Impressions of the day - Saturday, July 2, 2016
My name was a problem. It usually is. Most people want to spell it with the wrong vowels, or add extra consonants, or change it to one of the more common variants, which is one of many reasons I only use my birth name for legal necessities. However, this time the problem was that the man attempting to help me seemed to want my name to be something more suitable to his thick accent, as if because he had difficulty speaking certain letters, he could not hear me say them. I did my best, in my fragile emotional state, to swallow the frustration at spelling it out for him five times, and when he still could not get it right and switched to looking for the ashes via the name of the deceased, I again had to struggle to hold my emotions back as he mangled that name as well. Eventually he found the right box, but of course her name was misspelled, in a way that matched his accent. I could feel another storm of tears coming and I hadn’t the patience left to correct one more thing, so took the wooden box and made an escape before I made a fool of myself in the funeral home lobby.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Driving into San Francisco I was struck by the sheer number of homeless encampments. Every open patch of dirt and every wide stretch of sidewalk seemed to have a plethora of tents pitched, more than I can ever recall seeing before. At the red light I looked out my driver-side window at the scenes of despondency that only differed from the Great Depression in the presence of nylon tents rather than wooden shacks. I was stirred from my reverie by the sound of someone trying to open my passenger door. A bedraggled and filthy man with wild eyes stood there, threateningly waving a knife at me. When I pulled the knife I keep in the car and returned his gesture he fled back to the sidewalk, his blade now invisible, waving and smiling at me like I was a friend he was glad to have run into. The light changed. I drove on.
The sales girl in the used furniture store introduced herself as “Titsy.” The giggle she followed this introduction with as she asked if there was something she could do for me caused her extremely ample bosom to jiggle lasciviously in her extremely low cut top, thereby eliminating any possibility that I may have misheard her name. This burlesque-worthy introduction, however, was all in vain - the fake leather chair that was coated with a strange and tacky residue was not the reading chair I was looking for, and I would not purchase it, regardless of the bodacious talent show I had been given.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On the side of the back road paralleling the home-bound highway I stopped and looked at the reservoir. The summer-gold grass framed by oaks and madrones and occasional Coulter pine gave way to the glassy surface of the water, tiny reflective peaks whipped up by the wind making thousands of little mirrors. Beyond that, the coastal hills arose in a wall of green sagebrush and Manzanita before straggly patches of Douglas Fir and a scattered few Coastal Redwoods led to the summit where curtains of pale grey fog were seeking the sky with ghostly cold tendrils. I held the wooden box of ashes in my hands and cradled it to my chest, letting the sorrow and the loss wash over me, reminded that I too will someday be gone and perhaps someday someone will feel this same way about my death. I let myself hope that there will be a way my remains can return to the earth, decompose and become one with the landscape in a place much like this, without cremation, embalming or even a casket. After some time letting the fractured and reflected light burn into my red and stinging eyes, I returned to the car and set off towards the summit, towards my favorite views in the world, to lose myself where the rolling coastal hills of California lead into the Pacific and the nightly fog and mist turn all their rounded crowns into islands floating in a dream.