Por Fin - August Post Card Challenge

August seems like such a long time ago but in the world of words, it's simply part of another season. I love the postcard challenge every August and try to form an intelligible blog of cards sent and received but this year, I've fallen more behind than ever before. Yet, here they are...por fin...at last in Spanish. Sadly, this isn't all of them, due to my poor record-keeping this past summer. I bring in the new year with wishes for everyone and plans to do a much better job keeping up with my blog. 

I hope you enjoy these poems, the cards that were chosen to carry them on their journey and invite you to peruse other posts on my blog. 

Richard Novak talked me to sleep. He came and sat on the big Naugahyde chair and spoke softly, while I nursed one baby, sandwiched between me and her brother, whose back I rubbed with my spare hand. I tended to drift off to sleep somewhere in the middle of Richard's gentle words that hung in the shadows of my California sunset room. I never knew where Richard lived but at some point, he became quiet, left and went to that home, night after night. I never thanked him. I found his obituary online. Richard had so much room in his heart. 

The morning of the Sylmar earthquake (1971), all I wanted to do was sit still, and hang onto something, anything. I didn't even want to be in a moving car. Aftershocks knocked me around, just when I'd get my bearings again. A big bang started it, with bright flashing in the dark. The sun rose suddenly and we didn't know what happened. Sixty people died.

Dad would gargle his Listerine and we would laugh and laugh. I wish I could remember these things with you today. I walked by our old house when you were dying... just a street away, and there lay before me a multitude of images; our childhood. 

Frances (our grandniece, age 10, who looks so much like us in so many ways) walked with me one of those days. We sought out the handprints, initials, and dates you and I left behind in the concrete that Dad poured so many years ago. We are history, you and I. 

We used to say, in full seriousness, our mother would live to be 100. It took us all by surprise. She died at 89 after a diagnosis of brain cancer two months prior. We were filled with sorrow (and some with remorse.) She was not! At 89, she's stoically claimed she's seen enough and was ready to find out what came next.

 Pick up your skirt! Lift your knees and raise your arms! Yell out with a vengeance and a grin! It's time to win! Ring the alarms and wave the banners! Carry your pride high! Forget your manners! Tell the world we're on our way! Dammit! Women will save the day!

 I used to walk across the Aurora Bridge, up and down Queen Anne and downtown, through the market, over Capitol Hill where my bro lived on Roy Street, up to the U District. It was a mission-like walk, directionless, yet focused in an odd way. I didn't always know where I was going until I got there. Doors were always left open in those times. 1968

Living killed my brother. Years, he lived so close to the edge, Falls were inevitable, but he always managed to claw his way back up to paths with brambles and beauty. He was never hostage to the truth and has been called both a "man of few words" and a "Storyteller." I miss him.

My dad spoke highly of these guys, as if he knew them, growing up in Idaho, Montana and Eastern Washington. In the way we talked about favorite athletes, celebrities. Some say Butch lived his life out in Spokane and only the kid died in Bolivia, but my dad said it was not likely Bolivia, but Mexico. Interesting... my dad's fascination with these Crooks. He wasn't fond of movie stars at all. He hated Frank Sinatra. 

Sitting in bed, Sunshine covering me in its warm morning blanket. Reading last week's New Yorker, listening to birds gossip. Tweets, chirps, caws, wishing briefly... That perhaps there might be someone, almost anyone, who would bring me a hot cup of tea. And yet again, maybe not...

Do you feel as tall as you look? Do you feel as tall as you are? You stand over most of us with eyes that wonder in your own head, seeing things you'll never share, not with us. 

There were always laughs because that's what it was like when he was around. Uncle Russ sat at our dinner table, told silly jokes and riddles, and gently teased us. That was before before he married again. Aunt Myrtle, as we were told to call her, was shy and my mom said not really his type. When he died, Aunt Myrtle was the one I mourned for. I was a kid, 13 maybe, but she never got the chance to be a part of dinner laughs, nonsense at our house. She was all alone again, like she’d been before him. We couldn’t find a way to bring back those jokes again. 

At my brothers memorial service, I spoke to you on the phone from Portugal, where you now live with your wife. I loaned you my guitar, you said, in 1966. We chatted about music, my brother, Portugal. I struggled with images rolling in my head of you, New Year's Eve, 1966, and months later coming home to find you chatting with my mother in our family kitchen.

Sitting in bed, Sunshine covering me in its warm morning blanket. Reading last week's New Yorker, listening to birds gossip. Tweets, chirps, caws, wishing briefly... That perhaps there might be someone, almost anyone, who would bring me a hot cup of tea. And yet again, maybe not. 

It was words that made me stay in Seattle, New Year's Eve 1999. Not numbers, not 2,000 millennium scare, not weather, not fear flying, or computer crashes. Words. Words took me away again, sent me away, drove me away, pushed me away. Many words, one word, your word, my word. 

I left notes for John on the bulletin board of a Portland hang out cuz someone told me he had moved to PTown, too. One day I found a response. We were notes passing in the night. I wanted to see John and talk to him remembering our one quick historical moment of passion. It was 51 years before we would make contact again. Over someone else's death bed. His eyes of blue. They shot across the universe in the invisible ether and I felt naked again.

When we drive down Interlaken, Ewan's eyes are fixed on the ravine, leaning forward in his booster seat, straining the straps, hands gripping small armrests, skinny little boy legs dangling, swinging slightly, using his imagination, seeing things in the trees; creatures, humans maybe, moon people, samplings from the pockets of his mind.

 I was four years old when I saw a buffalo, a bison, for the first time and my Dad held me by the waist and cantilevered me over the fence and let me touch the majestic, tangled, smelly, beautiful head of what was now docile, broken, long-ago decimated; our national animal, a symbol of what we became.

She held images inside, tight and nonconforming to her other parts. She wouldn't allow her body certain sensations, less to awaken the noises she had silenced with expertise. The scent of burning corn husks could spring to action demons she couldn't personally be responsible for. It did no good to cover her ears; the hearing happened as an event she controlled with a feverish chill, a complete lack of love, A coldness as cruel as the autumn of a desert moon.

Tonight I read through all my old postcards and was haunted in my sleep as I tried to recall a street. Was it a corner? A dust road? A paved street with busy traffic? I exhausted myself battling images, memories, sorrows, and joys.

(After living in Mexico for 12 years) I've always found it interesting that white women, gringas,  are excited to meet Mexican men, dance with them, drink with them and often have affairs with them. But in the US, when a Mexican man makes attempts at conversation with a gringa, compliments her looks or makes a subtle pass, he is considered cheeky, even dangerous.

We had unmitigated hope. We thought all was right with the world. It was so short lived; it was as if we had nothing but a dream. What we've learned is that when all white people love all white people, there will no longer be a black problem.

My mother favored all of her children at different stages of our lives, and hers. She was whimsical in her favoritism; preferential treatment doled out in the same unexpected manner as rule changes and obtuse parental authority.

We must keep living life to the fullest. 

Never give up. 

Cross every possible bridge. 

Bridge every possible Gap.

Sail all the oceans. There is so much to be done and many who are up to the task.