Laughing & Crying

Oh, those surprises that overtake one when least expected. 
Reminiscing (and more) with a childhood friend from The Block, from way back, going here and there, back and forth, up The Block and down...so many ways to access memory and truth and those places in between...we came across a time when a mother of a family died. This was in the 1960s: the 5th Ave. Gang was in its heyday. We were many and ran about up and down the block,; through the Presidio and back; to Clement St. for candy or for toys at King Norman's. One foggy summer (maybe 1968? 1969? 1967?) the mother of three boys died. Suddenly, to us smallish children. Tonight I was told a memory of one child on The Block that I had never known with regard to this event that made impressions on all us children then. 
This child happened to be in our house that day. I don't recall where I was. Perhaps I was in the house and wasn't privy to this specific interaction. She was told of the news of our friends' mother's death, and she laughed. She instantly felt that laughter was probably wrong (understandably), but this is a person, then a child, who is and was then a thoughtful, sensitive, caring person. She didn't know on any level why she laughed, but as a child it was her reaction. My mother (aka in this blog Aged Parent, who was obviously not then Aged) reassured her that laughter and crying are both on the spectrum (perhaps not in those words) and that both are loving responses and nothing to be ashamed of. This child has remembered this as a caring and supportive response to a frightening time in all our lives here on The Block — what a special memory.
I could never have known than Aged Parent was capable of such a detailed panoramic knowledge of a child's experience of an almost unknowable part of life and indeed how to respond to it in the moment. 
May we all know that laughing and crying are in our lives for such important reasons.

Cluster Tomatoes

There is tragedy and there is sadness. Aged Parent's death falls in the sadness category: she lived a long life, died at home with music and flowers and a minimum of pain — not a Greek tragedy. It is interesting how the sadness manifests. The disappearance of a human being throws into relief the little prosaic things that make up us all. Yes, there is also residue of the larger aspects of existence, of course, but for me the details are the foundation. 
So the things I encounter in my walks through the house are either no longer here because she no longer is, such as:

• the San Francisco Chronicle -- was she one of the last 27 people in the city who actually had home delivery of the newspaper?
• the thumping noise of her cane -- a slow thump/shuffle, thump/shuffle
• the top volume of Oprah, The View, Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune (actually, not a lot of sadness around the absence of those...)
• squirreled-away bags of mini Hershey chocolates
• cluster tomatoes

Or there are the things that still are here and are equally sad-making, such as:

• endless stashes of plastic bags, paper bags, pieces of aluminum foil

• silly cat cartoons stuck with magnets on the ancient beached whale of a refrigerator
• quite old faded drawings by a grandchild she quarreled with quite a lot
• books she loved a long time ago and which I loved too
• baked beans

She also loved fabric, good fabric with color and texture, so I've kept about six pair of her best wool trousers out of the donation boxes. I will make some pillows with those beautiful plaids and herringbones. She'd like that. She did teach me a lot about fabric and yarn. It's nice to have something aesthetic as one of her legacies.