a moment in the day: aunt

The place is a dive. Pool table, video poker units, beer advertisements on the walls. I take the end stool at the bar and wait for the bartender who looks to be the only employee running the show. I'm here to order food to go because after a long day of working on the kitchen remodel, Stephen googled where you could get hotdogs in the neighborhood.

Swiveling to get a look at the digs, I flash on the way it works in the movies when a woman bellies up to a bar. Some man catches her eye. Soon enough, he's coming up and starting the quippy pickup conversation. 

I order the food from the bartender and she tells me it could be a while because they only have one air fryer. I pay the check. The place is two thin rooms divided by a center wall with an open doorway on each end and a glassless window in the middle. Half full, a few folks at tables, a couple playing pool. If I look long down my side of the bar, there are the video poker and some arcade games bunched together, no one down there, and for a moment I consider going and seeing if they have like an old-school pinball game to play. But I can see through the glassless window lined with multicolored Christmas lights, across at the far corner of the room, that a band is getting ready to play.

All four of the guys have white hair. The lead guitar walks with a cane until he steps up on the tiny raised platform and gets in position. He wears a black button-up shirt with flashing gold curlicues on the arms. 

The band rocks. The music is sixties-style blues-rock with electric piano and harmonica riffs. The bartender bops happy at the air fryer. I wish I could tell my aunt Kathy about this place. She would love the vibe, the music, the whole thing. 

Up near the ceiling in one corner of the room, so the bartender can see it, is a monitor divided into four, showing the output from security cameras: the video poker area, the sidewalk tables, the parking lot, and an alley with a gray wall bare except for where someone has drawn a small red heart.

Now a young guy wearing a backwards baseball cap comes up to me to ask where the bartender went. 

His eyes linger. He says, "You know, you look so much like my aunt. I hope that's not creepy."

For some reason to reassure him that it's not creepy, I start to ask him her name, and at the same time he says, "Her name's Linda. You could be her sister."

He moves off. In from the outside door comes a small woman in leggings and a flowered top with a differently flowered backpack. She beelines past me, down the room, slipping the backpack off as she goes, to a video poker machine directly at the back of the house, immediately starts playing.

The band sings, "Don't let that greenback fool you."

I wonder if she's someone's aunt. I listen to the music and pretend to project this scene through the veil to the great beyond. "Kathy," I think toward her memory, "don't you just love this? Listen to these guys!"

The video poker squares spin and stop. Spin and stop.

I realize I was wrong about greenback. The lead guitarist with the flashing gold curlicues sings, "Don't let that green grass fool you. Don't let it change your mind. It's always greener on the other side."

My nephew comes back to the bar, "hi, aunt Linda," as he goes past.

The bartender, rocking to the music, hands me three to-go boxes and tells me there's ketchup and ranch dressing inside, and Kathy would be all over that ranch dressing, and as I put the boxes in my tote, the video lottery woman leaves her station, comes back down the aisle, and goes out the door just ahead of me.

We walk home together, me on one side of the street, she on the other, just ahead. The sky is that deep, heavy blue of nightfall. At a neighborhood intersection, she cuts across the lawn of a church to a couple of tents set up there, and I turn the corner toward home.

a moment in the day: stream

Evening, and I'm sitting on the futon bed upstairs with Nicholas, watching the live stream, on my phone, of the celebration of life for Darcelle XV at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. I hadn't meant to, didn't know there'd be a live stream, but I sat down to rest after helping Stephen move the furniture around in the living room downstairs, and glanced at my phone for a moment, and there it was, and so I clicked in.

The celebration is tiny in my hand, a little square on the screen, most of that square just the bright amber color of theater lights. A tiny figure in the center, a man giving reminiscences on stage.

Years back, when Portland was newish to me, my aunt Kathy was all about going to Darcelle's. I kind of loved that it became our family tradition, that for a while whenever someone came to visit from out of town, we'd go to Darcelle's. Kathy always getting us front-row seats and shoving our hands full of dollar bills, especially for when Darcelle came out in the assless chaps to sing "Rhinestone Cowboy."

Sometimes in the early part of the pandemic, I'd think, when all of this is done with, I'm telling Kathy we have to celebrate by going to Darcelle's again.

It's been just over a year, now, since Kathy's been gone.

I lay my head back against the wall and look up through the skylight to the block of evening light that hangs just over my head.

Stephen's voice from the bottom of the stairs, calling my name. I get up and go over to stand at the top and look down.

He says, "I had an idea."

He draws out the word idea. And the smile on his face is sheepish and hoping. He wants me to help him move the furniture again.

He tells me he thinks the table in the basement would fit perfectly in that one empty spot by the couch and if I wouldn't mind, just a little more...

I say, "Sure!" Somehow this tiny square of tribute on my phone feels too sacred to turn off or leave behind, so I take my phone with me. Down the stairs. Down into the basement, where we heft the table and carry it carefully up and out the back door, into the evening air, through the backyard gate and heading to the front of the house, the Portland Gay Men's Chorus singing from my back pocket.

Three moments in three days: dream

In the dream, I'm walking out of the theater and into another large space, open, like a convention center or an airport, high ceilings. And coming toward me going the other way is Kathy. She looks the way she used to look except her hair is pure blond, no pink. She's waving hello to someone in the crowd around us, still coming at me but not like she notices me or not like she wants to see me. 

When she passes, I follow. "Kathy, I want to talk to you!" 

It's coming up on a year since she died, and both of those facts are unbelievable to me.

As I follow, the space around us draws wider and emptier, the people disappear. Nothing all around, just Kathy and me.

I don't know what I want to say to her when she turns. I ask her how she is. I ask for a hug. I ask if she's seen my dad.

"Oh yeah," she says. "He comes here, too."

***

Next night, I try to go there again. I lie in bed and picture the place, the high ceilings, the nothing all around. Try to dream my way back there, but it doesn't work.

***

Next night, I try to go there again. I lie in bed and picture the place, the high ceilings, the nothing all around. Try to dream my way back there, but it doesn't work.