old friends

Having the same phone number as when I was a kid is a mixed bag.

Not having to memorize a new phone number is a big deal, given my innumeracy.
It took a handful of years before our last number finally sank in.
And it has good archetypal juju going, engaging the past and whatnot.

The down side is the occasional caller looking for mom.

Thanks to control issues and a bi-polar mother in law who phones multiple times a day in direct relation to the phase of her mania, I never pick up until the machine has vetted the caller.

The wife, marred by fewer neuroses and with a rosier view of humanity occasionally answers live, with mixed results.

Last night she picked up and began her half of the conversation with

"I'm sorry, Linda's dead."

She had to stop saying 'deceased' because nobody understood what she meant.

The caller was a guy I remembered, a hippy jeweler who's signature pieces were spiders and scorpions dipped in gold. He hung the morbid trinkets from chains and sold them as necklaces. Sometimes he used the scorpions for belt buckles.
They were sequestered in a big divided aquarium in his living room and I would bang on the glass to make them jump around.

I think he made my parents wedding rings. I think we lived with him for a while after my parents divorced. We'd visit him or he'd visit us every couple of years after we washed up in Los Osos. I found a stack of letters and postcards in her effects, so I knew they'd kept in touch.

Like a lot of hippies he never really grew up.
He was always living somewhere new, doing some temporary job, always single.
He lived in Alaska off and on, working a fishing boat. One summer he led a youth group camping trip in the Sierras, and we went along.

He's living in Missouri now.
She told him about the baby/funeral confluence and he said how it was nice that she tied things up at the end of her life.

Standard emotional boilerplate when someone dies.
There's truth in cliches, or they wouldn't persist.
And they buy you time.

It's hard to think about terminal events before they happen, even if you have the inclination.
How do you envision a world without a mother in it?
With my long head start, it was still unknowable.

Or, to mine another cliche, 'where there's life there's hope'.
Through all the years when we had no relationship at all her existence still meant potential, like a seed in a dry lakebed.
Presumably all it needed to flower anew was a soothing rain.

In a Utopian world, one with Frank Capra seated on the Throne of Heaven dictating third act re-writes to a phalanx of typewriter-wielding angels, that's what we'd have had those last few months.

But in this one, you have to say "dead" instead of "deceased".