hanging gardens

Police cars in front of the house up the street, an alternate route taken past beautiful Victorians and the coffeeshop where the Albanians hang out, and I admire everyone else's balcony plantings, the sunflowers in 5-gallon buckets and scraggly tomato plants entangling the ironwork, the sweet potato vines dangling over, Babylon this is not, but it'd be nice to have some wonders of the world.

I talk to my mom about gardens and work, and my dad's going in for some kind of crazy heart surgery so he doesn't get clots and die, and then I talk to my dad and we have our camaraderie of rock and roll and God and gleeful morbidness, this is where it all comes from, and I say I want him around as long as possible and he says that won't be all that long. I know it's the truth, and that nothing lasts forever, but it's hard to think about.

There's a vigil up the street for Bridget's friend, and a friend of a lot of people in my orbit that I don't know all that well, but it seems he was a wonderful and full of life person, and I walk past the throngs of people I've seen at shows or out and about, connected enough to know faces, but not enough to hug or stand alongside, to where the candles are on the corner, and I don't know what to think or say so I stand there silently and pray for all these grieving souls around me, the friends and family and for the guy who'll go to jail over this, because I don't know what else to do, and it's too close, but not close enough and I don't want to colonize another's grief. I'm not good at this whole thing, and it seems like people around me are losing people they love all too quickly.

One of my friends lost his best friend to cancer a few weeks ago and is still torn up, a lady at my church who'd been in and out of rehab and jail died last night. I didn't know her well, I had her grandkids in my class, and one time she asked me for money and I said I had none, because it's easy to score drugs outside the doors of my place of worship and I didn't want to be responsible for enabling that. I wonder if I was wrong. An award's being handed out today at the place of employment in the memory of someone I really liked and never got to know, whose memory is used to project an ideal that he would have laughed at.  It kills me how inevitable this mortality thing is, how easily it gets used for this or that or the other,  that it costs so much to bury, and that as we get older, the ashes and the bones continue to rattle in our memory.