Friday, June 22, 2007

Summer


School is out and I can feel it in my heart lungs and groin and I float back to the vinyl stacked on the record player on Fulton Avenue. Late for The Sky. Blue. After the Goldrush. Over and over and over. The valley cools down at night more than here, what we used to call "over the hill" a denizen of which I have now been for longer than I lay in the valley cool, spitting apricot pits through the torn screen and germinating a small tree next to the ancient gardenia.

I marked the seasons at Fulton Avenue with Meyer lemons, camellias, gardenias and bearded iris while the record player plunked lp after lp. At Casamurphy it's grapefruit and jacaranda. I watched Spuds stretched out in his little bed this morning and felt like jumping on him and tickling him and tossing him on the floor. The first weekday morning of vacation and the feel of the bed, still cool before the dog day wretchedness of August which looms ahead, is the best morning of the year. I let him sleep. He would have beaten the crap out of me if I’d given him a raspberry on his smooth white belly or noogies on his grungy boyo scalp.

I had a nice talk with Sid and PK at the hippy school and while we have some philosophically moot areas, they are the gold standard of school administrators–fierce and loving mothers first. Nice to leave my kids in a place where I know they can’t fuck them up any worse than I can. Although, Sid, how many times did you actually watch The Sound of Music?

Himself and I will have been married 16 years tomorrow. There is no single act or decision I have made in my life that has so exceeded my expectation. The idea of marriage is so much richer and bittersweet and fraught with love and sex and grace than anything I ‘d yet to dream in 1992 when I was a June bride. And forty six years ago on Monday, which will be a regular psychotherapy, fish dinner and yoga night at Casamurphy, an Irish unwed mother gave birth to a frail premature infant at County General Hospital.

After our June celebratory rituals, Tuesday himself will fly away to Eire and leave me to remodel, ship the kids to camp and truly feel the emptiness of our bed and remember the coolness and loneliness of the valley.

Thank you my love for being born and for marrying me and for loving me and this stupid stupid fucking body.

4 comments:

harry said...

Happy Anniversary... I remember the night before the wedding in the big Victorian B&B, with many people in brand new pj's jumping around in everyone's bed but their own, and the crack dealers in the park across the street (we all had our personal radars). And you BOTH looked so happy. I mean I thought Layne would, but JOHN was almost freylekh in the dark wood and candlelight of the Pico-Union/Upper Admas robber baron manse.

John L. Murphy / "Fionnchú" said...

Thanks, Bob, and I don't know even what freylekh means. By the way, although a letter code in the comment box did not carry across, maith thú for your own Irish phrase on my blog, too!

You know, Harry Bob H., I will miss you and your own dear one on his birthday celebration, but I wish to be present in spirit if not collapsed and jetlagged and year-round teaching body. Happy Birthday, CBerryH20, in advance.

Layne and you and Chris all have brought wise love into my once-shattered and still-begrudging (that Irish national characteristic) life. I share with you my own warmth, not to mention the devoted mayhem of a spouse who has to put up with my same tweedy eccentricities which you and your helpmeet only have to read about at a safe and cyber-mediated distance. McLuhan's definition of the Culture of Cool?

John L. Murphy / "Fionnchú" said...

Layne, since you & H Bob H read this same place, allow me to post my anniversary wish. It applies to you both, after all. The place is known to you both. I have sought it since my childhood, when I first saw it at ten.

That you, L, will find a way to get us out of an increasingly unbearable city up to an increasingly necessary more peaceful refuge. Your smarts and my, well, my esoteric knowledge can get us there, probably you more quickly than me. I cannot get any connection at "harry" other than a blank profile, which instantly went up two visits from three to five as I hovered about it, looking for the soon to be Dr. H. presumably lurking about Blogger.

Cari said...

Allow me to wish you both the most loving anniversary greetings. Marriage is an institution that reqires great personal strength and courage from both participants, but it is also essential for married couples to have the ability to compromise, compromise and then to compromise some more. How do ya think we've survived 21 years?
Much love to you both, Layne and John

Cari