What Never Added Up, Will Add Up

 My phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket and answered, even though it was a unfamiliar number.

“Hello, is this Kathe Bottero’s husband?”

“Well, I was for awhile, anyway.”

Only 35 years….

“Hi, my name is Gabrielle Morgan.”

“Mike’s daughter?”

“Heh, I was for awhile, anyway.”

I suddenly recalled what I’d heard Gabrielle had said, some twenty years ago now: “I keep thinking, how can my Daddy be dead? I’m only nine years old.”

“Well, um, hi. I’m really glad to hear from you.”

Mike Morgan had been Kathe’s “informal foster son”, a teenaged runaway who had come to Kathe’s door asking for food and wound up staying. He’d been more like Kathe than any of her biological children, which was saying a lot since I’d always seen a lot of her in her other kids. After he died, his wife moved east with Gabrielle to be near her parents. The last we’d heard from them had been Gabrielle’s high school graduation, when we received a card with her graduation portrait printed on it. We’d hung it up and talked about Mike and Caroline, his wife, and admired the photo, glad to see she looked healthy and evidently was doing well in life.

“Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch. I only just heard that Kathe had died.”

“Yes, she did. I’m sorry, I tried to get in touch with you at the time to let you know, but the letter came back.”

“Yeah, we moved.”

“A forwarding order only lasts so long. Even a notice of the new address only lasts so long. They try to get mail through anyway, but they don’t always manage it.”

“Anyway, I wanted to call and let you know, tell you I’m sorry it happened.”

“Well, thanks. It was as good as it was going to be: it didn’t take long, and she wasn’t in any pain-” An exaggeration, but one I usually made, because why magnify grief? “-and she died holding my hand.” I always said that. It was true, and it was one of the things I was glad of.

“Well, that’s good. Anyway, I’m going got be in Portland on business, and I thought I could come see you.”

“Wow, I’d like that.”

I gave her directions to the apartment and we hung up.

“Guess who that was?” I called to my daughter Michu, who happened to be visiting. “It was Mike’s daughter, Gabrielle.”

“The girl whose graduation picture you guys had hanging in the living room?”

“Yes. She’s going to be in Oregon soon, and wants to come visit.”

“Oh, that’s cool! I remember when we met her Dad, soon after we got here from Ethiopia. It made us feel better about living with white people, to know that Mom already had a black kid.”

I looked over at where Michu wasn’t standing and sighed. It would be good if she were visiting, even if we had to refrain from hugging. Just as it would be good to hear from Gabrielle. I doubted I ever would, but it would be good.

 

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/meaning/

Watch Your Head, Sweetheart

My life had fallen into two modes: at home by myself, or when I was going out. “Going out” also covered those extremely rare occasions when someone was coming to visit me. Then, “home” became a part of “out”, the way Kipling’s “They” became “a kind of ‘We’.” In my non-solitary mode, I would wash more thoroughly, make sure I was wearing clean clothes, &c. I definitely became a different person on those occasions, a little bit more like my former self.

I’d never lived alone before. Not this alone, anyway. I’d lived with my parents, or in a dormitory at college, or in barracks with a roommate in the Navy, or with my parents again, or with Kathe. I hoped this solitary life would end eventually, perhaps fairly soon. In the meantime, I was trying to embrace it as an opportunity to lead a different kind of life. Seeing as how I had no choice.

Turning it over in my mind, the only period in which I had slept alone night after night, with no way of reaching another person if I needed to, was during the couple of months that I had spent walking and hitch-hiking in a roundabout way from Virginia back to Oregon after getting out of the Navy. I hadn’t slept in the same spot from one night to the next, usually on the ground, in a sleeping bag with at most a tarp pulled over me. It was kind of unnerving if I gave it much thought, just how strange this solitary existence really was.

Everything was different. In the first few weeks, I’d been busy with moving things out of the storage lockers, consolidating them into one, putting the rest in the storage space of the apartment building, or piling boxes up “temporarily” in the apartment, without having to worry how Kathe would feel surrounded by all of them. Removing the rugs from storage, I decided for myself, without having to consult anyone, that I would lay most of them out overlapping on the carpeting. Then the lockdown began, and I went out rarely, at intervals of days. The boxes have stayed where they are for now, awaiting my decision to carry them up to the storage space, or to discard them. I could go through the boxes here in my solitude, or not. There’s no rush.

The time runs out, and the host reads from the poem that contains the line that made me think of Kathe, her presence and her absence:

https://www.rattle.com/pride-by-diana-goetsch/

Diana Goetsch says, “I’m basically a love poet. I’ve started to understand that after all these years. No matter the subject, I think my mission has something to do with redemption. And I just go for the hardest thing to redeem.” 

So I think, was that your mission, Kathe? To redeem something as hard to reach as me? Alone, I have to answer for myself, and remind myself that Kathe always liked me, and respected me, more than I did myself. When we were having our worst times, she could get beautifully fierce with her desire to reach me as I withdrew from her.

I’m so grateful to you for all you did for me, Kathe. If you had died twenty years ago, or even ten, I would not have been able to survive on my own as well as I have. Your love made me strong enough to be able to live without it.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You are going to meet someone. Not a stranger."

The Answer Is Hidden And Folded Over

 The Answer Is Hidden And Folded Over

I walked around the room, pacing like a tiger. What was I going to do? As I walked between the shelf of preserved food which I had stored up as “treats” for when I was sufficiently tired of the chlorella and yeast and the door which I could only open in a truly dire situation, and only when properly suited, I recalled hearing that tigers, when confined in a very small space, pace in a very methodical way, making the same number of steps across the same distance, turning at the same spot. I was pretty sure my pacing wasn’t actually anything like as well-done as a tiger’s.

That wasn’t a helpful thought. What I needed was to deal with my situation in more constructive ways, not improve my pacing skills.

I pulled down my bed and sat on it, pulling up my feet. I thought about my former life, what I did with my days back then. There were all of those things I couldn’t do now. There were a handful of things I still could do.