When I go through the antique stores in downtown Prescott, I find the bins of old photographs, sometimes even with notes on the back. I take home the pictures of strangers. I can’t bear to leave them in a bin in a store. I look at their eyes, their old-fashioned clothes, the inkwell-inked words on the back. They mattered once to someone. Those eyes. That moment. It was special. And so I bring them home because I can’t leave them and their stories in the dark of a store.

On April 3, my aunt Catherine died in Wilmington, North Carolina.

She was the last member of my dad’s immediate family. She’d been fighting cancer for many years. It was clear when I visited last year that it wouldn’t be long. There would really be no one left who knew my dad when he was a kid. No one who could tell me things I didn’t even know I might want to ask. That’s just how things happen.

When my grandmother died about fifteen years ago, Catherine sent us a box from my grandmother’s house. In it was everything that was left of my dad in his mother’s house. Pictures, varsity letters from the golf team, newspaper clippings, essays from college, and just about every letter he wrote back home for twenty-five years. Lots of things, but they all fit into a file box, and the file box fits on my top shelf in the closet. All the things I have from dad also fit in a box that fits in the closet. Just a box.

My dad and my aunt had a sometimes difficult relationship. My aunt and I had an often difficult relationship. Last spring I began gathering material for a novel that is working with the over-arching desire: I want to write my family back together again. Even though that is not possible, I want to have at least one place, even if it’s just a closing chapter, where there is a real connection among them. Until I went back to visit last April, I didn’t realize that my dad’s death had had much of an impact on his parents or his sister. Everyone was so far away. No one talked. And I, of course, was furious as only a twenty-year-old can be.

Before I took that trip back to NC last April, I went to Taos to work with Jeffrey Davis for a week. I was walking the labyrinth outside the retreat center listening to whatever I could hear. I used to hear my dad’s voice all the time, but he’s been dead nearly twenty-six years now. I don’t hear it as much. I guess it’s in a box in the closet. But I heard his voice clearly. “Remember that she loved me,” he said. “Remember Catherine loved me.” And that’s the reframe I needed. In spite of all the things that had happened between them, in spite of how angry I had been about it, it honestly never occurred to me that she had really loved him. It had seemed to me that she didn’t like very much about any of us. But once I heard those words and could allow myself to think it might be true, I was able to go back to North Carolina open in a way I’d never been before. And that worked. And I knew that she had loved him, and that his parents had loved him, and that even though I never knew what to say to her, I saw that she had felt that way about me, and from that place, I could love her too. And once I could love them all for real, I could write about the issues that live in me without tension and anger.

I finished the first draft of the novel on the day she died. I was reading the last scene to Keith, the moment of transformation between Jed and Ruthie (the brother & sister), when I got a text from my cousin telling me Catherine had died.

I’m going to pretend that it all worked out just like I wrote it.

Tomorrow is the best day of the year: Graduation! Yay students! Kiss, kiss, bye for now!

And then on Monday, we are going to New York City!

I have been back to NYC every summer for the past six years, and each time I go, I fall more in love with it. I become more confident with the subways and more in awe of the magnitude of what exists on such a small speck of earth. The architecture alone is jawdropping. The bridges. The constant movement of people wakes every one of my cells up. I love the sounds, the languages, the food, and the potential. Every single moment quivers with potential.

One day, I tell myself every time I leave a city–New York, Chicago, San Francisco–I am going to live in a city that moves (with trains! There must be trains!) I will have a residential MUNI pass before I leave this planet. For now, I visit cities and save my money.

This time, we’re staying in Brooklyn at a rental apartment. K wants to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. I did that a few years back, but it’s well-worth doing again. We’re going to the Strand bookstore, which for some reason I have never been to. We’re going to ride TRAINS and push through turnstiles and climb metal stairs to the El. I don’t know why I love trains so much. I could just ride the train around and have a delightful week. We’re going to see some shows, go to some of the off-the-path museums (read: ones without miles of people in them), visit friends and did I mention ride TRAINS?

Thanks, Yavapai College, for the job and the summer off. See ya in three months. Unless the Big Apple swallows me up!

My first-best-friend, Donna, and I grew up across the street from each other in Charlotte. We went trick-or-treating together, played kickball together (we both have powerhouse legs!), conducted marriage ceremonies between her dog and the neighbor’s dog (early advocates of marriage equality)–you know, the usual kid things.

And then in 1981, my family moved to Arizona and we couldn’t bring Donna. (Why?) We couldn’t even bring our cat, but that’s another blog (the wound is still fresh, sniff sniff). When we got to our house in Phoenix, the mailbox was stuffed with long letters from Donna. She was transcribing General Hospital for me. I had to miss The. Most. Exciting. Week. In. Daytime. Television because I had been kidnapped and forced to travel across the country against my will. This was the summer of Luke and Laura. The “Paging Dr. Noah Drake” summer. The summer I realized how attached I am to place. How no matter where my address might be, my bones live in the south.

We stayed in touch, some years more, some years less, but I always knew where I could find her, and she always knew where she could find me. In the past five years, we’ve begun talking much more frequently. (There was no e-mail in 1981! No Facebook!) and I’ve seen her in person twice.

Donna’s field is science and mine is, well, not science. She’s wicked smart. Funny. And yes, kind. She’s fierce–that quiet fierce that sneaks up on you, and when we’re together it’s like we’ve always been together. We have, as they say, deepened with age. We are progressive women marching forward into whatever comes next. We have a shared past and even more importantly, we continue to share compatible worldviews and ideals. I spent a few days with her last April and went to dinner with her kids and her parents. When I left, her father, who was one of my father’s friends and golfing buddies, grabbed my arm. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I think of your daddy every day.” There are few people left alive who could say that.

This spring, we both celebrated a middle-age milestone: our first pair of progressive glasses. Here’s to the second half of a progressive, always progressing life-long friendship!

In February, I attended the Desert Nights, Rising Stars creative writing conference sponsored by Arizona State University and the Virginia G. Piper Foundation. On Sunday, after it was over, I wandered over to the Memorial Union to get some food before driving back to Prescott.

Nothing was open on this glorious Sunday. The MU was filled with empty tables, trash piled up along side the trash cans (I assume from Saturday’s diners), tables were sticky. Yay ASU! I found one lowly establishment open in the bowels of the MU, two floors down under intense fluorescent lights. I bought my non-nutritious but fast food and went back upstairs to finish my writing word-count for the day.

A few students were practicing skateboarding in the mall outside. Every once in awhile some kids wandered through in flip flops and pajama bottoms. But mostly I was alone on a sort-of-clean table with my laptop and fries.

But then, Leonard called through the speakers. Leonard usually only calls in the darkest of nights on the darkest of days in the darkest of months when I’ve been with the cats a little bit too long.

I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord

Could I really be hearing Leonard Cohen blasting through an empty student union on a Sunday afternoon? No one else is in the dining hall with me. I look left. Right. Smile.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof

Love. You. Leonard.

Love, love it’s a cold and it’s a very broken hallelujah

Two girls walk through in socks. Shorts with PINK on the butt. They’re both walking and texting. They don’t see me.

Love is not some kind of victory march, no it’s a cold and very broken hallelujah

Leonard. You are Art. If you’ve got a few minutes, watch a master pray here at the 2008 Montreal Jazz Festival.

I’ll stand here before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah

Thank you, Lord of Writing. Thank you, Lord of Song, for breaking open every time with hallelujah.

All lines in italics are from Leonard Cohen’s lyrics “Hallelujah”.