I haven’t been crying as much. I think I’m getting over losing you. I don’t think you’d mind.
Today I went for a motorcycle ride, pillion behind my husband. It was a beautiful day, more like San Diego than San Francisco. It’s Super Bowl Sunday but with two hours to go before the game, people were out in force. When we first moved here it took me awhile to understand the microclimates. Our condo sat right in the middle of the city, and every day between 4:30p and 5:30p a bank of fog rolled up the one way street we lived on. Look, I would yell, standing at the window. A *cloud* is on the street! And I’d run out to stand in it, because where we were from when a cloud came down to earth it’s called a tornado and you run and hide from it.
We wended our way from Crissy Field up past the bridge and Baker Beach, where cars lined the road for a full mile, parents walking along holding the hands of toddlers clutching plastic buckets.
Your mom sent me a poem that little V. wrote. Six years old and writing poems, how impressive I said to her. Both kids are brilliant like their dad, she replied. R. friended me on Facebook, she rarely posts except for pictures of the kids. I’m grateful for the access. On your birthday your brother posted pictures of you as a small boy, pictures I’d never seen before, confirming what I knew the moment I saw little V., that his head is shaped just like yours, except capped with dark hair instead of light.
We pulled up at a light and I suddenly remembered that you called me babylove, more often than you called me by my name. Hey baby, you’d greet me when I answered the phone. And just like that I am crying again, though I screw my face up hard trying not to - it worries my husband to feel me sobbing on the bike behind him, that I won’t be able to hold on. He never asks anymore, why I’m crying. I’m grateful to him for his empathy.
Remember when I sent you to Blockbuster to get a movie and you brought home Say Anything. We both loved it and for the next twenty years I had to pick out the movie while you reminded me of this one success. Lloyd Dobbler has lived, ever since, in my heart, and figured into my proposal to my husband, which I think would make you smile if you knew.
I remember you calling me at work, me picking up the line and stating my name and waiting, which is how I answered the phone back then. Hey baby who are the Monty Python guys, you asked. I reeled them off to the unseen guys surrounded your speakerphone. They whooped, and I heard a voice say “Pay up!” Thanks baby! you said, and I could feel your pride that you’d known you could bet on me.
I saw A. at the funeral, of course, and his son T. and daughter B. who both remembered me. We all hugged, laughing and crying. B said, I worshipped you! Every time I saw you I memorized what you were wearing! She even took up running, to be like me. The picture here is one T. took before he headed home from work last night. People teased him, it being Valentine’s Day and all. Get home to the wife, T! they posted. He was a good kid who grew into a good man. I don’t know if he calls his wife baby or babylove but he is the kind of man that takes a picture of the moon to share with his friends.