Lately, I've been having the sweetest Zoom meetings with family and friends, ostensibly for "My Huck Finn Funeral." People who know me, who "get" me, have been reflecting on my life within theirs, or their lives within mine. Although I got the wrong Mark Twain book when I named it, "My Tom Sawyer Funeral" doesn't have the same ring to it, and anyway, Huck was there, with Tom, in Chapter 17, when they were missing and presumed dead. Tom got wind of the rather grand funeral being planned in their honor and decided they should make a grand entrance, after enjoying some of the heartfelt grief being expressed on their behalf. This is something like that, except there are few tears, occasionally a song or two, but mostly just precious moments in time.
We go through the process of saying what we mean to each other, and a lot of it is surprising to me. I have some deep-thinking friends, which doesn't surprise me. I knew that. What surprises me is how deeply they've thought about me, and this life I've led, and the work I've tried to leave behind.
A few people can't do the Zoom, or won't, because they hate the internet or don't even own a computer that would allow them entry into one of those strange little "Hollywood Square" boxes. One of my sisters wants me to know what she would say if she did Zoom, and so she calls me, delivering a deep and insightful treatise on how I treat homeless people. I have no idea how or when she noticed this, but she went on, rather at length, about it, including my volunteer time at St. Francis House when I lived in St. Augustine, making sandwiches to be handed out on the streets or in the migrant fields over in Hastings,' near "Spuds," the potato capital of Florida.
That this sister I rarely see, whose life is so different from mine, could know so deeply what matters to me, is just about the best look back on my 67 years I could ask for. I feast on the small bag of Missouri black walnut pieces she painstakingly harvested, hulled, cracked, and separated, to put in the mail to me, as a birthday treat. I am rich beyond measure.
This is the only photo of me in "Comfort Me With Apples: Homelessness in Literature," developed as a special project for the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities in 1994-95. This particular character was drawn from Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours.
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