I'm just sayin

Phew.

Submitted my film tonight with 2 hours to go on the deadline, having done very little at all today besides try to wrap it and get it in the can. Then I joined a party in my dumb phone game of the year and people were goin' nuts. Just as that was wrapping, the Orioles, on my playback, came back to pass the Phillies, in the game after that amazing comeback against Detroit, right here when they need to not suck for a week so that management won't sell off our favorite players. It was an unlikely hero who tied it (Christian Encarncion-Strand, the player with the longest name in all of baseball, and one of the call-ups after several unfortunate player injuries), and then Gunnar, who's had such a rough year, and obvioulsy (as my pal Lee Ann mentioned months ago) been in a dark place. He almost cried at 3rd base, despite his tough guy thing, having tripled to drive in the go-ahead runs here in the 7th. I don't know yet if they'll win, but what a phew regardless. Please hang on, though, Orio(l)es.

Didn't make much progress on my film yesterday, on accounta the night before I was both wired for insomnia by my knee shots that afternoon AND alerted by an email from facebook that Tessa had posted "We were supposed to grown old together" that Holly---maybe not THE love of my life, cuz that seems like a dumb ttrophy to try to give out, but most certainly one of the big ones---had died. Saw that she had indeed posted one more time, after the months of quiet during which I'd found out about her much-metastasized breast cancer, and went through some wild emotional waves and impulses and lettings go and moves toward the gratitude and love that I'm left with, now that there's truly no point at all in regrets.

In that last post she was pretty much saying the end is here. Said she could no longer walk. Was moving into basic hospice-ness. And linked to a page for her at a site called CaringBridge, which it turned out I already had an account at, from back when my old dear Polly was dying.

There there were pictures beyond the #CancerChic infusion photos and stalwart lesion-filled activist moments to reveal her much-shrunken and bent figure in a wheelchair with short all white hair sticking up and a last several attempts to convey cheer and whimsy and goofy panache. There was also a post on how to get in touch with her, suggesting comments on that page and snail mail, giving an address.

If I'd been checking her socials religiously, I'd have seen that, and I'd almost surely have written her on paper. As 'twas, I'd decided that where it ended after my contacting her cuz a month ago was where she maybe wanted it to end, and where I should. And I had a little mini-peace sitting with that. But finding I'd missed the opportunity to send a letter hasn't taken that peace from me. Now, as my dear Brenda said,

𝔸𝕝𝕝 𝕡𝕒𝕤𝕥 "𝕚𝕗"𝕤 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖 𝕓𝕒𝕔𝕜 & 𝕒𝕝𝕝 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕗𝕦𝕥𝕦𝕣𝕖 "𝕚𝕗"𝕤 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕘𝕠𝕟𝕖

--- and I will maybe never wrap my head around me outliving her, my decade-younger lover to her red hot lover mamma, as she referred to me to the banker in Georgia who'd asked if we openers of that joint account were mother and daughter---

but

somehow I'm free now to be glad of what I had to be glad of with her, and to let it come back to me, unfettered by some obligatory self-care check on delusional relocation from the center of my own hula hoop, as the nuggets of recollection that embody how & why I loved her so very very float up & wash over me.

And just as I wrote that, my Orioes finished the game with the win, 2 comebacks in a row, and there's a chance I won't lose my loves there all cuz of a stupid trade deadline heartbreaking business of baseball inevitability coming in a week.

All the long slog of the regular hours and hours of regular baseball & you get love moments there too.

For years, when I didn't cry, and maybe couldn't, in real life, I would still cry every single time I saw that clip of John Lowenstein in the first game of the '79 ALCS, from before I was even a fan, but which I'd see played a good bit, when I became one, and learned about Orioles Magic. Lowenstein could never get to 3rd base in that clip before the waterworks hit, like I was some bottled-up man who wasn't allowed to show feelings, and I'd wonder what all it was that made that thing the key that turned my lock, but I knew his pinch-hit unlikley hero goofball self getting the walk-off was in there, plus the way they swamped him when he got home. They were all lined up waiting, and then buried him in love.

I'm probably still high as I write to you from the relief of the painkillers and the steroids and the wrapping of the movie and the sleep deprivation, plus the baseball hope, which is (hope) after all the opposite of despair. But dead Holly and the revealed wrap on that soul has to be the big factor in my transportation to a surreal suspension of the weighty gravitas of where I've been in life almost all of these last years.