Clear Eyed and Grateful

On our walk led by our little Jack Russell pup, we stopped and looked all around, little sweetheart, at the lush green surroundings, in the cool autumn air. I was so grateful to be there with you. So grateful for you. I will always be.

In The Village

Kilcrohane is just a little village,my sweetheart, mostly filled with farmers. It has one church and three pubs.

The third of them, The White House, was really not much more than what we’d think of as someone’s den here in the US. It had a short bar with taps and stools and a little pool table and was only open at the night when the owner came home from working in the fields. It was at the very edge of the village.

In the middle of town was the church and the other two pubs were to the front and back of it. The one to the front was as hotel bar nestled into the little lodge there. And the main pub was called Fitzpatrick’s after its longtime owner but known to everyone as Eileen’s, since she’d been the publican there for so many years.

Sadly, for us anyway, Eileen was gone that whole week we were there and never got to meet you, little sweetheart. But everybody else that did was very taken with you.

This is picture of you with everyone there at Eileen’s. We’d just come from visiting that nice old man, Johnny, at his house up the lane and had walked back settling in at one of the tables. Kris and Joy and Johnny all have a pint or half pint and you’re enjoying a hot chocolate with your feet up.

I think it’s a wonderful picture of you and it makes me so grateful that we made it there.

Happy Birthday, Little Sweetheart

Little sweetheart... Happy Birthday! It's your 37th and I wake with thoughts of you, prayers for you and your name and spirit in every room.

I'm so very grateful for you, my darling. You found and saved me and brought such blindingly brilliant light and love into my life, the kind that could knock a man down. You felled me. You are my miracle girl.

I'm so very grateful, too, that we spent each of your birthdays together once we had become one. I remember the first in Boston when you were on the road doing Rock n Roll at The Huntington. It was brisk and wintry there already and I walked you to the stage door every night, watching the show from the orchestra almost every performance. On your birthday, after walking you there, I went grocery shopping, then back to the sweet little apartment where we were staying and made dinner and baked a cake for you to come home to.

The next year found us in San Francisco on the day. I'd been gathering lots of little presents for you with a plan to surprise and shower you with all the many gifts, securing and secreting them for you to find at last. I had most everything but while we were browsing at the great little punkrock bookstore, Needles and Pens, in The Mission, I saw how taken you were with a pretty set of feathered earrings. I quietly sneaked back later and bought them for you.

On your 31st, we decided to go up to Calistoga to the hot springs. We wended our way through the hills in your battered blue Prius and got there in the late afternoon. We checked in to a charming little room and then changed into our swimsuits to go visit the pools. You weren't crazy about the super hot one but the warm one was, Goldilocks-like, just right. You were, as ever, unbelievably stunning to every passerby, in your black one-piece, your perfect ivory skin, long red hair cascading over your porcelain shoulders and with your ever-present and enormous black sunhat perched on your head. Like a bathing beauty Zorro.

You wanted to wade across the pool into deeper waters but you didn't want to get submerged, so you wrapped yourself around me and I walked us across, a stately, striking procession. Carrying my giggling little mermaid. I can't think of too many times I was ever happier.

Little sweetheart, you are in my every thought, today and every day. I love you with all my heart and soul. And I'm sending all my love to you. May it fly to where you - closer than I can imagine. I know you're watching and guiding me safely toward you. You are my lookout, wrapped around my soul just like you wrapped yourself around me in Calistoga, taking me through the waters of the journey I must complete and then to be reunited with you so very soon and forever.

Thank you, my angel. My true love, my best friend, my soulmate, my partner, my gingersnap, my gorgeous gorgeous girl. Happy Birthday, Summer. Soon with you, my love, yes? Soon. So very soon. All my love... m

All Roads Lead

Little sweetheart, it's late. I'm watching West Wing and trying not to eat an entire box of gingersnaps. Every thing is about you, little sweetheart. All roads lead there... 

I remember that before I came to SF to do the play and meeting you, I also liked cookies. I didn't have a sweet tooth in all the years I was drinking but I was sober now and I liked Chips Ahoy. They were my go-to. But for some reason when I was living in that little basement back apartment in Bernal Heights where they put me up during the play, I started eating gingersnaps. My grandpa liked them, I remember. I would come home to that place after rehearsal and just be alone. There was a Blockbuster Video a little ways away and I bought a few DVDs marked down as 4 for $20. I'd watch them on my laptop and snack on gingersnaps and sometimes text people I knew asking them to come see the play. They were all out of town. Either in LA or back in NYC. I was lonely. No one would come over. But you did. 

And you changed my life. You were there. You made your way in. I didn't have to ask. 

And I'm still feeling every wave of what you set in motion. Your pictures and things surround me. You are in my first thoughts as I wake and my last as I lay down to sleep. You're not here but in a way - ways I can't entirely describe - you very much are. I need you. You're everything.

Love you forever. 

Gifts

Little sweetheart, I'm looking at one of your first cards to me. It's in a frame over my desk. It came with a gorgeous coffee table art book and you sent it to me on my birthday, just months after we first met, just after I'd come back to New York, just before your first visit here.

I remember that we talked increasingly and almost every day on the phone in those first few weeks after the play had closed in San Francisco and I had returned to NYC. My birthday was just less than a month after that. And soon after, you called to tell me that you were thinking of coming to visit. You wondered if you should just come for a weekend or a whole week. I told you that you should definitely come for the whole week because if you didn't, afterwards, we'd be sad.

You did come, of course, and it was magic. We really were quite new to each other still. They say that new couples are tested when they first travel together. This was far more intimate than that. The two of us bumping about here together in my little apartment for a week. But it was perfect and we were perfectly compatible and comfortable with each other immediately. It was extraordinary and it confirmed every feeling we had for each other. Later, after you returned to San Francisco - and not before we immediately made another plan of when to see each other next (in London at the end of the month) - you emailed to say you were "sorry to have left the place in such a tip" (a mess) and that I shouldn't think that you "hadn't seen (me) walking around behind and cleaning up after (you)." I wrote back to tell you the truth - I wasn't concerned about any mess or cleaning up, I was bewitched and simply couldn't stop following you around from room to room, so in love and overjoyed to have you here.

In the card that I'm looking at, this card you sent me with the gift for my birthday just a few weeks before you arrived and stayed here with me for the first time, you write so lovingly and charmingly, telling me about finding the book at the great little store in The Mission - Needles & Pens - where I'd taken you (and would again many times) and that you also wanted to include some gingersnaps from the bakery in your neighborhood (where we also would go together many times) but that you were worried they'd be "smashed to skitter with the heavy book and all...".

It's a beautiful note, little sweetheart, and noteworthy for being so early in our time together, that - like your calling to say you've impulsively decided to come visit but are making sure that's alright -  it still has the slightest hint of “if-that’s-okay” politeness about the fringes of our mutual head-over-heels falling in love. You say in the note that you’re hoping I don’t already have this book but that if I do, then I “better tell you & don’t be all nice and not mention it… OK?”.

Little sweetheart, no one has ever been as blessed as I to have been found and loved by you. As I sit here this morning wanting so much to write something down for you and so very mindful that yesterday I was not at my best, regretting it and praying that I may be better, do better, be worthy of the great gift that is you, I look at this treasure from our first days together and the words begin to come, the thoughts begin to appear, the love in my heart begins to swell.

I know I must do better and that I can. I vow that I will. I vow to quiet myself and take today one breath at a time with gratitude for you. And a prayer that I may be worthy, that you will let me call to you and hear and help and guide me. I will do better, my little sweetheart. I promise. Please, please be with me. With all my love forever…

On this day...

When I looked into Facebook this morning, little sweetheart, there was a "memory" there of a text post, a status update with a list of song titles. It ended with an ellipsis, mid-set list and the word "more", although clicking on it didn't reveal any more of the original post. Nonetheless, I recognized immediately that the collection of song titles was the set list of the wonderful Leonard Cohen show you took me to for an early birthday present. You'd already gotten tickets - super secret, you told me - for something closer to the day but this was something you couldn't resist, so you wanted to take me to see this too, my little sweetheart. No one ever does things like that for me. Only you. And what a great night it was. The concert was in a beautiful restored art deco theatre in Oakland (could it have been the Paramount, maybe?) that reminded of Radio City. We had fantastic seats far down in the orchestra, a little to house right on the aisle. He came out and played a wonderful 90 minute set and we were totally knocked out, only to discover that he was taking a short break and coming back for another hour-long second one. When the show was over, we walked holding hands sweetly, into the warm spring California night and drove back across the bridge to San Francisco and your neighborhood of the Inner Sunset. Before we got to your house, we stopped off at a deli there, on Judah, I think, for a treat to take home. You went straight to the ice cream freezer and then beckoned me over. "I think you better come here," you said. You pointed to a special edition pint of Ben & Jerry's Gingersnap. "Oh, my god," I blurted. "Better get two of them," you replied. I think every day I was with you, my little sweetheart, vies for the title of Best Day of My Life. I love you with all my heart and soul. And I can't wait to be called and returned to you in The Forever. My darling, soulmate, true love, best friend. Wonderful, magical you.