Publishing this on March 31, two days later than I should have. I’ve been pleasantly distracted by family meals, conversations, and activities with guests from out of town. Even on schedule, I knew I’d run out of enough days in a single week to post all the items I showed from my paisley memory bottle. I’m continuing into this week along with whatever else I decide to post. This one explains the mustard packet pictured on the upper right of the photo.
When I was looking through my photo album for pictures from that time to refresh my memory, I found a photo from another birthday, this one at the location where I taught. My students got a cake to surprise me. (There were no grades, no pass or fail, in this program. It was an unselfish gesture on their part. They were lovely humans with a range of ages, genders, races, and life situations.) Apparently back then, I wore a lot of blazers, and this outfit included a tan one along with a light brown shirt and a coffee-colored scarf. My haircut was the unsuccessful result of someone trying to feather layers around my face. What can I say; it was the times.
Another from work, this time wearing an off-white blazer and vest with a brown shirt that looks like it has some kind of floral pattern, finished off with dark brown pants. This outfit is similar to the one in the next photo. I was probably wearing brown pants in it, too.
I’m in the driver’s seat of my Monte Carlo (it was a swivel seat marketed as providing ease for exiting the car, I think). I believe I’m sitting in my car outside a business I frequented at that time, where I got to know some of the people who worked there. Any one of them, and maybe even Lynne, could have shot the photo. Somewhere in my writing archives, I have a poem written to that group of employees. I will spare you that, at least.
The employees were always really nice, professional, and they all had great senses of humor. They didn’t become friends so much as friendly conversationalists. When I went by there one day, one of them (he wasn’t working; just hanging out) said he could use someone to talk to and asked if I wanted to take a drive with him. It was obvious his coworkers weren’t worried about me and thought it might be of some benefit to him, so I said sure. When I tell you I got into the passenger seat of his WHITE PANEL VAN and the two of us headed up the nearby mountain to a REMOTE spot, it sounds like the beginning of a terrible documentary with an outcome that wouldn’t bode well for me. But I was never a heedless risk taker, and I promise I had the discernment and maturity to assess whether I was likely to be the victim of a sociopath with bad intentions. I’d had many occasions to get to know him. He wasn’t a threat.
In fact, HE was the one in trouble. Sometime before this day, he’d been with friends (not his coworkers) and thought it might be interesting or enlightening to drop acid (in case this is too long before your time or outside your interest set, it means he took the illegal substance LSD, aka the psychedelic drug lysergic acid diethylamide). His account of how badly it went can be summarized in some quotes from my Internet search: “users [can] experience panic, confusion, sadness, and scary images. Bad reactions can happen with the first use and a user may have flashbacks later, experiencing the feelings of a bad trip even after the drug wears off.”
I don’t know how long we rode in the van or parked on the mountain to look at the serene scenery, or how long he talked, but I fully knew I was in way over my head on this subject (I never dropped acid, though I had friends and acquaintances who did). I was meant to be a listener, not an advisor, so that’s all I did. What finally broke his meandering stream-of-consciousness soliloquy was when he asked, “Do you smell mustard? Or is that just me,” as if this might be yet another strange symptom of a bad trip.
Once he mentioned it, I realized that I, too, smelled mustard, and we started trying to find its source. It turned out to be the seat of my pants. There’d been some kind of fabric, maybe a thin shop towel, on the passenger seat that I hadn’t moved when I sat down. Under it were several packets of mustard like you’d get at a fast-food place. The weight of a passenger had broken them open. Unfortunately, the mustard seeped through that thin fabric and onto the fabric of my brown pants. They were stained yellow and reeked of mustard.
The surprise of it shifted his focus. We laughed our way back down the mountain, hugged goodbye, and I drove home. A couple of days later, I stopped by the business to see if he was better. He wasn’t there. His work buddies told me his parents had checked him into some kind of facility so he could get professional counseling. Apparently, he ended up with a pretty severe diagnosis and a long hospitalization. Here’s my letter to him.
“Gentle and good soul: I never saw you again after the day of our drive and have no idea how things turned out. I can only hope it had a good outcome, that you got the assistance you needed to unravel it all and manage the after-effects. Even now, decades later, when I see mustard packets, I silently send good thoughts your way, wherever you are. You always deserved all the best–Becky.”
I pulled out all the tiles from my Magnetic Poetry® Wood Words box. From the moment I began to assemble my poem from among them, I knew exactly who and what inspired it. When I placed a specific word, I also knew what photo from my archives I hoped to find to share with the finished poem.
Today is the anniversary of the date Riley died in 2008. The L.A. fires and their consequences have kept me emotional for the last week already, so this year, Riley’s loss feels a little sharper. The other night, Tom and I watched The Last Waltz, which I haven’t seen probably since the late seventies, when it was released. I still remembered the songs, the performers (band members and musical guests), and some of the conversations with members of The Band as they talked about how the concert (the focus of the film, as directed by Martin Scorsese) was bringing to an end their sixteen years of performing on the road.
As for me, I tried to rewatch this 1998 movie while Tom and Eva were at the ER. There was a lot of stopping and restarting because of ongoing texts. It was still fun seeing Sigourney Weaver play Katharine, a treacherous boss, and Melanie Griffin play Tess, who’s smart, sweet, and sexy. As she tells Harrison Ford’s Jack (why are so many RomCom leading men named Jack?), “I have a head for business and a body for sin.” A stellar supporting cast portraying working women (Joan Cusack is gold, as always) and sleazy men (though there are good guys, too). Bonus: A brief but good appearance by Olympia Dukakis as a personnel director at an employment agency is one of several characters who show the value of women mentoring women in the workplace.
