by Sara Dillon
Wow, she wrote back a day later, great. Where did you find it?
Una could be receptive when caught in the right mood.
What was I good for; or more nicely put, what was I good at; another way of saying, where the hell did all this come from? But I was good at something. This put me in mind of Daddy, who when making one of his more risqué jokes would say, You’re a good girl, honey; only problem is, there’s no demand for them. This, of course, struck me quite differently twenty or thirty years on.
In the Galway pubs way back when, I would stand at attention when the band struck up Soldiers Are We at the end of the night, frowning my strongest frown of disapproval at those who just sat there nursing a beer. I could plunk myself down in the kitchen of cousin Mary’s tiny mobile house on an early summer’s evening, light up a cigarette, the late sun oblique and blindingly gold on the hill across the way. I could do all of that. I was a genius at it, it was so easy. Devoted, stubborn, unchanging, obsessive, peasant with a stack of books, tossing the undrunk tea out the door into the back garden. Saint Patrick’s prayer of devotion, I bind to myself today.
One major trouble was, there was no demand for it.
And despite its pleasures, I still couldn’t say, That is where you’ll find me.
Dear darling John Merrill, on whom I poured out elaborate affection in absentia, need not have worried about a badly conceived ending. I had the opposite of the Midas touch; there was no ending, and the best I could pull off was thanks to the few measures of courage I had left in the barrel. I could, you know, escape.
No winning lottery tickets, Greek millionaires, handsome vets, out of the blue murders, identity theft, barn fires, an award winning organic jam business or a hit show in community theatre. Kido had once said I was pure, and so I was. Kimi wa pyuua da yo. It was meant, I suppose, to contrast with either himself or the world he lived in.
I would have asked Kido to think of Astrud Gilberto singing If it takes forever.
One humid night in Tokyo, under a dark canopy of trees, we said goodbye. I could go on and on, but let’s just put it this way: think Astrud singing that song.
In the meantime, here I was, the rented house overlooking the lake, two little doves almost asleep, balancing my checkbook. On Monday, I would drive over to Stannard to re-read and map out Shayō, The Setting Sun.
It gets colder quickly in September. I close the front window, against the wishes of Princess, the cat. It crosses my mind that, damn, I wish I’d done Mediterranean studies.
As stories go, it was funny, really, at least some of it. Funny, or something a little harder to identify. Say it’s so, compañera, marinera, say it’s so. No story, no fragment of music, was too grandiose for me, though look what came of it.
When I was little, I would come running home when the other kids were mean to me; a mean comment or a cross look would probably do it. Gramma would crouch down and say, Don’t you cry, they aren’t worth one of you tears, not one of your tears. Gramma had her good side.
Calvin Pini and I had a joke, a very good joke. We liked the poet Mark Strand back then, liked him enormously. From Strand we got a line, Yes, I am tired, Yes, I want to keep reading. I think it continued I say yes to everything, or something like that. Strand referred to . . . a black line that would bind us or keep us apart.
I am still laughing at things Miles Bradford said, more than thirty years later.
I often see Nuala looking at me, smiling and showing her gums. Which do you like best, Cat? she is asking.
