Old Friend

Last night I broiled some tasty lamb chops, after spreading them with olive oil, lemon, chopped garlic and rosemary with cracked black pepper and kosher salt. We had them along with another nice salad and a side of baby peas.

Yesterday's brioche experiment became today's french toast. And it was delightful. The recipe for the brioche was from an Ina Garten book, Barefoot in Paris. Kimberly started the bread saturday afternoon and finished it Sunday morning. When I got back from taking Paige home to Normal (and it was a lousy, terribly rainy day for a highway drive), we sat down and ate several slices each. Outstanding. Kimberly's streak in the kitchen continues.

This morning in my email I heard from an old friend that someone with whom I lived for eight years is coming to the end of her days. Pat Smith and I were friends and lovers in the 1970s, between my marriages to the two Beckys, McGovern and Bradway. We lived together primarily in a house on Scarritt Street in Springfield, where I had the first of several writing groups that met over many years. We also lived together in Chicago in 1974. And later in a house on Washington, and an apartment on South Grand Avenue.

Pat is a really good person. My history with her was checkered, but I always appreciated her very real gifts. She was smart, logical and rational, and she had an elegant sense of the world. I learned many things from her, particularly about grammar and etiquette. We did a lot of entertaining over those years. Most of which was never returned by the bohemians of our circle. We gave many parties and many dinners. That house was a true salon, people felt free to drop in and talk art any time at all. Of course it was the seventies so we did our fair share of drinking, smoking, toking, and generally living like we were on the left banke and not in the middle of central Illinois.

I hope she is brave now, and I know she is. In her chapbook of poems (The Museum is Closed, Sangamon Poets 1979) she speaks to her own passing:

I plan to get there, of course
in fact I plan to get there happy and a genial
genius pain in the neck.
I will grin constantly.
I will be very craft
and probably even eat once a day.
I will go to jail at least twice, an easy one
and a hard one, and I will not drink much
in bars.

And I will die when I am good and ready

...First I must see my face in the mirror.

Probably the thing that truly became the wall between us was my realisation over those years that Pat really didn't like my fiction. She was a good critic and I'm afraid my fiction never rose to a level adequate to her sensibility. That was okay. We were, it turned out, after very different things in our lives. At the time it seemed very important to me for my words to be understood. Now it only seems important to be honest with the memory of those who have shared parts of this existence with me. I believe we will see each other on the othe side, again.

May the Lady end Pat's great divorce, and bring her home again.