Saturday, December 14, 2002 :::
For Marie and Her best friend Renea
If I have to consider the death of my father, then it would be impossible, not to remember the death of my other mother (a lady who helped raise me) due to breast cancer. She died about a month after he passed away. I received the call and news of my father’s death while visiting her daughter, who was my best friend. We were having coffee and her mother was talking to me about the clothes she had chosen to wear for her own funeral. We were shocked, it was so unexpected to hear the news of his demise as we prepared for her death.
My friend was working tirelessly doing all the nursing care for her mother. It was one more cancer death in a family already scarred by their time in the Delta Region with one person after the next dying for what seemed like a death every year. I attended many more funerals than weddings in Louisiana in my youth and I used to keep my wardrobe of dark dresses at the cleaners, always ready for these occasions. (People raised in Louisiana know what I am talking about)
We were both in our early twenties when her mother passed away in 1986. Her Mom was wearing the blue chiffon she had picked out and all of the pink and yellow roses and carnations were arranged exactly the way that she’d asked.
She said it stormed at every family funeral, and I remember during her mother‘s funeral, we were sitting next to each other under the velvet canopy, and we heard a clap of thunder, and then an abrupt down pour began, it was so fast that everyone standing on the outside rushed in at the same time.
She looked at me, with her big brown eyes, and grabbed my arm, and smiled in a tired, half hearted way, and whispered in my ear “ I knew something was wrong and I just couldn’t figure out what it was. I thought that we had forgotten to do something. But that’s what it was. It wasn‘t raining. I’m kind of relieved. We‘ve never had a funeral without rain” I smiled at her and hugged her.
Around us everyone was leaning in and huddled together, in a damp mass.
She lost her father to brain cancer, her mother to breast cancer, one of her grandmother’s to lung cancer, and another grandfather to cancer. They lived next to a canal in the city where they dumped lots of pesticides and chemicals. At one time, there was a City Parish Nursery just across the ditch from them. She lost almost her whole family in ten years time. Already by the age of 11 they had found a benign tumor on her breast.
Now she is busy raising her own four boys, with very little help or support. I think she was trying to replace all of the people she had lost over the years.
Her family would have loved to have helped her, but most of them are situated, quite different, these days. You can find them, anytime, down the block from Cortana mall, on a cozy side street, under some trees, next to a lake, and six feet down.
In Between
I can remember a time in between those funerals when me and some friends went out and we lay in the high grass and dry mud of the Mississippi River Levy (before the casinos) and we smoked weed and watched the tug boats and traffic on the bridge and I thought about doing a slow dive into the murky waters (climbing to the highest girders of the bridge and doing a long swan dive over the city) and I stood up and threw chunks of dirt instead, aiming for the barges, that lumbered up and down the river like slow moving dinosaurs; and we talked about life, and friends, and family, and we vowed not to have funerals at all (for ourselves), “ they were just a waste of time and money” and we returned home and drank Yagermiester out of the bottle and sat on the back porch and ate homemade pecan pie, and I fell asleep in a chair, and I dreamed about nuclear war. I watched as the bomb dropped over the water, and in my sleep, I could feel the impact, and I could feel myself burning, and I closed my eyes tight, and I prayed in my dream, and I felt the red heat searing against my lids, and I awoke to the afternoon sun shining in my face.
::: posted by melanie at 7:33 AM
Thursday, December 12, 2002 :::
Zetzer Men or Try To Catch a Falling Star
My son’s great grandfather was a gangster
The flying Zetzer of Port Clinton, Ohio.
A very brave Rumrunner
Who once flew the last member
Of Ma Barker’s gang from Ohio to Arkansas
While on the run from J Edgar Hoover.
I met his grandson Ric
50 years later in a honkytonk in Hot Springs.
Ric drew me in
Like the first sip of beer on a cool keg
And I still Savor that very first taste.
We stayed together for three years.
On the road from Arkansas to California
and back to Louisiana.
I still miss him
I made the first drive to his hometown, this year
Port Clinton, Ohio.
We went to see Ric’s grave
And I introduced my son
To a cold piece of marble
As his father.
He was the grandson of the grandest old man
Someone who once towered over the sky
In one brilliant moment
Both lifetimes were like meteors.
Never to be forgotten.
Now I see their polished tombstones are grounded to the earth
John’s has an airplane’s and Ric’s has our love.
I fell in love with a picture of Ric’s father
I never met Robert Zetzer, John’s son
He died before I met Ric.
We named our son after him
Now I have his portrait
And I loose myself inside of his Brown eyes.
I’ve had the most beautiful man in the world
With me for years.
He is my own child and theirs, too.
So much a part of them and so like them
He is every bit as handsome and charming
As his father.
My son Eddie Robert could melt ice with his gaze.
I didn’t know it was going to happen
Falling stars are like that.
They grant wishes and dazzle you
They make the sun and the moon seem unimportant.
They never leave your memory for your whole lifetime
You only get to see them for a little while
And then they disappear leaving silver traces on the clouds.
A plume of smoke and a bright, bright, bright light.
I had to fall in love all over again.
Mel (for Ric, John, and Robert Zetzer) 2002
another one:
::: posted by melanie at 4:43 PM
My first post from my other Blog.
I guess one of my goals in writing is to be brutally honest and truthful even at my own expense. I want to expose every raw emotion and human frailty, mostly my own. If the reader laughs when perhaps they feel they shouldn’t then my answer would be an affirmative. Go for it. I’m smiling at the ignorance of living in the here and now and that’s the way it should be. If someone becomes offended then I think they should be. Hate me, revile me, whatever, but understand my primary concern is to push the First Amendment as hard as I can. To beat on it as though it were a large stone monument seemingly oblivious to the pounding of my furious tiny fist. Like a door meant only for the elite, but open to us all with an awareness that any of us can be knocked over with a flick of some twit's wrist as an obvious irritant, an inflamed pulsing vein on the ass of the Supreme Court, not even important enough to be considered, merely another screaming voice in the cacophony with all the joy and pleasure (I get off on this. I’m weird) and as rambunctious as I can still muster. A crowd scene, if you will, in the privacy of my own room, hitting on flies and stomping on roaches as I write. I do it because I can and because I am curious and I want to see how far I can take it within my own set of strictures and morals, yet never backing away from what I see to be real, even if its not a part of the cultural mores of the day. Even if you hate me then I’ve had some effect and achieved some measure of promoting our baser primal urges that take us finally back to what it is to be human.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
::: posted by melanie at 8:42 AM
More from the flaming red's head. Probably mostly poetry from my other web site. www.theflamingredhead.blogspot.com and maybe some new stuff as it occurs to me.
::: posted by melanie at 8:34 AM
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