sun 20 nov 1994 12:00:00 — brookline, ma
my mother died
my mother died on 20 october 1994. we scattered her ashes at sea in a nice, homegrown ceremony. and then on november 5 we threw the party she had wanted. everything went so perfectly it was very poetic.
i was living here in brookline at 56 harrison street, the second floor of a house. d works at the school across the street. we moved back in together. i ended up being very happy to be living with d again, particularly when this crisis happened with my mother. some of my family came to stay and sleep over with us sometimes, like my brother bill came to sleep over the night before we let my mother die.
yesterday, saturday the 19th, my nephew mark was married. it turned out to be a really weird trip, delightful in a way, but still rather confusing. d and i were invited to stay over at my niece amy and george's house in salem nh after the wedding. we got to their house with our bags about 45 minutes before the wedding, my sister liz was already there. i guess liz is 42 about to turn 43? she was wearing a gold shirt with fancy patterns on it. i asked her for her autograph. we made jokes (as we all drove in the car to the church) that if the car broke down (cuz liz said it sounded like the wheel was going to fall off) that we could stand liz out on the road as a flare. but then i said there would be a rash of reports that someone had seen elvis walking out on the highway. that made everybody laugh.
during the wedding reception i had a couple of chats with sito, mark's grandmother, whose parents were both lebanese. and she invited me and d to come visit her. [...]
we were all pretty fucked up when we got back to george and amy's house. amy read some new poems to me. at some point we're sitting in the basement and eating orange food, and somebody hands me a joint (i guess it was my wife) and tells me to take a drag. i took two drags from it, that was it for me. i was paranoid about being paranoid. i turned left at the joint.
for the rest of the night i was not really clear on what i was perceiving. like at one point amy got out her erotic stories that she's been writing, and read them in front of her mother and me. (i was thinking, what a strange and wonderful country i live in, this america.) they were the kind of smut that you read in "hustler". i was not sure what the point was of her stories. she was telling us some pretty heavy stuff, also, about her growing up, how she's managing herself, trying to get over some stuff from her youth. anyway, it's weird to watch this intensely spiritual, voluptuous young woman sit there and read fantasies about someone coming in her face, and to remember walking to the hospital at age 14 to see her as a newborn. but what was she really trying to tell us, with those stories? we were laughing about some of it. but did she mean them as a joke? she kept saying, "it's good smut!" and liz said stuff like, "i can't beleive you're reading this in front of my baby brother." [...]
everybody's worried about my nephew billy. i'm scheduled to go see nine-inch-nails with him at the boston garden on dec 3. he has just turned 18. [...]