The Engagement Party. or there are Irish in my Lightwell

No seriously there are Irish in my lightwell on lawn chairs broguing. It's true. Seamus is peculiar, according to the lightwell, lawn chair gossips, but it is time for head phones.....

It's a quarter to six, I am still on the bridge, it's still hot. I am feeling six parts spunky to three parts dread, I have got to navigate traffic, park, throw on my game face and my game shoes and get going.

It's six o'clock and I've got my left knee propped on the wheel, I am going to be deliberately late, I am nowhere near my game face, but I have just been freshly therapitized, I am feeling marginally edified.

At precisely sixfifteeno'clock I am fanning my armpits, applying that second layer deoderant, emollient on the skin, essentially trying to liquefy/con myself into a supernatural state of super heroism....

stop, she says, mid mascara application. stop, she said, and promise me you wont go crying in the corner. Besides it's kind of nice to put on your game face , and your game skirt and your game heels and just go.

So at sevenfifteeno'clock I showed up to my ex-husband's engagement party, and there at the front door were our old and beloved past, my old and beloved past. Dear friends I should have been a better friend to, the forsenic particles of my misbegotten youth, the greek chorus of my half remembered nights, those happy bodies, immortalized in substances, who were buoys to me, ports in a storm, when I was only half conscious and mostly storm ravaged, who were a sort salvation --- but enough of that. Enough of that past, here we are now, a motley assembly under the heat lamps in the garden. There they all are, there we all are in various states of parenthood or not... piecing together whatever we can to make the illusory work, and that is the very fucking bottom line and then my brain leaked out my eyeballs a little bit -- because that it what it is, isn't. It's making the illusory bits jibe with one's carefully contructed reality.

So I have decided to take refuge in my imagination, I expect to resurface after a long breath in a kinder sort of sanitorium -- again with the tangential............

So D thank you. Thank you for giving us reason to be together. And D, thank you for thanking me for being there, twice I nearly turned the car around, but mostly thank you for bringing together a group of disparate people and for reminding me, reminding me of that lovely quintet or sextet of people that I don't see enough, so are our machinations, so time passes. It's nice to know that after so much time I don't fear making as ass out of myself in front of these friends.

I have got the promise of tomorrow and it is elsewhere and it is manifold and it is manifest in the people that I think and dream about, the lovely personalities and the vile bodies that constitute all that is tenuous between me and my unwinnable bet witht the moon.

The Irish are still in the lightwell on lawn chairs, they just get louder................