The Romo Cafe,
Oakland California,
Clouds Wish To Cry,

It was the 4th of January,

Dear Love,

I am sitting in a cafe on Fairfax and some other street, a street with closed down businesses, bars on the windows, a restaurant on holiday called Luis Family Restaurant, next to an empty Barberia Cesar, Cesar's barbershop.

It's good to get out of Boise and into another world, a world within worlds whirling about worlds other than I've been.

I came down here to be by my mom’s side, to say goodbye to her baby brother, my Uncle Brian.

He’s had cancer for the last 20 years or so, but the past 3 or so have been a rapid descent into the abyss. Uncle Brian has always been a fun human, bought me my first shot of aged tequila, and took me hiking through Yosemite, not at the same time.

A few years ago, the cancer spread to his brain. They did a surgery, but the promise was that he wouldn't lose his personality, but as we have come to see, doctors’ promises are quite wobbly.

Before the surgery, much like my father, he stated strongly that there were non-negotiables, and losing the personality, the emotional side of himself was one.

I haven't seen him in person for 12 years.

Yesterday, I did. We are staying with them at their house, Aunt Valerie’s house, where he is in Hospice. We walked into his room and there, lying in bed, silent of words, he looked at us, my mom and I, as we said hello.

Then she walked to his side and just started bawling, tears falling. Uncle Brian was looking at her, kind of there and then not, looking at me, and then again at her. The tv was on, reruns of Star Trek Voyager, I believe. I kept hearing lasers shoot behind me and then Uncle Brian would glance at the T.V. Then he’d look back at my mom who was still crying.

I think it was a shock to him as well.

One moment you are watching a show, lying in bed, and then your older sister is standing in front of you crying. I was watching him configure himself. He was holding my mom’s hand, looking at her. You could see his empathy for her. He was saying it's okay with his eyes, telling her that he loved her, comforting her.

He knew that my dad had just died.

Three months earlier, my dad was standing in that same room with my mom saying goodbye to Uncle Brian, a last goodbye, so my mom thought.

And now there we stood, the wrong brother-in-law and husband died first.

A fog moves through me as I hear the voices of my mom and dad, talking about Uncle Brian's inevitable death.

My dad was always there to comfort my mom and now that comfort slipped away.

Life doesn’t wait for us.

Its time is its own time, a timelessness not made for human consumption.

I hadn’t spent much time with Uncle Brian the last day and a half, quick hellos and I love yous.

Then I’d leave the room so my mom could be alone with her baby brother.

But this morning, I had just gotten out of bed, one pant leg was coming up my thigh, when I heard a crash and then an unknown voice saying, "oh my god”, and then my aunt Valerie’s voice, “What happened? Are you alright?”

Her voice was calm as one might expect from a former nurse and a wife who had been caring for her husband in one way or another for the past 52 years.

I could hear everything. The nurse said, I told him not to move, to stay put, as he was sitting on the commode that was in the corner of the bedroom.

She turned around to put a bed pad down, and apparently he decided to walk to the bathroom and ended up on the floor instead, whacking his head on the dresser as he fell.

I heard my name called, and then saw my mom coming down the hall toward me.

There I stood in front of Uncle Brian, he was sitting up, hunched over, legs straight out, diaper on. His legs were light and emaciated, atrophied, the scene similar to the last month of my dad’s life. When they get old, when we get old, the muscles disappear and skeletons show up.

Once they go immobile, skin bones replace legs.

I reached down and he held on to my arms then looked up at me and said, “Oh, there you are.” It was good to hear him talk.

The nurse took the back side and I lifted him from the front turning him so his toosh was on the edge of the bed. Then he stood up again with my help as we scooted to his right.

I learned with my dad that it’s best to get their ass in the right position so that when they lean back into bed they are already properly placed.

It’s something we take for granted, plopping in bed and then adjusting ourselves, but at their stage it is a workout to get well adjusted and they don’t have the strength for it.

We did our dance, as if a moment ago never happened, as if he magically found himself laying in bed, oxygen around his nose, blanket pulled up to his chin.

He asked me where I was living now. He knew I had been in Portugal for the past 8 years and that I had no plan on coming back to the States, yet there I was, picking him up off the floor, myself as well, I suppose.

That was two hours ago.

Now I am at a Latina owned cafe listening to Spanish being spoken, drinking a Cafe de Olla, there is a Dad who is younger than me sitting with his teenage daughter who is doing homework, reading “Of Mice and Men”, while taking notes.

My girlfriend from 15 years ago, Andi, loved that book, asked me to read it to her out loud, the first time I had ever read any of John Steinbeck’s work, other than a paragraph here and there.

I love how memories work, Madeleine cookies.

One of the few bits of Steinbeck’s that I was familiar with came from a book called The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Context is always important, so I will give you a little. The paragraph comes from my favorite course, Writing Great Sentences, a course that begins by acknowledging the impossible task of capturing and presenting a living thing, a great sentence.

You can’t take apart a ‘thing’, a life, and label its parts and then say you know what it is.

A bucket of blood cells, sinews, and fragments of brain and bones doesn’t make a being. A corpse isn’t a being either.

Humans love their labels.

Slap a name on it and now you know what it is, but never do you know it all, barely a bit, if even that.

Isn’t that the pleasure of being awake and aware, to continue to open up to the truth, to the unfolding of the unknown?

Isn’t that one of the pleasures of love, of intimacy, to forever be seeking her mysteries, travelling into her eyes, seeking the experience of who or what she is beyond the ideas that we have of each other, beyond the words, beyond the flesh, always wishing to come close, closer still.

With women, whom I loved and love, I’d seek the world that moves through them, the wonder, the essence of everything.

I have to stop writing now. I’m on my way to Berkeley to play in the rain.

Be blessed, stay beautiful, stay sexy, stay as you wish.
Emeric Damian

​www.EmericDamian.com​

p.s. Today is the 14th of February. This was originally written on the 4th of January. But I didn't send it to you. I wanted to send the earlier email first, the words that I thought were finished, that kept climbing into my mind, seeking my heart's affection. If you missed the last email, you can read it here.

Isn't it a curious life...

Also...

The link to The Log from The Sea of Cortez can be found here. ​

​The Steinbeck quote pulled from the introduction:

"We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes—we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both. For example: the Mexican sierra has “XVII-15-IX” spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational externality has come into being—an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines of the sierra unaffected by this second relational reality is to sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth “D. XVII-15-IX.” There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed—probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.

It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and has recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way."

Stay sexy, stay beautiful, stay as you wish, you divine wonder,
Emso