Growing up in a..well, rather infamous Los Angeles suburb and having kids my age die of gun violence, I was well acquainted with the notion of “survivors guilt”, even if I didn’t know the term.

The notion is that, while people live and die in sometimes capricious ways, that certain people didn’t deserve to go out like they did, and you realize that you’re still alive and they’re not. It’s akin to being in a war zone and your fellow solider steps on a land mine and here you are, years later, siping on a cup of coffee and it hits you, really hits you, that you’re here and they’re not. And you feel bad. You feel sick about it. Why me? you ask. What fate made it so they can’t be here, but I am?

Over the past few years, people I love have lost people they love to Covid. I’ve lost a dear friend who got some wrong information and paid dearly for it. I’d give anything to have those people here.

It was in this backdrop I went on vacation. In a foreign country.

I enjoyed the time away, and really got to recharge and rest and get warm sun, but I was continuously bugged by this…guilt.

I got to do something millions of people cannot do financially or physically. I got to be vaccinated and test negative, which a large part of the world isn’t. I got to tradel,w hick a lot of people aren’t comfortable with. What makes me special? What makes me the one? I’d gladly wish the joy of being warm during a Chicago winter, the hedonism of strawberry daiquiris on a beach, even the small thrill of having your mask off outdoors.

But that’s not the reality of what we’re collectively going through: a failure of government and a success of people who want to see “the other” dead and disabled. And it’s enraging and tiring and sad and all of those things, but, as long as we’re still here, and loved ones are not, we’ll have that guilt.

Or, I’ll have it, and wonder if I can do anything about it.

An aunt I grew up with is gone, but what’s on my mind is not her legacy, or the memories; I’ll get to those and ruminate on them in time.

What’s on my mind is a concept. THe concept of “quality of life”. The concept that someone may decide that there’s too much pain, too much cost, too much keeping them from enjoying life. And that concept led to the events that my family is going through now. 

My aunt had a myriad of internal issues. She had fallen in her home repeatedly. She didn’t feel as if she could keep going the way she wanted to keep going. So, in her final days, she demanded no more surgeries. No tubes, no monitors. “Let me go home.”

And so she died at home, surrounded by her children and a host of grandkids and friends. She called her shot. She said “enough”. We’ve gone through the last couple of years where people died alone in hospitals; surely we’d have empathy by now?

There’s a time to lay the burden down and rest.

And this isn’t about being “weak” or “wimping out”. Everyone has a limit. The strong can’t be strong ALL the time. Sure, you can call on God and Jesus and Allah to walk you across the sand one more time, but none of them can admininster that morphine that’ll ease the pain of those last breaths. 

I am thankful that she was in my life, that she gave me memories to cherish, that she raised a myriad of people I’m related to and love very much. She deserved to go out how she wanted to. And she definitely deserves not to be second-guessed on her decision.

Rest easy, Aunt Nina. You were loved, and showed love. In a little corner of this place, you existed and we were better for it.

Imagine…

The love of your life is miles away, if only in physical form, but spiritually, they’re with you. Romantically, they’re first on your mind.

Imagine. Easy, right?

You’re old school, and believe the written word is the best way to tell them how you feel. You stutter when trying to explain yourself in person, and you have little musical talent to sing them a song, and you’re not going for trite, you’re going for heartfelt. Plus, you have an inkling of what you want to say and the words you’d use.

Imagine. So easy, the romance and the love and the blooming of both.

You get out some good stationery, find your best pens, and sit and write. Lo, the words flow from the pen, as you explain to your beloved how great they are, how they make you feel, and how much you want them to be in your life. 

Imagine. The tactile sense of writing, of being able to translate thought into words.

You put this declaration of love in the envelope, put a stamp or two on it, and put it in the mailbox at the end of your block, confident that it will reach your beloved, and then the next chapter of your life will truly begin.

Except, it doesn’t. Because they never get your letter. 

Because Louis GOTDAMN DeJoy is Postmaster General, and because of the circumstances surrounding the US Postal Service, through mismanagement, the pandemic, onerous debt, and a barely-hidden wish for the department to be privatized, that letter never reaches its intended destination.

Why is that not so hard to imagine?

Reading a collection of letters of Ralph Ellison, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I can defintiely see a diference between the greats and where I am, and that’s time.

Some of these letters go on, taking their time to set a scene, lay out a point, a veritable warm up to a skillful deployment of words. You never get the sense that he’s in a hurry, or he’s just wrting to write. 

I have a lot of ideas. Lot of things I want to do and share…but I cannot, for the life of me, slow down. I cannot spend more than an hour doing anything resembling taking my time. 

Part of it is that I forget things if I’m in the middle of something else. If I have four ideas, and start working on one, I’ll forget at least one of those ideas I had; it’s just how I’m wired. I take copious notes, but something gets through the cracks every time. Writing somehting, drawing something…doesn’t matter.

The letters I write have nowhere close to a portion fo class, wit, and feeling of completeness as Ellison’s, and while that’s not a surprise, his mountaintop of excellence seems very far away from where I am.

Maybe, with this year, I’ll learn to slow down. I’ll learn to be more…patient? Deliberate? Something. First is to acknowlege, second is to bring a plan of action into…action. 

I talk about family a lot, mainly because it’s a theme in my life. I’ve seen he best of Italian nd I have seen the worst of it. The notion that someone who is related to you is one of the most important people in your life is both obvious and nonsensical at the same time. Mix that in with how friends can become more than friends, and you have a confused notion of what family is. Well, not confused, but what your experience tells you family is turns out to be different from what family starts to mean for you.

I got the idea to write a letter to an uncle I haven’t seen in years, a loner who moved far away from everyone else to have his own family. When I was younger, he showed up to my HS graduation, and we visited him once. Cool cat, and was very, very skeptical about the rest of the family bullshit.

Thing is, I don’t know what to say to him. “Hi” is a bit too…trite? I know how he’s doing; the rest of the family speaks of him in whispers and angry screeds about how “he think he better” because he saw fit to leave family drama in a physical space he’s chosen not to inhabit. The last time he was among “family” was for a funeral.

But I don’t know what to say. Or how. Because all of this family baggage. How does one write and avoid any elephants currently in the room? How can one be polite? How can one avoid writing”Hey, things are effed up and I thought to write you”? A bit too on the nose, I think.

So, I’ll put this paper away, because I have plenty other sheets that, when it comes time, I can fill it with what I’d feel like I needed to say, and when I needed to say it.

This exists as a written account of how We Made Gumbo. This is the third time we’ve made it, but the first where I’ll actually write this all down.

Ingredients:

Roux:
1 cup flour
1 cup fat ( we used butter – 4 small sticks = 1 cup)

Veggies/Aromatics
1 medium onion
1 green pepper
6 cloves of garlic
3 stalks of celery

Protein
2 lbs uncooked shrimp
2 packages of imitation crab meat
1 rotisserie chicken, meat pulled off the bone
3 packages of Hot Doug’s Andouille Sausage (12 links total)
3 packages of Paulina Market ANdouile Sausage (12 links total)

Broth
4 cups of shrimp stock (made with shells from shrimp)
1 1/2 containers of low sodium chicken stock

So, after chopping everything, we did these few things:
Put the sausage in the oven to broil off some of the grease. This results in a lot less grease in the finished product.

So, with everything ready to go, we started.
Dumped the butter in our gumbo pot, meted it. The key is, when you dump the flour in, it sizzles. Got it hot enough for this, then added a bit of flour in as we went, not dumping in the whole thing at once. This gets VERY HOT. Stirring the whole time is imperative. Check my mans here with some good roux-making.

Stir until you get the roux as dark as you want; we didn’t go for dark chocolate milk, but milk chocolate bar, let’s say. Then, dump in onions. Stir until they sweat; ie, you see the water coming out of them. Because of the steam, this gets HOT AS HELL. Then add the pepper and celery. The roux will cool down, and you’re supposed to stir until they get integrated a bit. We didn’t do it a full two minutes, I don’t think.Then the garlic, which doesn’t get a chance to burn, but when you smell it good, we went ahead to the broth. Medium heat.

THen, add the broth. We put in the shrimp stock first, then the chicken. Because we had a ton of protein, we left a few inches from the top. Stir and stir some more.

We put the sausage in, and got it up to a boil. The idea was to get the sausage flavor in there while the cooking was happening. Stir! Once it boiled, turned down to simmer, and let it sit for 40-hour.

Because everything else was already cooked, we added the chicken next and let it sit in a while, then the crab and finally the shrimp, which was in for maybe 20 minutes. Then off the heat, make some rice and some French bread, and go to town.

This is not a post about my father. Not entirely.

This is a post about how I feel about my, well, his family.

I understand grief, and loss, and watching a loved one decline with age, whether mentally or physically.

But to act like it’s inevitable is…foolhardy? Irresponsible?

And then, when faced with the prospect of making things better, to sigh and throw up your hands and say “welp, it is what it is” borders on criminal.

But what I haven’t understood, even in this new cruel world where strangers can project their shit onto you, it was always family that was united in a cohesive, mutually beneficial way.

But, I’ve learned a long time ago that family is only certain people.

A few months ago I lost a good friend to COVID. He was in Florida, and was performing indoors, and caught it, and languished for a few weeks before he died. I had wished him a happy birthday a few months earlier. I’ve eulogies him in other spaces, but he was one of the nicest, smartest dudes I’ve ever known.

He was told by…someone…that the key to this thing was to catch Covid..THEN get the vaccine. That..turned out not to work out. Someone gave him shitty information, and he paid for it with his life. I went through the usual stages of grief, but I stayed longest on anger; why? Why in the hell did he take such bad information? Who? I was livid for days, avoiding my sadness with a justifiable emotional substitute.

So, fast forward a bit.

The year was..2000. I was in my first job out of college, and I fell in with a bunch of lower-rung people at a PR firm. Admin assistants, web designers in the age of Flash websites that did nothing. I call a lot of those people friends to this day, seeing weddings and kids and job changes; life changes.

One of those friends decided she “wanted to do her own research” on the vaccine. In the midst of all this death and disinformation, she wanted to…do her own research. I never knew when my texts would be returned, and silently cheered whenever she sent me a Instagram post or a YouTube link. I hoped she would stay okay, and saw no point in yelling at her; free will is a bitch, I guess.

So, she let me know that she had gotten her first shot a few weeks ago, and I was overjoyed. I began to create a bit easier; surely she’ll be okay in a month when she’d get her second shot.

But, no.

I texted her last weekend to say hello. and she said she wasn’t feeling well. She’d gotten her first shot, and was supposed to go in for the second one in a few weeks, but had developed difficulty breathing. I held my breath.

I hadn’t heard from her since, and I texted her this morning. All day, no response, and I really dreaded the worst. Thing is, I don’t know any of her people, so if something happened, I’d have no idea. The only clue I had that she was still with us was her texting me back.

So imagine my relief when I get a text from her this evening…but my spirits fell as I read it.

She was texting me from a gurney at the hospital. Covid pneumonia.

One shot is good, but not the protection from two.

I made sure to tell her that I loved her, that she’d be fine, and I’d wait to hear from her if she needed me. She responded that she would.

Now I wait. And hope some more. Because I won’t be able to take two text conversations in a year cut short by this gotdamned virus. I just can’t.

As in, I hope. I hope I’ll look back on this and laugh, rather than mark the beginning.

You know how, in movies and TV shows, a character cheats death or dodges at the right time, and they pledge that then, they were going to change? That every day is borrowed time, and they could have died, if not for timing or their reflexes or Bruce Willis. That today was the first day of the rest of their life?

So, I have shitty eyesight. My left eye is a lot worse than my right, and my right is pretty bad. I can’t have lasik because my eyes twitch, and whichever eye I’m not concentrating with decides to move on its own, which looks like lazy eye but kinda isn’t.

ANYWAY, I share that to say this.

This morning I woke up and my left eye..was just shit. Everything is blurry and in triples, and while I know my left eye is bad, it wasn’t this bad when I went to sleep. So, something’s up. I made it through a day at work, and am writing this down in hopes that this is an anomaly. That this all goes away with a lot of water and vitamins. My head doesn’t hurt, I’m in no distress, but my left eye is barely functioning right now.

So, I’m hoping.

And today is going to have to be the first day of the rest of my life. Because things involving my eyes, whether tests or the thought of contacts or, just, ANYTHING, makes me a very scared little boy again, scared I won’t be able to see. Scared I won’t be able to see what I’m drawing, or writing. Scared I can’t recognize people, scared I can’t pick out the record I want. I know there are people who have made it their entire lives without being able to distinguish anything more than light and shadow, and that they’ve found purpose without it, but to have and lose is worse, in my opinion, than never having at all.

I have to go to work, and computers lurk there, so I’ll have to deal with that, but what I don’t know vastly outpaces what I do. My right eye is the strongest of the two, yet it is largely unaffected. Why? How?

I’m living without the knowledge of if I’ll wake up one day and I won’t see anything. Then I’ll regret the things I didn’t make, sights I didn’t see. I’ll be saddened at the people I couldn’t recognize, and be relegated to the voices of the people I love.

And I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can handle that. And that’s just real.

So, my new lease on life begins today. Keep my eyes open and focused…as long as I can.

This is on my heart and in my mind, and it’s Friday and I tend to get introspective after hard work weeks, weeks where I wonder what I’m doing and why and how far am I going with it. This is an American story, not only in the fact that it happens in America, but so much of what makes this country so unique is in it.

Depending on how well I know you, when you ask where I’m from, I’ll answer in one of two ways. “Suburban Los Angeles” for those Chads and Beckys with whom I share a brief space on this earth and whom I can sense don’t really care. Also, because I abhor the questions that inevitably happen when I tell them the actual place I’m from.

For others, I say it: Compton. A city made famous by music, a city name made notorious, and a holder of The Baddest Place To Be From mantle, along with my current home of Chicago and of a number of other Black-inhabited spaces linked with crime and “the ghetto” while still having that cachet of being places bad enough to “make it out of”.

This is not a story of my childhood in its whole, of my particular navigation of gangs, poverty, low expectations, overpolicing, the crack epidemic, and so forth. This is about two people: Tyrone and Khye.

Tyrone was the oldest son of our neighbor across the street. His mother taught me basic computing; of DOS and the joys of early PC educational games. My parents paid her for “computer lessons”, and I went over there once a week to sit in front of their computer and understand what .BAT files were, what .EXE files were made of, and after it all, I got to play Zaxxon or Reader Rabbit. I developed such a huge crush on her that I took the $20 my folks gave me on a school trip to the LA County Fair and, instead of eating, starved all day to buy her a stuffed bear that said “I HEART ADRIENNE” on it. My mother won’t let that go, to this day.

Anyway, Tyrone was in high school when I was in elementary school, and was therefore too cool to hang out when I came over or when I played with his younger sister. I didn’t know him very well at all, but well enough to wave then I saw him.

I remember, though, one evening when we had come home from somewhere and there were a lot of people going in and out of their house. Now, we were a pretty close block, and the neighbors all knew when we had get-togethers and such, and had standing invites to our Sunday dinners, but this seemed different. My mom called over there, and over the next few days, we started getting more and more details. Mom sent me over with some food she had made, and to see a lady who represented so much happiness in black, eyes red, made me immeasurably sad.

Tyrone was in front of the Compton library, a place I considered my refuge many a weekend, where my folks, eager for some time away from me, would drop me off and wait for me to call for pickup, usually four or five hours later. He was on one of the pay phones in front, with his back to one of Compton’s busiest streets as he talked.

What we pieced together was, a week earlier, a Mexican gangbanger was shot and killed by a rival Black gang. Apparently, some associates of the vato that got killed went looking to kill themselves a Black kid. As the stories go, surveillance cameras caught a car pulling up with three people in it, a dude hopping out, crossing the street, walking up to Tyrone, who was unaware, and shooting him once in the back of the head. Then running back across the street, hopping into the driver’s seat, and driving away. Tyrone wasn’t 18 and, to my knowledge, the killer never caught.

Unlike Tyrone, I knew Khye. Every Sunday, without fail, my mother and I went to Double Rock Baptist Church. As part of our deal, we never went to church, because Mom looked askance at the pastor, but still wanted to get her praise on, so we went to Sunday school. I saw Khye every Sunday, and we were part of our short-lived Cub Scout troop as well. After Sunday school was over, we’d stand around outside the church and talk and joke and maybe run to the Aco station next door for NowLaters or Red Hots. He was my boy.

Then one Sunday, before class started, our teacher told us that Khye had been shot, and he wasn’t doing okay.

Khye’s mom sent him to school in Gardena, a neighboring suburb, for all the reasons people send kids to schools outside their neighborhoods. Better school, less violence, gifted programs, after school activities. Khye was smart and doing honor roll stuff, so he was going to school in Gardena and catching the bus home every day.

So, Khye was sitting on the bus stop in front of his school one Friday after school had let out. A schoolyard full of kids, looking forward to the weekend, waiting for pickups and school buses.

The story goes that some gang members decided to roll by and shoot indiscriminately. Khye was hit twice, once in the neck.

He lasted til Tuesday. He was 13.

The article about his death, and the wave of violence that weekend, is online here. I can’t really bear to read it.

Two young lives, taken before they really got started. Two families gutted and in mourning. And while I know the world keeps turning, and two lives out of billions aren’t big in the scheme of things, these two deaths, close to me and so random and capricious and stupid and unlucky, had an effect on my psyche I’m still trying to put into words. Neither of them got a chance to grow up. And all across this country, in these cities and burgs and neighborhoods, shit like this is still happening, and the politics of it makes me so angry. The sorrow of it makes my heart heavy.

And tonight, that’s in my soul. Peace to those not with us, may their memories last as long as we have breath to speak their names and recall their words and deeds.