lost and found

I’m back at the airport, waiting for my flight to San Francisco. I just left LeeAnn at her gate, and she’s heading back to Idaho to an empty house. The phone rang somewhere before eight this morning, and it was her. She was outside my motel in a pick-up truck, and she couldn’t climb the stairs to my room as she’d sprained her ankle. Clearly, the wake for Max had happened. I threw together my clothes and went down to join her. She’d decided we needed to drive down to Cannon Beach, the place I’d fled to after my father’s suicide. At the time, it was a funky little artist colony on the coast, dead in the winter, and catering to the tourists in the summer. It was a place where half the waitresses and bartenders were either working on a novel or painting in their spare time. When they weren’t drinking, that is.

We cruised down the coast in the large truck, and I noticed all the changes. There’s a huge outlet mall in Seaside, and the patches of wild are smaller all around. When we turned the big curve coming into Cannon Beach, I choked up. Haystack Rock is a commanding presence in the town, sitting out past the tide line, as tall as that nuclear haystack I’d seen yesterday, and millions time more majestic. It will be here way after the houses here are gone, and my, are there way more houses! The sight of that rock helped me keep perspective on all the changes. In Cannon Beach, every change is so darn tasteful! Gone are all the funky buildings on Hemlock, replaced by all wood shingled buildings designed to weather gracefully. The funkiness of the town has completely disappeared, replaced by artful wealth and tasteful design. I was so glad to be with LeeAnn, and we reminisced about her and Max, and what life was like here before.

Driving back to Astoria, we stopped in to surprise Michael McCusker, at the bookstore café he’s working at. I thought he would never recognize me, hell, it’s been over twenty-five years since we’ve seen each other. But he knew me right off and even made a comment about seeing the young woman in me that use to sunbathe naked at Hug Point. Is she still there? It’s a surprise to think so, but this trip is stirring up memories and senses that have been dulled for years. Michael gave me copies of his paper, The North Coast Times Eagle, and surprised me with an edition in which he’d reprinted old articles I’d written for him. He also told me that my old lover John is in Majorca with his ex-wife. I threw myself on the rocks of that relationship as I grieved my father and cousin’s deaths. John and I pushed every envelope we could find in hurting each other, sharpening the point where pleasure and pain meet in every way we knew how. Way too old for me, John and I made Last Tango in Paris look like a cake walk in Duluth. I’m glad to know he’s alive, and that he’s repaired things with his ex-wife. Some soul retrieval is happening here, some taking back of parts that I thought I had left behind. It’s not real comfortable, or easy, there’s some loss I’m feeling that goes beyond the changes to the town, and the changes to LeeAnn and Jody’s lives. So paradoxical, this feeling of both retrieving and recognizing loss at the same time.

Driving back along the river to Portland with LeeAnn, she told me various stories of her grand love affair with Max. She had that rare and peculiar thing that so many love songs and romances hold out as the ideal. She had the great one love. They struggled mightily, breaking up and then getting back together; she was married to him three times. We both know how precious this life and death of Max’s was. So precious and special that in the end, it was death that parted them, and up until that moment, they were together. I heard LeeAnn say many times this weekend how well Max faced death, how great he was at both living and dying. As she tells me stories of their life, I can see the young girl in her, as well

Minutes from now, I’ll be going back to San Francisco. I’m taking back a lot from this trip, none of it in bags or packages. My heart is full, my mind is working overtime. I think I’ll be crying a lot in the next few days.