're-going-to-get-your-money's-worth. Most important, I think, of course, is that you and I are together. May it be forever so!

With all my love.

REM

I found myself watching a short documentary about REM last night, little sweetheart. And although that band wasn't strictly one of ours together, still, it makes me think of you.

The documentary is about one of their lesser known albums but one that I quite like - it's more of a promo, really, I guess - for New Adventures in Hi-Fi. I remember I was in Ireland when it came out and actually bought it just after I got back to London before flying home to New York. Kris and I listened to tracks on Irish radio as we drove along the dark, narrow, country lanes between Bantry and Kilcrohane, which I would visit for last time with you on our trip there together in 2010. Later the album was in heavy rotation at my old band's rehearsal studio in Brooklyn and on the jukebox at McCoy's.

One of the reasons I associate it now with you is that the 8th track - "Be Mine", with it's repeated chorus of you and me, you and me, you and me - played in the background of that little restaurant we used to go to in the Inner Sunset and where we sat one night having something to eat just before you took me to SFO.

Every time I had to leave your side, I would began weeping, often hours before departure.

Later, after your impossible and tragic passing, after I had come back to New York in the short weeks before returning for your memorial (held, ever incredibly, on my own birthday), I spent several days upstate with Sean and Megan and their two little girls, broken, inconsolable. Sean gave me a couple of CD-Rs and I took them with me when I flew back out. The REM one and another I'd only just gotten with you were the two I found myself playing endlessly in the rental car all that week.

The one Sean gave me was a double-disc of live shows recorded in Dublin - Live at Olympia. The other, ours, was the new Radiohead album - The King of Limbs - which had come out just weeks before the tragic events (and which you had excitedly asked me to download as you were driving home from San Jose as I was making dinner for your arrival. We had just begun listening to it together. Those two records were my soundtrack all that week and beyond, filled with sorrow and longing for you, dumbstruck and without compass... the unimaginable hole in my life.

It aches to hear these songs, little sweetheart, our songs. But you told me, didn't you, my love, to listen and remember?

How I love you! How I miss you. How I long, with faith, to find that you are only just around an invisible corner - alive and forever. And that we will be together again, eternal.

With all my love, forever. Forever.

Listening For Signs

We’re right at the point of the autumn, little sweetheart, where we’re listening every night for some signal or sound that the radiators are going to whir to life. During the day it’s warm enough but by nightfall we’re both bundled up in hoodies and socks and straining to hear some indication that maybe a regulator has begun whistling and the pipes will fill with steam and warm the place up a bit.

I remember so well one of your last times here, little sweetheart, with that heat pipe in the WC so hot to the touch and you accidentally bumping up behind it and coming running back into the apartment to tell me.

Everything around me is evidence of you - thank god! It’s such an enormous comfort to have this shared history in events and phenomena, so that each time it comes around, my mind is flooded with thoughts of you. It’s such a blessing in your absence. And you are the blessing itself made flesh and spirit. You are the blessing of my life.

In Dreams Again!

You were in my dreams last night, little sweetheart! Thank goodness! I always feel so much better and feel like I’m doing good things when you appear. Thank you!

The one I most remember is the one this morning just before fully waking. It’s still a bit cloudy but we were with your mom and a couple of friends - I can’t quite remember who, they were two guys I knew from the old days, I think - and we had just arrived. Your mom had expected us to fly but somehow we’d wound up driving all the way to California from New York. We’d started out just to go a little way and then wound up driving the entire distance across the country.

Everything was a completely normal with you and I. Nothing bad had ever happened and it was just routine and altogether lovely. I’d just been for a run, too, I think, because my hair was still all wet and sweaty from my skully. Your mom was talking about a movie they’d seen and that we shouldn’t even bother. We could see it when it came out on Netflix or something.

What struck me most about the dream was just how wonderfully mundane it seemed. Everything was fine. We were together, all of us, and happy. Unworried.

Thank you for coming to me. I’m so grateful and I love you always. Forever.

Little Flashlight

Thinking today, little sweetheart of that little flashlight I got for you. Do you remember?

You were working at ACT at the YC. Craig Slaight had hired you as the dialect coach for an Irish play they were doing. I came with you to one of the dress rehearsals where you both were taking notes and you noticed that he had this neat little flashlight, a kind of a very soft reading light, flat, in the shape and size of a Metrocard, basically, or a bookmark.

You were so taken with it, I began to look around to find one for you and when I got back to New York I found one in the gift store at The Met. It had a nice little print of a Degas on one side and when you squeezed it, a tiny soft little reading light came on. I wrapped it up with a little note and sent it straight out to you the next day by post.

One of the things I most loved and most miss is watching you delight in something and quickly procuring it and giving it to you. You are the great blessing of my life and I always want you to know how grateful I am and keen to make you happy. Love you forever!

On Wings, of the Wind

Little sweetheart, we’re going back over the footage now of the documentary we shot that I was telling you about.

All of it is done on location and meant to evoke the nature of a quiet conversation and as it was recorded that way - quietly, with the ambient sounds of the city and other environs all around - Sylvia had the idea to add subtitles and close captioning (in both English and French). We’re working on that now, working ahead. A few episodes are already up but we’re working on ones that won’t be aired until next month.

The last one, part six, was filmed in Central Park. We went up to the north of the park to The Ravine, where I had never been, and saw the little waterfalls there and the big green pond they call “The Pool”. It went well but we tried a second time a little farther south by The Great Lawn and the light was really nice there, so I think that one is the keeper. The other one will probably be an “extra” after all six parts have been published.

Anyway, like I said, we both felt so close to you during all of this and maybe especially so on this day because I was talking about you a lot. And we didn’t even notice this until now, but listening to playback there is a moment where I’m talking about how I feel that the there of us, you, myself and Sylvia, almost become like one voice during the album, and this incredibly mysterious gust of wind just appears, like underscoring all of that as I say it and then ascends.

How well I know that you near, my little sweetheart. How blest I am. How very much I love you. Forever. Forever.