On the way there I was listening to Cat Power singing the greatest;

The Greatest

Once I wanted to be the greatest
No wind of waterfall could stall me
And then came the rush of the flood
Stars of night turned deep to dust
...

Melt me down
Into big black armour
Leave no trace of grace
Just in your honour

...

Once I wanted to be the greatest
Two fists of solid rock
With brains that could explain
Any feeling

I thought about missing my mother and how I hadn't even seemed to like her very much when she was alive but that sometimes now I need her so badly that I walk down st. Antoine, staring at a particular place in the sky as if by looking hard enough she would show up there.

Then I thought maybe this is why I write, why people have to write in general, because to experience any great shift in the bedrock of their life without trying to share it they would lose all hope.

What scares me most is that I didn't ask her any stories about what she was like when she was my age.

My aunt recently gave me a photo of her taken when she was in her late 20's. In the photo, my mother is sitting on a deck chair and some guy no-one remembers is tipping the chair so she falls out. It's summer the ground is stippled with black and white shadows. My mother is wearing a funny bathing suit and has a towel around her neck. her hair is growing out and there is a fringe over her forehead.

She is holding on to the sides of the chair and laughing, her face looks exactly like mine, almost, she doesn't have her future husband's chin like I do.

Her eyes are shining and she's happy. When my mother was alive I didn't ask her whether she was happy when she was younger, I guess I forgot in all the asking her why she couldn't be happy now for me, so I wouldn't worry or feel embarrassed, or want to run away.

I told Jane all this, and she tried to make me feel better, she did make me feel better, and we told some other stories about my mom, the kind that I used to tell when she was alive to illustrate how unlucky I was to have a fucked-up crazy mother.

I told the story of how in second year university she sent me a package for my birthday. I think I had asked for linens, so she sent some by parcel post on the greyhound bus. When they arrived I was in exams, and not terribly responsible so I didn't go to the station to pick them up for over a week.

When I finally got to the station the station-master handed me a big green duffle bag, which I opened right away on the street so I could redistribute everything into separate bags and ride my bike back home.

The first thing I discovered was that she had sent me her sheets, some of them, and they weren't even clean. Then I noticed she had sent one new egyptian cotton top sheet for a king size bed in slate grey.

At the bottom of the duffel in one of those clear plastic pastry domes was a black forest cake upside-down and going kind of rancid.

I never understaood her. Never. I still don't. And then I didn't understand the ache in my heart that made me take the cake and the sheets that were hers and the duffel bag and stuff it all as hard as I could into the reluctant swinging lid of a Berri street garbage can.

I thought it was hate but I realize now it was love.

I biked home with the crisp new grey sheet in my shoulder bag. I pretended as hard as I could that I didn't care about all the other stuff.

When I got home from the Academy Awards I lay in bed and wrote this in my real journal

"

The weirdest part of love is how it really doesn't obey any kind of principle, nothing. It makes no sense.

The dog is scratching her ear with her hind leg, that's the kind of sense love makes, using your hind leg to scratch your head.

Maybe hands are what screwed us up. We looked at our hands and thought that our needs ought to have logical solutions, ones that went with opposable digits, with mastery. We forgot that our needs came first, and that hands are just one attempt by evolution to present us with tools to create a better framework for eventual satisfaction. The hands tricked us and we forgot that the need itself was never logical, it was really just an itch magnified. We forgot that it's solution wasn't always altogether logical, or there. Sometimes it just wasn't there at all.

"

Cher Clients

The Flink would like to apologize for her erratic behaviour, not this week-end not this month but for the rest of her life.

Hold on to this invitation, take it out of your pocket crumpled and folded up when theflink is late with a deadline or fails to arrive at a meeting exactly on time, because I am only going to aplogize once.

This is business Flink style, read my blog hear my funny jokes and realize that each time I make a whole lotta funny jokes in a row it probably means something's gonna snap.

And then it does.

Posted by Miriam at March 6, 2006 11:54 AM | TrackBack Posted to death and dying