RIP Cindy Williams (photos)

I’ve been wondering how I could possibly have known Cindy Williams, as I'm no fan of American sitcom TV, having avoided it like the plague most of my life. I never watched Laverne and Shirley. I'm no groupie either, as I was a theatre brat—some of my babysitters were the funny men, not to mention Sea Hunt. I've only been starstruck twice, when I met Col. Chris Hadfield, and Eric Idle. Not at the same time! Well, maybe Brian Cox too. Robin Williams doesn’t count because I went to college with him. Then I remembered where I’d met Cindy who starred in Menopause, the Musical, at Harrah's, Las Vegas, April 2017. A promoter gave us free tickets at the Las Vegas Highland Games. I’m no fan of musicals either, but I LOVED it. I think it was her closing performance. After the show Cindy and cast waded into the audience and dragged my friend Chris (center) and me (left) onstage for a rousing can-can finale. I love the way all three of us are making beseeching little church mice paws after the leg-leg-dance. And for the record, I'm wearing an elegant baggy flannel PJs top—after a long grueling weekend as a volunteer booth wench in the desert, you wear whatever’s left in the bottom of your suitcase that isn't stiff with alkali dust. It took me a while to place Cindy, but I never forget a face. She was so talented. And she was an absolute gas. The musical was about the empowerment of women. And Cindy was a powerful force. She had a fire burning within. May she RIP. Happy Saint Bridget’s Day.

RIP Naomi Judd

Note bene: I never know where my next writing idea will come from, where it will go, or what spawns an idea, usually it’s because of a Facebook post that serves as a trigger, I write a comment which leads to another comment, and so on. I never expected to be floored by the death of Naomi Judd, someone I didn’t even know. But there you have it. It seems Facebook style Wakes are becoming a thing. This is a developing piece based on a lot of hear-say (stet) as I only knew her on on the periphery. Call it 1° of separation if you must. So bear with me as I uncover a West Marin story.

A new Facebook friend, activist Sandra Birnhak, who grew up with Diane/Naomi in Kentucky, said she went by the name Naomi back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, so maybe she changed her name back to her given name, Diane when she was in LA, with her then husband, Michael Ciminella, before moving to Lagunitas. She was only 17 or 18  when she had her first daughter, Christine, in 1964. 

Sounds like Hollywood wasn’t kind to her—in her autobiography, River of Time, she mentions about being molested by an uncle, she abandoned by her husband, then, at 22, she was raped by an ex-con heroin addict. I don’t know how she wound up in the San Geronimo Valley, but it was a haven of single mothers. Since I only knew of her peripherally, I’m still piecing together the stories… 

Backstory: The Judds once lived in Speck McAuliff’s apartments above the post office in Lagunitas (where I once lived as a young child before my parents split up). Then they moved up the road to north a cottage on Tamal Road next to the House of Richard (a hippie store), and they also lived on Resaca Avenue as well.  

RIP Vito Orlando

 I have not taken the time to properly mourn the death of an old friend. One of the fallouts when you break up with someone, is that you lose a whole circle of friends. Vito was part of my support system for nearly 22 years. And then, because I felt I couldn’t revisit my friends for fear that Neil would find me, I hid out, laying low since that cataclysmic blowup that left me unhomed in September of 2018. Then the pandemic. Diana died soon after, we were unable to mourn. Shiva died durimg the pandemic. We were unable to mourn. Then Vito, I was unable to mourn. When I left Neil, I left everything behind. My known world, my friends. A death of sorts to a significant part of my life. Vito was one of those casualties of failed relationships. But every time I drive down 580 towards the Richmond Bridge, I have imaginary conversations with Vito. The one-way conversation begins at the Center Street offramp where Costco is, and ends at the Richmond toll booth. Mostly I wish him love. Life is like that, I told him. I was not invited to the memorial service. This photo was stolen from my ex’s wall.

RIP, Buddy the Cat (Florida Journals) (photos)

The wind was blowing the whirligig, but Buddy couldn’t hear it.

RIP, Buddy the Cat, who at age 19, was nearly old enough to visit the local bar, that’s something like 133 in cat years. I tried to warn my friends that his time had probably come, as he was pissing on the hall floor. I was always stepping in it barefoot. No odor, renal failure, I knew the drill too well. My favorite cats, Cheetos and Jack, both orange bhoys, died of kidney failure. Poor little guy slept on the couch the last few days. No more midnight yowling. And of course, no one wants to hear that their pet is dying. At least he didn’t die on my watch. 

Whenever I was on the couch, Buddy the Cat liked to parallel park along my calf, snoozing hard, it’s a tough life being a cat. Whenever I went outside, he hovered nearby, like a constant shadow. He was deaf as a stump but responded to percussive sounds.

But he also kept me sane under impossible circumstances. He was my constant flame, my fan club, and my tormentor. He had a hellacious medianoche howl. He was able to reach a much louder velocity than what I was able to record on my iPad. He would throw his head back like a little wolf, and he kept me awake most nights with his yowling. So much so, that I needed to visit the bar. Drive me to drink, he did. He always shut up and made baby squeaks whenever he saw me coming, he knew he wasn’t supposed to howl. And he went running off whenever he saw me, he knew the score. So I had to sneak my iPad around corners in order to catch him in action. 

I only knew Buddy for three weeks, while catsitting. Not too sure how long that is in cat years. First, there was the cool cat whothehellareyou and whathaveyoudone with my master beloved, I’ll keep my distance and be terribly aloof—week. Then there was the OMG you are my entire universe wherehaveyoubeen allmylife week. And then the lovefest commenced. But I could see how he was beginning to falter, and I knew him well enough to recognize the signs of renal failure. I tried to tell my hosts when they returned, to say their goodbyes, but it was news no one wants to hear. 

A stone-deaf pale flame Siamese colored Persian with a lion haircut, he pretty much followed me everywhere once he realized I was not only the catsitter, I was the gravytrain, the head scratcher, the face washer, the ear massager, and master tail-butt itcher all rolled into one. A few nights after my friends returned home from their concert series, the yowling magically stopped. Even they were surprised. Something was up. Buddy’s card. Gonna miss that little guy, but not his particular rendition of the song of his people.

When I moved his bed outside to the back porch, he was a happy camper.

Godspeed, Edwin Drummond

For Edwin Drummond, who reached for the clouds. And got a handhold. May the mountain gods pull him up to safety to the sky and beyond. The only regret Edwin had was not climbing Everest. The gods quashed it. May he find a new toehold in that unscaled escarpment. Alas, my love, godspeed. So honored to say that I knew you when.

May 14, 1945 - April 23, 2019

I was supposed to be the second wife between Grace and Lia, but I said No, and ran the other way. He never quite forgave me. Last time I saw him was after he divorced Lia. We reconnected but the same old ghosts were still hiding in the closets of time. Lately Edwin has been on my mind. Haunting me. Almost an obsession, really. I guess I was sensing the end was near when I began to search for him on the internet in January, but I never found him. It was so ironic that he was so close, yet so far, in Oakland, right down the street from where I used to live. And we never reconnected. Weird that he died a year after John Oliver Simon. I'm losing the significant men in my life. Is there a memorial service?

Edwin Drummond shaving, Forestville, ca. 1980. These negatives were mixed in with the photos of Boschka Layton I had taken for her book jacket.

RIP John Oliver Simon 23 April 1942 - 16 Jan 2018

¡Presente! Mi corazón de los sueños. Buen viaje mi amor viejo. This was the back cover photo of our bilingual chapbook, Falling to Sea Level, Aldebaran Press, 1986. A chronicle of our many journeys to Mexico and beyond. Jorge Luján photo. Safe journey, old friend. 23 April 1942 - 16 Jan 2018.

JOS poet teaching article in T&W

JOS in Argentina 2012

JOS OBIT
John Oliver Simon, one of the Bay Area’s most beloved poets, died in the early hours of Jan. 16th, from cancer, in the home of his fiancée Susie Kepner. He is survived by daughters Kia Simon and Lorelei Bosserman, son-in-law J.D. Moyer, granddaughter Tesla Rose Moyer, and former wives Pam Simon Hazel, Alta, and Jan Courtright Simon. He was 75.
Born in New York City in 1942, he wrote his first poem under a full moon in 1956. Educated at The Putney School, Swarthmore College (Phi Beta Kappa), and the University of California Berkeley, Simon was mentored by John C. Adler, Jeffrey Campbell, Daniel Hoffman, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Carol Lee Sanchez.
While at Cal and after, Simon was active in the Free Speech Movement and in the famous struggle to liberate Berkeley’s People’s Park. Of this time, he wrote “I was a newcomer to the Bay Area, having arrived in Berkeley in September 1964 in time to sit down in the crowd on Sproul Plaza surrounding the police car which was holding Jack Weinberg prisoner in the back seat in the first act of what would become the Free Speech Movement. I came west three months after graduating from Swarthmore College, planning to get my Ph.D. in English at Cal since I had not been accepted to graduate school at Harvard, and because my mother’s forebears had arrived in San Francisco a 110 years before that and California was my terrain of legend.”
Simon’s nine full-length books of poetry included Caminante (praised by Gary Snyder and Juan Felipe Herrera), Roads to Dawn Lake (Oyez Press, 1968), Rattlesnake Grass (Hanging Loose Press, 1978), Lord of the House of Dawn (Bombshelter Press, 1991), and Grandpa’s Syllables (White Violet Press, 2015). His poetry was published in numerous literary journals and reviews, “from Abraxas to Zyzzyva.” He also co-founded and edited the poetry magazine Aldebaran Review, which ran from 1967 to 1978.
In 1989, Simon was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship by the California Arts Council. He also received an NEA Fellowship in Translation for his work with the great Chilean surrealist poet Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011). On Jan. 20, 2015, Simon’s contributions to the Bay Area writing and educational community were recognized by the city of Berkeley with “John Oliver Simon Day.” On May 14, 2016, the Berkeley Poetry Festival presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
As an educator, Simon devoted himself to teaching children to write poetry. He co-founded and taught at the People’s Community School in Berkeley, 1969-1973. He was a former president and board member of California Poets in the Schools (CalPoets) and served as the artistic director of Poetry Inside Out, a program of the Center for the Art of Translation. In 2013, he was named the River of Words Teacher of the Year by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass.
Despite not learning Spanish until the age of 40, Simon became a noted translator specializing in contemporary Latin American poetry. His cultural reporting was featured in Poetry Flash and American Poetry Review. In 2017, he traveled to Madrid to attend a conference of translators of Gonzalo Rojas.
In addition to his daily writing practice, Simon was an avid backpacker, kayaker, gardener, and baseball fan.
John Oliver Simon touched the lives of thousands with his teaching, friendship, and poems. Mexican poet Alberto Blanco wrote, “The poems of John Oliver Simon, like all true poems, trace a map, a psychography, which allows us to enter, not only into another life but into the voyage of that life, and not only into another culture, but into other cultures: into another point of view.”
Simon himself wrote, “Language is the central human invention, the hive which we are ceaselessly elaborating, even as I speak.”
A memorial service will be held at the Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland, on Feb. 3rd, at 2 p.m.

A video of John produced by Érica Goss.

Folklore: Stumbling = Death

"The one who stumbles (in the grave) is the next to go"
and a variant,"they're grabbing after you."

In 2001, my third cousin Mary Kate Walsh and her sister came to visit us in America, from Bantry Bay, Co, Cork, Ireland, and we had a big party at the Sullivan's on Skyline in SSF. As everyone was catching up on who was still alive and who was dead, the talk gravitated toward stories of death and the supernatural.

What was interesting was their avoidance of the words "death" and "grave," it was suggested with pauses in speech. Mary Kate didn't elaborate on the saying, it was "understood," rather than spelled out. When we asked her about it, she meant, stumbling anywhere—as opposed to only on graves.

This sign superstition seems to be a fairly common one as several of my sources used variants of it. The idea being that you invited death in by stumbling on the graves of the dead. What intrigued me, this particular saying didn't even mention the word "grave" at all, so theoretically, the act of stumbling anywhere could be a portent of a death to come. Which made one think about being doubly careful about walking around.

Suddenly the taboo zone of danger exponentially broadened to include everywhere, not just graveyards. So many times when an elderly person falls and breaks a hip, it is the beginning of the end, and many do die within the year. It as if the act of stumbling is akin to dying, and that you're always a step away from the grave.

From the UC Berkeley Kroeber Hall Folklore Files.