"Table of Silence"

Little sweetheart, it’s been so hot today, I couldn’t bring myself to go out. I’ve been very light with using a/c this year but a couple of times when it’s been this hot, I’ve finally given over.

I really wanted to get out for a walk at some point, though, so I waiting until dusk and then headed west and north. It was dark by the time I was heading home and I decided to walk through Lincoln Center, where I saw the most amazing event unfolding. I asked one of the security guards what was happening and he said that it was a rehearsal for a performance that was going to be staged here on Monday, which is 9/11.

It is almost impossible to describe little sweetheart but I’ll try. All around the fountain were two or three circles of white-robed dancers - there must’ve been over a hundred of them - in simple uniform motion. Farther removed at the border of the plaza were two guys with huge kettle drums like they have in an orchestra playing in a steady almost mournful rhythm. And at another remove were a trumpeter, a saxophonist, a violinist and three women with megaphones. Much of the performance was in silence but parts of it were punctuated with sound including these musicians and the dancers themselves who sometimes take up a wordless chant. 

There was a moment where they seemed to pause for a break, for some words from the director while staying in formation and I found a woman with a headset I took to be a stage manager.  I asked her about the performance and she told me that it was a piece called “Table of Silence” that had been created in 2011 to observe 9/11 and that they would be performing it right here at 8am on Monday. That it was free to attend and would also be live streamed. I’m definitely going to watch that, little sweetheart and will leave a link to it right here.

It was absolutely mesmerizing and terribly moving. And although it’s meant to be performed in the early light of morning there was something incredibly special about seeing in at night. I’m so glad I happened by it! And to top it off, as I walked home I could see that they had lit the twin beams downtown, as they do every year around 9/11 to commemorate and remember where the towers once stood.

Thinking of you, as ever. With all my love. 

April 25th

There’s never a day I’m not thinking of you, little sweetheart, but some of them are even more keen than others and today is one of them. Of all our years together this day will always hold both great joy and great sadness. 

One year one this date we had a wonderful weekend in Davis together, you took me to see DCfC in Sacramento and made epic cupcakes for us. And just two years later on the same date I was speaking at your memorial. 

I remember being in the car with you once and you telling me that you thought that we had ten years before your health would fail again - you were so hyper-aware of your own mortality - and that you wanted me, after you passed, to listen to our music and think of you and also that you wanted me to speak at your service. I remember how the tears began burning my eyes when you said that and how I cried and told you I wanted to die before you. 

The words I did write and speak for you that day, that awful day, I returned to, recording this tribute for our album Sometimes in Dreams. 

I can’t say much more just now, little sweetheart, except that I love you with all my heart and soul and pray that we will be together sometime again soon and forever. With all of my love…

Remembering Forever

Little sweetheart, this is the very difficult day each year and I try to think of it not as the day I lost you but as the day you ascended, transcending this earthly plane for the forever one. And that I will meet you there one day, where we will be together at last again and as I will come to see and know we have been forever. 

On that night as we left the hospital, little sweetheart, there was the most amazing celestial event in the sky - a super moon, the Perigee-Syzygy. I wrote this song for you about it, found on our album Sometimes in Dreams. 

How I love you! Forever!

And At That Hour, Above (Perigee-Syzygy) 

 

 

April 25 - pt 1

It’s my birthday, little sweetheart, twinned forever with you for a multitude of reasons but certainly very much so because your memorial was held on the day. 

You and I were meant to be together here in New York working on my play My Before and After, which I’d written so very much with you mind - a big role unimaginable for anyone but yourself. And we had tickets to go see Low in Philadelphia the day itself, on my birthday night. 

Instead, I was speaking at your memorial in San Francisco. 

When we made the Sometimes in Dreams double-album, I revisited, with a couple of edits and additions, what I said that day for you, composed underscoring and putting it together as the centerpiece of that album - The Choral Text Passage. I’m posting a link to it here . 

I’m so grateful for you, my little sweetheart. How I love you! Forever! Forever! 

Good Friday (remarks)

Little sweetheart, today is Good Friday. It has a special resonance to me for a variety of reasons but perhaps especially because for three years in a row I was asked to write and deliver remarks as part of West End’s service. The last of these was actually recorded, so it could be posted on the church’s website. It’s very much about you, of course, and I’m posting it here, below. With all my love forever. 

In Between Days

These days ahead, little sweetheart, while not quite as dark as those of March, also have a kind of bitter memory to them. They are the days between my returning to New York after your tragic passing and my return to San Francisco for your memorial - held, incredibly on my birthday.

There was a something about flying back to New York that held a kind of magical hope that I would find you here. Joan Didion speaks of how she kept her husband’s clothes after his own tragic passing, very consciously thinking that he would need them when he came back. This place, of course, our little apartment here, is very much filled with your things to this day and pictures of you on every wall and surface surround me. But even then, I felt somehow I would find you here when I got back. I’d been gone two months and the landlord had to get into the apartment to fix a couple of things. They’d been waiting until I got home. They were very kind and empathetic, knowing of your loss, so they didn’t bother me for a few days but they did finally have to repair a radiator that had been leaking - my neighbor had let them in weeks before so they could shut it off - and all the stove/ovens in the building had been replace except for mine while I’d been gone. They went from gas to electric, I think because there’d been some problems with the gas lines - remember when you were here and you thought you noticed a funny smell, like gas escaping? Remember, I called them and they were quite unusually prompt, arriving within the hour.

I was here alone for that first week and then Sean and Meg asked if I’d like to come out Rye Brook and stay with them and their two little girls (they’re both very big girls, high school and college, now). It was enormously helpful, actually, little sweetheart to be with them. They knew you, of course, and were unfailingly kind. You and I were supposed to have visited them on Cape Cod that summer. It was nice to be around their family, having dinner and playing with the dog, going for walks, hearing about the girls’s day at school and staying up talking with Sean and Meg. I told Sean at one point that I didn’t know how I was going to do this (like keep going on) and he said, very kindly “you’re doing it”. It was way too soon to start working on the album you and he and I had begun, again, but the thought did occur that I would do. I wrote my speech for you for your memorial and spent my days out there with our lovely friends until it was time to fly back to SFO.

I rented a car and got lost trying to get in from the airport. I’d only ever traveled to and from SFO with you and I wound up way over on the other side of town, near the stadium just as a Giants game was getting out. I was, literally, lost without you.

These days, these three weeks in April always give me such pause, little sweetheart. I know they will again this year. In a way, they fold somewhat neatly into Holy Week, which begins on Sunday. My thoughts, as ever, of you. With all my love.

That Song

It’s the last day and night of June, little sweetheart. Today has been the hottest day of the year, so far. 97f at its peak here in the late afternoon.

Tonight, I don’t know why, I thought of looking up something on YouTube. It was something that had been on TV and rather a phenomenon at the time, so much so that my mom had sent me a link to watch it. It was that clip of Susan Boyle singing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. I remember it being a little extraordinary as it was one of those awful TV talent shows and as she was older and didn’t look like a model or something that everyone was rather mean and dismissive when she came out and then shocked, and hopefully ashamed of themselves, to hear how wonderfully she sang.

I remember telling you about it and although you agreed with all that you were less excited because, as you told me, you had “a relationship with that song”, yourself. I didn’t quite know what you meant, little sweetheart, but I thought I understood.

When I finally did hear you sing it, it was from a performance that had been filmed when you were only 12 years old. They played it at your memorial on a huge screen at the back of the stage. You were still a little girl but all of you, all I would come to know, was there in your eyes as you sang expressively, soaringly and beautifully.

Your memorial, of course, was held, incredibly, on my own birthday. A day we’d meant to spend rehearsing a play of mine in New York, then driving to Philadelphia that night to see Low play at the storied indie venue at The First Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street. Instead I was here at the Brava Theatre in The Mission in San Francisco about to give your eulogy.

As in all things, little sweetheart, I followed you. After they showed you singing “I Dreamed a Dream”, the tears still rolling down my cheeks, I got up with the words I’d written for you and stood at the podium in silence for a long moment before I could finally gather myself enough to begin.

When I hear that song now, I, too, have a relationship with it, little sweetheart. One that you gave me, like so many other things that I treasure, that saved and redeem me.

How I love you! Forever, my angel. Forever.

The Choral Text Passage

Little sweetheart, when we first began working on Sometimes in Dreams, I knew that its centerpiece had to be based on something of those words I had written for you ten years ago. 

The two previous albums, Electric Hymnal and Dream Together had both incorporated spoken word with underscoring but Sometimes was the work that most fully integrated it, finally, I think, and that marked that aspect of our sound going forward and to this very day.  

The piece for Sometimes became "The Choral Text Passage", with the text itself a bit longer, adding a few other thoughts, underscored with guitars and spoken, as the title might suggest, with multiple voices sometimes joining in counterpoint or unison with the main narrative one. It's here, below. 

Love you forever.

 THE CHORAL TEXT PASSAGE (from Sometimes in Dreams)

 

On This Day

Little sweetheart, today is my birthday. We were already forever twinned before, incredibly, your memorial was held on the very same day, ten years ago. I'll share more things here today, too, little sweetheart but begin by repeating below what I said to all those gathered, brokenhearted, to honor you that day. With all my love forever: 

Michael's address for Summer, given April 25, 2011 - San Francisco, CA

SUMMERLOVE 

I have a thousand things to say about Summer Lindsay Serafin. A thousand thousand. I’ll be saying them and thinking them and writing them down every day for the rest of my life no matter how brief or prolonged that may be. But today...Just for today...

She liked to sleep. That’s not what I wanna talk about but it has to be said. She loved sleeping. I’m listening to one her voicemails of late and she says she is so excited by the prospect of sleep. That “it is like (her) mouth is watering for sleep”. She says that. It’s good. I sometimes sleep now and just want to stay. I hope I might find her there.

It’s impossible, really. Impossible that I met her. That she “found me” she liked to say. I’m not from around here. It’s impossible that she lived in a place called “The Inner Sunset”. Impossible that she lit me up, this shining person, and held me, safely, in her orbit. Impossible. All of it. And today. Just impossible.

She was a terrible driver. Even Mike said so. I loved her battle-scared Blue Prius. The passenger side mirror in a kaleidoscope thousand pieces, dangling by a cable. A taillight busted. The bumper sagging. No, no she fixed that. The back seat full of boots and sunhats and coconut water. And tissues. She left a trail of tissues everywhere. Like Hansel & Gretel. You could follow it to its source and eventually find her.

She was – words, not for the first time, fail – an unearthly beauty. An ethereal beauty. And shockingly, entirely earthbound. Preternaturally present. She ate up life. With both tiny perfect fists. Ate it up. Actually, she ate quite beautifully. Do you remember that? Cutting and balancing petite bites, transferring them knife to fork with quiet elegance. Even bananas she ate like that. Seriously, I have a picture. I got her to try dark chocolate. She wasn’t a fan at first. She broke little bits off into tiny pieces. I looked over and she was sprinkling Equal onto them one at a time.

She was the dearest dearest girl. Nothing phony about her. If you got to know her at all, your heart just broke in two the moment you realized, the moment you saw her, really saw her and then surged with love. For her. This amazing girl.

She didn’t do anything to make it difficult, but I can understand how someone could think she was hard to get to know. She was friendly but never facile. She wasn’t frivolous. She was serious. She was fun, god, was she fun. She loved people – and this is what I wanna get it, at long last – she loved people and she took them seriously. Not everybody’s up for that. More fool they.

I’m circling the runway here, I know, but there’s one more thing I gotta say before I bring it in – she was a breathtakingly gifted actor. I met her doing Edna O’Brien’s Tir na nOg, Chris Smith’s last play at The Magic. She played the central role, a country girl in the west of Ireland who grows to young adulthood and further adventures in Dublin. And she burned that stage to cinders every goddamn night. With three broken toes. If you live here and you go to the theatre and you did not see her in that, I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. A year later, right after she was in Rock n Roll at ACT, she went down to Carmel to do David Hare’s The Blue Room directed by Ken Kelleher. 

I sat there between Linda and Coy and I just thought “god, what am I doing?” I have a perfectly healthy ego. I’m from New York. But I have never seen acting like that. She is like the supermoon. Once in a generation.

She loved her work. And she was good at it. But she had a higher calling. To love. And, yes, that is what I want to talk about. Because she told me. She told me she knew why she was here and that was to love. She was filled with love. So much love. And she wanted more than anything to share her love with others. She told me that. And there is absolutely no doubting it because you could not have a better piece of luck in this world than to have been blessed enough to have been loved by her. She was like that device they use in open heart surgery that cracks your chest open and holds it gaping, wide, so you can be healed. That fragile little muscle, scarred and scared and on the verge of shutting down, giving out, giving up, held now tenderly in her expert hands, beneath her loving, healing gaze.

Her love was tenacious, vigilant. Unflinching. I met her three years ago and she quickly became the center of my life. She didn’t drop people. If you were in, she was in. Even if you faltered because nobody had ever shown up for you before like this, she was on you. Checking in. Reminding. Different this time. Not goin’ anywhere. She hated talking on the phone but we talked every day, often for hours. For three. She knew everything about me. Things I never tell became hers.

And she made sure I knew her as well. Her gratitude, her pride in a happy childhood. Loving, devoted, would-take-a-bolt-of-lightning-for parents. Her epic struggle from the age of 5 to live. Ryan’s gifting her a kidney and the double organ transplant that saved and changed her life. The unfathomable loss of Jesse. She carried every piece of her past with pride and love and honesty into every room, knowing exactly who she was, like no one I have ever known. Or ever will.

God, how I loved her! She’s right. She did find me. I clung to her. “Like a life raft” I told her she was, “to a drowning man.” She smiled and said, “you’re not drowning anymore.”

When my mom died last year, I was in London. I got the news in the middle of the night. I was alone. I called Summer, eight hours behind, here. When I told her, she burst into tears. And then told me to get on Skype. “I want to see you drink an entire glass of water”, she said. “And lie down. And try to sleep. I’ll be right here at my computer watching you. I will watch you while you sleep.” She watched over me like an angel, a cyber angel, and when I woke she was there with Linda getting me on a plane to New York and then on to Michigan. Then Summer flew herself to Detroit and waited in the airport all night to meet my plane. And was at my side every day for a week while I buried my mother. Who does that? Serafin love. Irrepressible, irreplaceable girl.

“When I met you”, she said “you were so wounded, so hurting, so sad – I just wanted to love you, to heal. But I never dreamed”, she added, “I would ever get so much love in return.” Who does that?

I need her. I am broken. That is as it should be. It’s supposed to be hard. She cracked my chest open. It’ll have to stay that way. Because who would go back? But it’s hard.

Summer, incredibly, had an answer for that, I think. All this is preface. She’d want to have the last word. So, I’d like to share that. It’s her Christmas card from a couple of years ago. She was in Boston doing Rock n Roll at The Huntington. It closed just before the holidays and she came to New York to exchange gifts with me. She made me promise to wait until December 25th to open it. So, I took it on the plane with me, waited til Christmas morning and opened it at my Mom’s. The gift was a beautiful blue and grey scarf she knitted. There was also a card. It’s to me but in a way it’s to us all. Everyone of us who she loved. Everyone of us who love her. And feel so lost. Because life is so lonely, the world so empty and wrong without her.

My Dearest Michael,

I’ve been working on this in the green room and backstage since we came to Boston. I’d drape it around my neck to keep warm while knitting in the dark of the freezing wings. The cast is decisively in favor of the striped color combination.

It’s Christmas day, and I’m wearing my pajamas. I’m in my P.J.’s even if you’re reading this when the sun has set. Ryan is making another bourbon and coke even if you’re reading this as the sun rises. My Dad is reading aloud shocking statistics about religion or politics, my Mom is spraying perfume on the dog, and me...? I am missing you. Maybe one day we’ll spend Christmas together.

Coy says “You are where you’re meant to be”, and while I like that idea, I know, far too well, what it feels like to be in a world where everything feels wrong – where everything is wrong. You have also been to that place. And as the world spins on its own axis, people are lost in their own needs and trials. We falter blindly, and strive endlessly. But no matter where you are, whether you should be there or not, and no matter who is present... know that you are a treasure in your own right. If the chest is buried, the key is lost, or the map stolen, it doesn’t matter; it doesn’t change the fact that it’s inside you. I just see what’s there. You carry it with you. What’s hidden can always be found.

I love you.
Your Gingersnap,
Summer
 

I love you, too. Love you forever. Goodnight, little sweetheart.

Listen and Remember

I’m sitting here tonight switching through the channels on Sling, little sweetheart, and I saw that The Wizard of Oz was on. It doesn’t matter where I pick up watching that - the beginning, middle or end - randomly, it just always breaks my heart because of how thoroughly my thoughts are filled with you. 

Of course, you famously played Dorothy - I think you were 12, is that right? - in the production at the Chico Light Opera company. People were still talking about it 20 years later and it had been such a big thing early in your life, it’s how you’d first worked with and met Coy. 

I remember one time you and I set out on a long walk from your apartment in the Inner Sunset all through Golden Gate Park and finally winding up down by Ocean Beach. It had begun to rain and we ducked into quite a nice restaurant. You’d wanted to take me there anyway, so we got ourselves a table by the window. A little jazz trio was playing and at one point they began to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I held your hand and looked into your eyes and cried and cried and cried. 

How I love you! How I still do! How I always will! 

I remember you telling me once - remember exactly where we were, I was driving your Prius and we were on the way to go grocery shopping at Andronico’s. It was shortly after my mom had died and you propped my up that whole week. I couldn’t have gotten through it without you - As we drove you said something to me about your own death. You thought I would probably outlive you and you asked two things - that I speak at your funeral or memorial and that I listen to our songs, like what we were playing on the car stereo just then and all of our songs - and think of you. 

The Wizard of Oz is like that. It’s so hard to take it on and not fall apart with longing and grief. But I try. And I love you my little sweetheart. 

Love you forever.

Bracelet

Little sweetheart, several years ago your mom got each of us a lovely little memorial bracelet - leather wrist strip holding a polished steel setting with your name and dates on one side and a personalized phrase on the other (mine, of course, saying "Little Sweetheart"). 

Some time back, because I wore it every single day everywhere I went, the leather began to give way on one side from the clasp and I had to put it aside for fear that it would fall off and I might lose it. 

But this afternoon, I took it to that tiny little shop at W55th and 9th, the shoe repair shop run by that guy who always says that he - and true to his word usually can - can fix anything. He stopped what he was doing when I came in and took a look at it under his magnifying glass light. I asked if he could fix it and he said he'd do it right then and there, just to have a seat. He cut a new piece of leather and attached it so seemingly seamlessly that you couldn't even tell that a new piece had been attached to the old. He cut away the frayed edge and then asked me to try it on to make sure the fit was good. Then he went over to his industrial sewing machine and stitched it up properly. 

It's totally restored now! It feels so good to be back in the habit of putting both it and my red "Love Courageously" band on each day. I took a picture and sent it to your mom. 

Feeling very close to you just now! With all my love forever. Forever!

Another Trip Around The Sun

It's my birthday, little sweetheart, and this day will be forever twinned with the words I said for you on this very day nine years ago, as our souls are twinned and one forever. I love you so very much.

https://bipolarexplorer.bandcamp.com/track/the-choral-text-passage

In Sadness

I came across this tonight, little sweetheart. Radiohead wasn't the main band in our shared life but it they definitely had resonance. 

"In Rainbows" came out in the months that we first first met and fell in love. Because Big Famous Rock Bands (c.) only release albums every three years, their next one, "The King of Limbs" didn't come out until early 2011. I was on their email list and got an alert. You could purchase/download the entire album a month before the CD came out. I read the email on my laptop sitting on the couch in your apartment in the Inner Sunset. You were down in Santa Cruz in rehearsals for "On The Waterfront" but heading home in your famously battered to hell blue Prius. I texted you from the couch as I waited for the download and ran out to get you dinner from Crepevine, so we could eat together when you arrived. You were so excited. We listened together that night and I think three more times.

This track, "Codex" was our initial favorite I think, mostly for its sound. We hadn't had enough of a chance to fully digest the album and its lyrical content. I'm not sure what day it was. I came out on Feb 12 because the screening of our short film based on my play "Two From the Line" was the next day, Valentines was the day after and I was there to see your opening in "Waterfront". We were supposed to return to NYC before my birthday to see Low in Philly and to record your vocals for the Flag Day EP in Brooklyn and to do a workshop of my play My Before & After at EST with you in the lead.

We never got to do any of that. Tragically. 

Instead, on my birthday, was your memorial. It was a Monday, so that may be have been why the theatre was free.

At one point I found myself outside and saw your dad in his car. I knocked on the passenger side door and he let me in. He had the stereo on. He said he was listening to the saddest song he could think of. I gave him this one on my phone, little sweetheart and we listened together, he and I. I had been listening to this album everyday. It was killing me but there it was. I'd been in the car with our friend Chris Smith in the days after when I had nowhere else to go. And he, knowing, had out put it on another time. This night I played it for your dad and he said "Yeah, this is sadder".

Sometimes I look at this world thinking how unfair everything is, how lawless, how untrue. I ache for you and always will. It's so fucking unfair. But I know how near you are. And that is something, more than something. It's the only thing. Love you forever.

Voices... and Your Own

I was listening Carol’s show this morning on WFMU, little sweetheart, and I heard something that kind of stopped me in my tracks. It was a song by a group I didn’t know, The Clogs. but the guest vocalist on it was Matt Berringer from The National. His voice is so embedded in my memories of you that it takes me to you instantly.

I remember discovering The National together, little sweetheart, getting that “Dark Was The Night” compilation at Easy Street Records when we were up in Seattle together for the reading of 7 Pages, then you sending me an mp3 of that song from Boxer with the line about “I waited for 29 years to find you”. You were 29 at the time and it seemed so very much about you and I finding one another, you saving my life, filling it with light and love.

I remember tears pouring down my cheeks when you spoke of your certainty that you would pass away before I and that you wanted me to speak at your funeral and to listen to our songs and remember you. It’s so very hard to hear those voices and songs that meant so much to us, little sweetheart, that music that came to be our own. It still cuts me to the core. But I do love you forever and with all my heart.

Please be with me today, little sweetheart. Let me know that you are near and strengthen my faith to know that I will be with you again, soon and forever. With all my love.

Memorial Day

It's Memorial Day, little sweetheart. Often seen as observing veterans of foreign wars, I think it's even more appropriate for remembering those we love, regardless.

Happened to watch our video for "Ocean" last night and it made me think so much about you, who it is very much for and about.

With all my love forever.

On This Day...

It's my birthday, little sweetheart. My best ones were always with you. And your memorial was, incredibly, also held on this day. The words I wrote and spoke for you that day are always on my mind and last year, expanded and with underscoring, they were weaved into our album Sometimes in Dreams as the track, "The Choral Text Passage".

It's here: https://bipolarexplorer.bandcamp.com/track/the-choral-text-passage

Love you forever.

Letter to a Friend

Little sweetheart, a friend of mine, Kristen Hartke, who writes a food column for The Washington Post emailed me the other day. She's writing a kind of unusual story about loss - what do people do on the day that is the anniversary of the passing of someone very dear to them. 

 

Well, she thought about you and I, little sweetheart. 

 

She's spoken to a lot of people and learned a lot about how different cultures approach this day and also, of course, how what we prepare, serve and eat may have some special significance or import. 

 

She interviewed me on the phone Thursday night and then I sat down and tried to write out some of the things I had mentioned and told her about. Partly in case I'd forgotten something and mostly so I could say them all to you right here, little sweetheart. 

 

I don't know what, if any, of this might wind up in Kristen's story but, just like always, talking and writing about you - the great gift of my life - brings you closer and comforts me. I love you so! 

 

Here's what I wrote: 

 

 

So, great talking to you Thursday. Your article sounds really interesting and resonant, and, like I said, made me think to write down quickly a few of the things I mentioned.

So… rambling a little about both the Day and food…

My thoughts of Summer are constant. She is always with me. And, of course, the subject and very reason for my work, our work. Bipolar Explorer continues, “of, for and about her”, as I often say. I’ve maintained a little blog, Summerlove, for several years where I write to her. And I’m working on a book of memoirs (the first of three, I hope) about her.

So, Summer is always with me and in my thoughts, every day. But, like we said, this day does come around each year. And despite our sometime intentions that we might better mark our beloveds’s memories by observing their birthday instead of their passing, it comes up on us.

The first three years, I traveled to California to be there with Summer’s parents on the day. The last five, I’ve been here. Over these ones at home, I’ve often been busy marking the day by doing something band-related to honor her. That’s included the releasing of singles “We’ll All Go Together” (2016) , “Watchers and Holy Ones” (2017) and videos for “You Are” (2015), “Dream 3” (2018) and “Necessary Weight” (2019).

So, I’m often busy making something for Summer on the day and forget to eat at all! But food is and was an important part of our life and relationship and continues to be. I loved cooking for her and when I’m in California visiting Mike & Linda, I cook for them each day.

Summer herself loved baking and on her visit here - we met working together in San Francisco and were immediately inseparable, a week after I first returned to NYC, she had booked a flight to visit me the week after my birthday - she wanted to make some cupcakes. She looked around my kitchen doing a quick inventory and spotted a big silver bowl squirreled away at the top of one cabinet, unused for years. I grabbed that down and then she made a list of all the things I needed in my kitchen, we marched up to Bed, Bath & Beyond across from Lincoln Center and procured each item. She made cupcakes that night and from that day forward I was always presenting her with recipes and menus to choose from so I could make dinner for her.

After Of Love and Loss came out in 2012, for more than a year, the band had monthly “couch concerts” here at The Shrine - I’d cook a big meal for the guests, we’d eat and then adjourn to the front room studio and play live for everyone, surrounded by pictures of Summer, songs written for her filling the air. 

On the first “anniversary” in 2012 when I was with Summer’s folks in Davis, we went to the Nugget Market, this lovely grocery in the beautiful little college town where UC Davis resides, and Linda saw a cake she imagined would catch Summer’s eye too. She had them write Summer’s name on it with pink icing.

The Serafin’s have a beautiful house in Davis. Linda herself designed it and it’s where Summer lived when she was going to high school. Her room is still exactly as she left it, her walk-in closet filled with her things and her cotton candy scent. Summer told me of the Davis house with great wonder when we first met and couldn’t wait to take me there. We’d often go, just the two of us, up there from San Francisco, and stay for days on our own, enjoying the garden, watching movies, sleeping late under the canopy of her beautiful bed and cooking.

One year on my birthday, Summer got us tickets to see Death Cab for Cutie, a very important band to the two of us, in Sacramento. We drove up and stayed in Davis. The show was beautiful and emotional and we held each other close and cried. When we got back to Davis, Summer presented me with four different recipe cards she’d selected of possible birthday cupcakes and asked me to pick one. I picked the most over the top chocolate one of the four, of course, and she began laying out provisions. Then she discovered that the hand mixer that was usually in the kitchen had been whisked off to the other house in Yuba City. She was in something of a panic. I noted that it was such a nice friendly pretty little neighborhood and asked if it would be out of line to maybe knock on a neighbor’s door and ask if we could borrow a hand mixer. “Great idea!” she said. “You go do that”.

So, I did. I knocked on the door next door and Mary, their neighbor, very kindly lent me their hand mixer. I told her it was my birthday and Summer & I were there for a few days, Summer making me birthday cupcakes and promised to bring her a couple when I returned the mixer the next day.

The cupcakes were amazing and amazingly complicated. They had molten chocolate inside the batter and all told - prep time and baking time combined - took about 4 hours! I have some pictures of Summer taking them out of the oven and another of her hand-drizzling more chocolate over each individual cupcake there in the beautiful Davis kitchen.

Cupcakes are actually something that I make on Summer’s days, birthday especially, and take around to both my neighbors here on the 5th floor and down the street to the lovely nuns I’ve gotten to know that live in the little rectory across from Sacred Heart. The head nun there, The Mother Superior, I guess, Sister Catherine, is especially kind and always remembers Summer & I. I knocked on the door this year on the 18th and asked if she would say a little prayer for Summer. She took my hand and we stood right there in the doorway and did just that.

I think the thing about food and the day is something that you seemed to have hit upon yourself, Kristen, when I was telling you all this - it’s about giving something to others. That’s so fitting because it’s so very much like Summer herself.

Someone told a story at Summer’s memorial - which was held, incredibly, on my birthday, yet another point of nexus connecting her and I forever. It was an actress, Bree Elrod, who was a cast mate of Summer’s at The Huntington up in Boston. Bree was always wearing a striped wool hat during their tenure there. One day she lost it. And the next day when she got to the theatre, Summer had a present for her - it was a pretty pair of warm striped stockings. Summer told her “I couldn’t bear you going with your stripes!”.

She was so very kind. To everyone. And to me. She saved my life with her endless kindness. She changed me and called me her treasure. She gave of herself. And she taught me everything.

Giving is very much the order of the day. That day, too, maybe more than others, even.

There’s so much more! But I think that’s a few of the things we spoke about... And seasonings! While doing the kitchen inventory here on her first visit, Summer looked through the spices and asked “hey, where’s your seasoned salt?” And (especially Californian) where’s the lemon pepper?” They were in-stock here, then immediately and always. I use them in every savory recipe still to this day. And on the little red table where Summer always set up all her things, her office/make up station, and where we would eat together, where now her things remain, a kind of ground zero of the shrine within The Shrine, a bottle of each - Seasoned Salt and Lemon Pepper - reside.

Okay, hard to bring this to end, as ever, so just signing off with a to be continued and this little excerpt from an interview France’s Indiemusic did with me after our album Dream Together (2017) came out:

“She’s always with us in so many ways. Her passing is entirely tragic. For anybody out there who wonders how you endure, I can only say what a friend told me when I said I didn’t know how I was going to go on or what I was going to do now. He just said, “you’re doing it.” It’s always there, grief. Like if you even breathe a little too hard. I think possibly you learn to carry it. I can’t tell anyone out there that it’s something you ever get over. For myself, I don’t even see that as some goal. I don’t want to “get over” anything that has anything to do with Summer. Not even the most painful parts. I want all of that. I welcome her, ask her to be near me.

I used to say to her all the time, even if she was just going into another room for a minute or only just shifting her weight to grab something from the other side of the bed, “don’t go too far away,” I’d say. I still say that to her all the time. Whether it’s in a quiet moment when I suddenly sense her presence or we’re in the middle of a session and a lyric I wrote for her hits me as we come to it.
Summer isn’t the main reason BPX goes on, she’s the only reason. She is the reason. And I think I can trust that I’m doing things for the right reason if I always know the reason for it is her. Not out of any ambition other than to honor and conjure her. She’s my conscience.”

With love & faith,

M

April 4

March and April are both filled with bitter anniversaries, little sweetheart. April 4 is another, almost inadvertent one. It was the day we already determined pre-tragedy for me to return to NYC.

The weekend before was meant to be closing of "Blackbird" and you and I had plans to spend the next few days together in Davis before I flew out on April 4 and then you joined me a couple of weeks later for recording sessions in Brooklyn, a workshop of "My Before & After" in the city and a quick trip down to Philly to see Low on my birthday - we already had tickets.

Instead, April 4 was the day I returned to NYC without you or any plans at all except to return to SF for your memorial, held, incredibly, on my birthday.

That feeling still of desperate loss continues to burn, little sweetheart, when this day, like several others comes around each year. I'll try to take it easy today. To listen quietly for your gracious spirit, blessed presence and hear your instruction.

Please be with me now and always and take me to you the moment heaven will allow. I love you with all my heart and soul. Forever. Forever. 

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)

For the Better. Forever.

Little sweetheart, we're working on the live Of Love and Loss and at its center is something we call the "Choral Text Passage". It's largely based on my memorial speech for you but delivered by both Jason & I (and later, Kim) in turn and unison. There's a part of it - where I was talking about your acting - that I've wanted to rewrite, so this morning I had a go at this. It's below. I'm not sure how I'm going to break it up but this is the new section. Thinking of you, always... 

...This isn’t the main thing, so I don’t want to linger, but I have to say this: she was the truest artist I’ve ever known. Breathtakingly gifted. When we met, she was playing - inhabiting - the central role in "Tir na nOg" - a play about a young girl in the West of Ireland who grows to adulthood and further adventures in Dublin. She burned that stage to cinders every night. For six weeks. With three broken toes. She’d careened barefoot into some stair unit backstage during a quick change in the middle of the Final Dress and half her left foot swelled up and went purple. Her doctor told her she’d have to quit the run. Not a chance. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. Neither did the audience. Not unless they happened by the stage door after and saw her striding away in her short air fracture boot.

When she joined this band, everything changed. For the better. Forever. I loved writing for her and she was the best musician I’ve ever known. Her vocals, like every part of her, were connected directly to her soul. And she had total telepathy. I’d play something on guitar and she’d meet me there the moment I arrived.

One more thing about her acting. A year after we first met and became inseparable, she got a job, down the coast in Carmel, doing “The Blue Room”, David Hare’s reworking of “La Ronde” where two actors, one male, one female, play all ten parts. Good actors, great ones, are supposed to be adept at one of two things - transformative character work, disappearing into a role; or the deepest kind of emotional connection, shocking us with their naked honesty. Summer could do both. Simultaneously. She did that night. In the round. A foot from the audience where you can’t hide anything or fake it. I sat there between Linda - her mom - and Coy - her friend - and I think they literally had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I couldn’t move after. She was that good. She is like the Supermoon - once in a generation...