So, I bought my sister a copy of the Walter Mosley book, with an upcoming miniseries starring Samuel L Jackson. The book is amazing, and I wanted to share that with someone who may not be up on it. The below is the note I’m enclosing with the book when I send it. We’re going through a like situation right now, which I’ll explain…at some point.

So, I’m enclosing a book that, well, there’s a lot going on with it. Let me try to explain without writing a college essay. I’ve already saved you form dealing with pages of my handwriting, so I should get some props for that, at least.

First, Walter Mosley.

Dude has been writing for years, and is probably most noted in Hollywood for Devil In A Blue Dress, which was a great movie with Denzel and Don Cheadle. He’s written a number of characters, and seems at home when writing about LA in the 50s-70s. He mentions a ton of familiar places, and his characters are people you’ve known for years, full of Southern wisdom in urban LA. I’ve enjoyed his work for years, and has inspired me to write more myself; we all have stories, right?

Secondly, this book in particular.

When I first read it, the subject hit nowhere close to home as it does now. He wrote this in 2011, and that was before, well, all this. Grandma Jonnie had been dead 10 years, the last person I was familiar with with Alzheimers. The memory of her not remembering who Mom was had subsided. And Grandpa Ennis, well, it was treated with so much silence that it never really registered.

But in the writing, I find probably the clearest language in what a dementia patient is going through. Putting into words the confusion, the anxiety and anger when previous accessible memories just aren’t able to be remembered. The writing is more visceral, more illuminating to understand, even from a fictional standpoint, what’s going on.

He puts a wrinkle in it, though. Sam L Jackson is doing a miniseries on this now, actually, airing on streaming TV. How far are you willing to go to remember, to straighten up your business with one last burst of clarity? Would you make a deal with modern medicine? With the Devil himself? And what would you actually do if you had a clear mind…for a week? Or would you prefer to live out your years in this mental fog? Also, and a nod to our current situation, how to deal with family.

It’s a great story that I want to share with you. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, but this is a peek into the stuff I read and like and aspire to write myself at some point. 

I am third of my name, although just second in a row. My biological father insisted upon it, and my mother acquiesced, thankfully rescuing me from having a name like Frank or David.

My name has been mispronounced repeatedly, and in an effort to make it easier and not have people butcher my name, I shortened it when I got to college. There is a line of demarcation amongst my friends, and you can tell when they met me by what they call me. My family calls me something completely different.

Anyway, this situation popped up at my place of employment which both got me thinking about my name and how protective I am of it.

Our email system works on the firstname.lastname system, so if you are Bob Smith, your email address would be bob.smith@whereiwork.com. Simple, right? But our directory system works off last names, so when you get an email from Bob Smith, the email header says

“Smith, Bob <bob.smith@whereiwork.com>”

I explain all this to get to the point that people keep calling me by my last name, even though it seems apparent to me that’s not correct. My email signature gives my full name, as well as my shortened one, so there should be no issue. 

But, at least once every couple of weeks, someone calls me by my surname like it’s my first name. Usually I joke about it after they realize their mistake – “Oh, I’ll let him know that you’re looking for him” – but other times, I have to start taking things personally.

One of my colleagues got so incensed at people getting his name wrong, he asked that people call him Mr <last name>. I respected that, and in this industry, a definite act of defiance, especially since many people, hip to the power dynamic at play, won’t call anyone they deem “below them” with any respect whatsoever.

But this all got me thinking about what my name means to me, and how I feel about people butchering it. My government name has been mispronounced for 40+ years, and it still rankles me to hear more syllables and consonants than are actually in my name to start with. 

And “it’s just a name” – I count more than a few people in my life who have changed their names to go along with realized identities, and their new names mean a lot to them. What kind of asshole do you have to be to deny calling someone by the name they want to be called, whether that name is from birth or made legal just minutes ago? We assume married women take their husbands’ surnames, and when they don’t, the tides have turned as to how “scandalous” that was, but why the hesitation to extend that to first names?

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.