I guess the poem I wrote the year I lost Jay is kind of parochial. But here it is anyway.


play me an old song,
recapture the past,
remind me once more
of things that will last,
think of us as we were then,
always together, together again
I hear your voice
your face is my heart,
Play me an old song
we’ll never part

I used to keep a journal and since I started blogging and writing to newspapers and posting on Facebook, these efforts satisfied my urge to write and the journal effort faded.

I have a box full of notebooks in the garage dating back to the 70s. I used to carry a notebook that I considered my friend. No matter where I was, waiting in line, on the subway, in a doctor’s office waiting to be seen, I’d pull out the notebook and write. I had also read that keeping a journal helped hone one’s writing skills and I wanted to be a writer.

Later everything went into the computer. For some reason I looked up my computer entries yesterday and these date from 1993, the year I lost Jay. So I was reading about myself as I was then. I do write about being tired but that, it appears, didn’t stop me from doing prodigious amounts of work and totally organizing the loft protest I and my neighbors entered into against our landlord – phone calls, visits to architects, collecting checks to pay the lawyer. Just reading about it makes me want to take a nap.

I write about the people in my life then, the office politics, the work there, my thoughts on the absence of comfort from friends for my loss because when you grieve, many times it’s too much for others to absorb. Even my sis didn’t have the emotional strength to be there. She did, however, cut short a phone call because her neighbor, who had recently been widowed, needed her. And I was thinking, what am I? Chopped Liver? I forgive/forgave her because she did the best she could with the marbles God gave her and she’s gone now and I miss her.

If I start keeping a journal again, and I think I will, I’ll be sure to enter last names and maybe some peripheral information, because I am wondering, who the hell was Gladys?

So much for journaling.

xx, Teal