The 19th

Although the 18th is such a tragically sad day to remember each year, little sweetheart, I must remind myself that the 19th is actually a glorious one because it is the day that we recognized as our anniversary. Although we'd first met in December the year before and had our first kiss a week or so earlier that March, the 19th was the night you drove me home - or rather I drove your car, as you directed me to, with you next to me in the passenger seat - parked on a hill outside the place I was staying in Bernal Heights and made your move. "Oh!" - I finally got it and asked if maybe you'd like to come in and have a cup of tea. You did, of course, and there's far more to tell but it was very much our first night. Let's make sure we remember this glorious day forever. With all my love... 

A Happy Day

Little sweetheart, as incredible as it and we couldn't know, of course, this day, the day after such a sad, tragic day, comes the day you and I always thought of as our "anniversary" because it was the first night we spent together. I'll always hold it close to my heart, as I do you. Always. Always.

May 7

You taught me to remember, little sweetheart, that today is the anniversary of the surgeries that saved and changed your life. I marked the date on my calendar and am remembering how grateful I am for you always. You, who saved and changed my life, from the first, when I met you, when you found me just seven months later. 

With all my love forever.

Holy Days - April 4th

Little sweetheart, it's April 4th. As the month turns from March to April, I always have this day in mind somehow, intuiting its approach. 

April 4 was the day my return flight to NYC was scheduled after you and I had gotten the "Blackbird" production together. Closing was meant to be a few days prior, so that you and I could decamp to Davis and have a lovely weekend together before I flew back east. Already, we knew you would be following just a few weeks later. My birthday was the 25th and we had tickets to see Low at that really special church venue in Philadelphia. We thought we might either take the train down or even rent a car and drive, because you were going to be here also for the workshop of my play My Before and After. We'd arranged to have the day off so we could make the trip. 

Instead, tragically, none of that came to be. I did fly on April 4th, heartbroken, ruined, alone. 

This day haunts me, little sweetheart, so I must do everything I can to be mindful, to listen quietly for your presence and to heed your call, your guidance. And simply to have faith - faith that you are closer than I can even imagine and that I need to keep my heart open, do our work and know that you will one day soon call me home. 

With all my love forever.

The Day After The Day After St Patrick's Day

Little sweetheart, for all the bitter anniversaries that March brings of loss, another far more joyous one remains and I hope to hold it close to my heart today and all in all the days of my life yet to come. 

March 19th - the day after the day after St Patrick's Day - was one that you and I used to cite as our anniversary as a couple. We'd met, of course, months earlier and had been getting to know and deeply care for one another from almost that very first moment. But this night proved a special one for us and later we'd think of it in that way - as our Anniversary, writ large.. 

So, Happy March 19th, my darling girl, my True Love, my soulmate, my gingersnap, my little sweetheart. With all my love forever.

In Your Arms

Little sweetheart, on this sad day, my thoughts are, as ever, of you. How terribly I miss you. How grateful I am that you found me and brought such light and love into my life. How I long to be with you again when God finally calls me home to your side. 

Last night, something very unusual happened. The westside was cloaked in fog, as if we were back in the Inner Sunset of San Francisco as we were in those best days and nights and years of my life - simply with you. 

Fog in NYC is quite rare and I couldn't help but think, indeed, know, that you were putting your arms around me, letting me know you’re so much closer than I can even imagine. 

My every thought is of you. On this day and every day. And I love you. Forever. Forever.

 

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.

Night and Day

The saddest anniversaries of March 8 and 18 have come around again, little sweetheart, and I have listened quietly for your presence and guidance.

Little things throughout the days have turned my head with their curious manifestations and I know, with faith, that you've drawn near. I'll always, however sadly, mark these days.

 

But I will also, always - far more joyously! - look to the many other days, like your birthday, which brought you into the world, and this very day of March 19th, that you & I observed as Our Anniversary, writ large, because it was that magic day and night that we knew, we really knew, we were one.

 

Thank god (quite literally) that you found me (as you liked to say).

 

Happy True Anniversary, little sweetheart.

 

Our Oneness Can Never Be Erased.

 

 

January 13th

Little sweetheart, 30 years ago today, my father died. It was so shocking at the time. I couldn’t know, then, how far more unfathomable life and loss would be. 

I talked to you about that day, little sweetheart. You’d lost your dear brother Jesse just the year before you and I met and although my dad’s passing was sudden and untimely, Jesse twenty years younger when he passed than my dad had been. Both far too young. I like to think that you and Jesse have gotten to know my dad a little and that you get together now and then, looking in on us here and encouraging us on. 

This week is always a strange one for me, little sweetheart - I remember how you would always so vigilantly check up on me as the day approached - and the passing of my dad is book-ended by the death of my friend Curt, who died in 2007 (again, less than a year before we met) on the 19th. 

I’m feeling on edge, little sweetheart, but saying quiet prayers. Please be near me. With all my love forever.

On This Day - Mom

My little sweetheart, within the next 24 hours is the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death. We don’t quite know exactly, because my brother found her after her fall and we don’t quite know when it happened.

When the news of it came, it was a late Sunday night going into Monday morning. I was in London, excited to begin rehearsals for a play of ours - one that you and I were hoping to do together at Seattle Rep.  I had been texting my director, our friend, Wilson Milam, with notes and rewrites well past midnight after which I finally went to bed.

My laptop was nearby playing music and still restless around 4am, I reached over to check email. My brother had written in all caps “EMERGENCY. YOU MUST COME HOME”. I was puzzled to say the least. I wrote back to say I was in London and was mom okay and he replied “NO. COME HOME.”

You know the rest, little sweetheart. I’ll write more later but I'm remembering just now how I called you once I had the actual confirmation. I was alone. I was staying at Kris & Joy's in Northern London but they were in Wales at the farm. I didn't even know how to dial out international on the landline. I had to wake them to find out.

The first call after that, I made to you in San Francisco. I told you and you burst into tears and then began helping me through every single step for a week. You got me on a flight back to NYC and then Detroit. You flew yourself there and brought my suit. You slept in the airport waiting for my flight. You took me into your arms and helped me through every moment. You took me by the hand and over and over that entire week every night to remind me that you were the love of my life and that I was still alive with something, the most Important thing to live for - you.

It’s that day, today, little sweetheart. And I am so grateful and miss you so very much. Oh my dear dear True Love. Take me home, soon, won’t you?

With all my love.

NYC to SF - 1914

I was walking home after my run today little sweetheart and I saw something interesting.

There are little video displays on the bus stops in New York, now. The time and temperature and other info is displayed and sometimes little “On This Day in NYC” fun facts will appear. One of them day caught my eye.

It said that today - July 29 - in 1914 marked the first ever transcontinental telephone call and that it was placed in New York and answered in San Francisco.

It made me think immediately of you, of course, and our many many epic hours long call every night when we were apart, me here, you there. Before I had a decent cellphone, I’d lay on the plaid couch with my bottom of the line AT&T Nokia balanced on my left ear talking with you into the night or sitting on the floor of the kitchen under the window on the old landline. Hearing your voice every day made being apart bearable, little sweetheart.

And now, talking to you every day in my prayers and later night conversations before I fall asleep, devout in my faith that we will be together again and forever is the thing that fortifies me. Please by near me today, little sweetheart. Today and every day, until That Day. With all my love forever.

An Anniversary of sorts...

Little sweetheart, as I'm working on our book, I have several notebooks going all at the same time. I'll switch from one to another as detail memories and events from different periods, working ahead in long hand as I periodically transfer long passages to type, editing and rewriting as I go.

Often little notes scrawled on index cards or postcards will fall out of one of the notebooks - some scrap of info or an idea I had wanted to get down in a hurry and save so it would inspire a passage when I got back to it later.

Yesterday, I found one of these. A pink post it that says "First Reh Jan 29th". That was to remind me of something I've already written about but that I set aside for today because today is January 29th. The note is to remind me that rehearsals for Tir na nOg began on this day in 2008.

You and I had first met, little sweetheart, about two months earlier, at the first reading of the play and then when I came back to San Francisco for a workshop of my own play, Seven Pages Unsigned, you were there in the audience. I was so surprised and delighted to see you!

Now, on this day, eleven years ago, we sat next to each other (something that I believe you yourself arranged by re-arranging the name tags around the table) and began the journey that would seal our souls together as one forever.

It's a mix of snow and rain, wintry and gray and cold outside today, little sweetheart. And as I type this and try to work myself up to attempting a run along the Hudson before the temps truly drop into something Arctic, I try to quiet myself and listen for your eternal and celestial presence.

Please be as near to me, at my very elbow, as you were eleven years ago this morning. I need you more than ever. And always. With all my love...

Days Remembered

I’ve been so occupied these last weeks, little sweetheart, with the new album (weighing in at 23 tracks, it’s quite a handful of work) that I haven’t been able to keep as diligent as I’d like in banging out our first memoir but when I resume, which I hope to do by the end of the month, I’ll be nearly at the point of recounting out first trip to London together. And it’s actually the 10th anniversary of those very days, so so much of it is flooding back in the memory.

You’d just been here in NYC for a week and we knew we’d have England together in the months ahead because you needed to attend a friend’s wedding and I was going for several weeks to work on one of my plays with Wilson. I was staying in Kentish Town with Kris and Joy and missing you terribly. You’d drive up to the house in Davis just to be able to get on a landline and call me, eight hours behind, from California, to talk each day. When we weren’t on the phone, you were sending me epic emails, every single one of them treasured and saved. I’m looking over them even now, my angel.

When you finally arrived, I saw you coming down the stairs to the basement flat. You’d cut your hair! Just the front, cut it into bangs or a “fringe” as you liked to say. I’d asked Joy if it was okay for you to stay with us and she of course said yes. She loved you right away too. You and Kris were sort of an odd pairing - the two of you are so different! - but it didn’t matter. You were here, we were together.

You knew London, you’d lived there after finishing your degree at Oxford, but I still liked taking you to all my favorite places. We wandered The Heath and took the Tube down to The Embankment. Walked across the bridge together. Lingered on The South Bank. Saw Shakespeare at The Globe. Had a 99 from a stand near The Thames. Got tickets for The National Theatre and later Donmar Warehouse. Bought groceries at Tesco and made a delicious crumble once we got home. Got locked out of the bedroom one night when no one was home to help us and you picked the lock expertly with a hairpin. Cuddled and made plans and belatedly discovered a Cure song as it blared out of the boombox on Fortess Road “Friday, I’m in Love”, which became our anthem.

One night on the walk back to The Northern Line, looking out at the city spread before us, doing everything I’d longed to share with someone special, forever lonely but with you finally squeezing my hand healing every wound, every slight, I began to weep. “Don’t cry, don’t be sad yet or miss me - I’m right here!”, you said, knowing my heart, my way instantly and better than I myself.

These days are still so fresh in my mind, my little sweetheart. And I thank God for you and know that you are near, nearer than I can imagine. And that we will be together again and forever. Indeed, we already are. I just need to pass - when it is my time, not yet, you’ve already turned me back to wait - to know it. With all my love. 

Words and Music

One of the things I meant to post on April 25 - my birthday and the anniversary of your memorial - was this track from the new album Sometimes in Dreams.

It obviously is inspired by what I wrote and spoke for you that day in 2011. It includes much of what I said that night and goes deeper with new writing and thoughts and musical underscoring, as has become the way of us. I love you my angel.

I have a thousand thousand things to say...

The Choral Text Passage 


(from Bipolar Explorer's double-album, Sometimes in Dreams - c/p Serafin-Wells, Thirteen November Music ASCAP and Slugg Records)

A Better Anniversary...

Of all the bitter days of March, little sweetheart, now remembered for the tragic events of 2011, it's so much more lovely to remember an earlier, happier one.

Today, March 19, is the day that you & I recognized as our anniversary as a couple, remember? And today is actually the tenth anniversary.

So, happy anniversary, my gorgeous girl, my beautiful angel. I love you with all my heart and soul. Forever yours.