I worked late into the night tweaking Roscoe’s video but, when I awoke a little after nine, I wasn’t ready to post it. I needed to clear my head. Pina was on a Zoom meeting in the living room, so I left the house, and hiked up through the cemetery and down the other side into town. Fortunately, there was an open table outside Sunflower Café. I tend not to be much of a breakfast person but I was seduced by the idea of a poached pear waffle. They sold me a pitcher of coffee so I wouldn’t have to keep going inside for refills. I also traded two dollar- bills for quarters to buy the Chronicle from a news box. Usually I blow through the Chron in ten minutes, but today I pretended that it was the Times and read every story in it.

Since the pandemic started the newspaper has become a thinned down version of its previous weak self. Many of the stories are Readers Digest versions of wire service reports. The strategy for the front section—a piddling ten pages—has been to enlarge the headlines and the font size of the stories to make up for the paucity of reporting but, like I said, I read them all, anything to take me away from my obsessive work with Roscoe.

A two-paragraph story on the South Carolina State Fair turning into a “drive-through experience” had me wondering why the esteemed editor chose it for inclusion. I read four paragraphs about the National Stadium in Warsaw being turned into a hospital, and nine slim graphs on the French schoolteacher that had been beheaded by an eighteen-year-old Chechen refugee for showing Charlie Hebdo caricatures of Mohammad as part of a discussion of free speech, but the story didn’t mention Charlie Hebdo or that the Chechen did the deed with a knife and fired a BB gun at the police before they killed him.

As I wolfed down my poached pear waffle, I thought about the implications of the beheading story: the clash of cultures—Islamic fundamentalists celebrating the killing against the traditional French concept of freedom. I considered the story’s parallel with right wing extremists and media outlets in our country, excusing the seventeen-year-old kid who murdered two peaceful protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Now, I thought, the backlash against immigrants will intensify in France.

Four cups of coffee in, my mind spun off on a tangent about how the French balanced their virtues and brutality. They cherished liberty while mistreating Jews, North Africans, and immigrants of all stripes.

Then my caffeinated mind shot back to Gabrielle, my perfect French girlfriend who dumped me during my junior year of college for a Senegalese track star. Gabrielle corrected every word I tried to pronounce in her native language. She also shook her head like she believed I was hopeless. Once I remember bringing a small bouquet of flowers to her apartment. They were zinnias in a muted pink that seemed very French to me. Gabrielle said, “Oh, they’re vieux rose, or old pink to you.” The French phrase struck me as the perfect description of not only the color but the character of the flowers. I tried to pronounce vieux as Gabrielle did and she corrected my pronunciation three times. On my fourth try I got it, more or less, and she laughed: “You should see your mouth; you just turned your lips into a duck’s mouth.”

I must have been reliving that infamous moment, trying to pronounce vieux soundlessly, when Sally turned up on the sidewalk and startled me. “What the heck are you doing with your lips, dad?” She burst out laughing. “You trying to make your mouth look like Roscoe’s?”

There are times when the past and the present become perfectly synchronized.

I invited Sally to sit at my table and pushed my chair back to gain some extra distance. I felt bad that I hadn’t called her for more than a week. I got so caught up with Roscoe and just thought I’d let her carry on for herself awhile.

Sally sat and settled her elbows on the table. She looked good like she’d been getting her sleep and eating well. I worried that when she moved into her apartment she’d be drinking and doing drugs all night with her new boyfriend.

“No, really, what were you doing with your lips, dad?”

“Practicing my French.”

“You are so weird, dad.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not to celebrate the assessment.

“So, how’s Pina?”

“She’s good, back to a pretty full schedule at work.”

“I like Pina, but I don’t think she likes me.”

“That’s not true.”

Sally shrugged.

“Are you hungry, honey?”

She tilted her head sideways and smiled at me. “What’s the deal with you old people? You always use food to change the subject. Is that something they taught you in school?”

“Yes, cafeteria studies. It so happens that the poached pear waffles are pretty tasty.”

“I just had my cereal, dad. But I’ll pick up a latte here.”

I offered Sally money for the coffee and she declined, the first time she’s done that in modern memory.

A few moments later when she sat down with her latte she said, “Guess what, I got a job at Whole Foods. I know, working for the devil. Somebody said that if Jeff Bezos gave every one of his employees $100,000 he’d still have as much money as he had before the pandemic started. I don’t know if that’s just Amazon or if it includes all the subsidiaries like Whole Foods and the Washington Post.”

“Do you like the job?” I asked.

“Yeah, they’re good people to work with. I like being in Sonoma, aside from when there was the awful smoke. Sonoma’s like a fairy town; everybody’s so easy going. But that guy you saw me with—bad news. I cut him loose when he told me he voted for Trump and was going to do it again.”

I wanted to grab Sally’s hands, but talked myself out of it.

“Maybe I can finally get over being with bad boys.” Sally’s eyes grew cloudy and her lips quivered. “I never told you, but Alger used to beat on me. I mean, not really bad.”

“Oh, Sal.” I felt a mix of sorrow and rage and could hardly stay seated.

“You know, over the years I got a few black eyes is all, and he broke my arm once. I could usually talk him down. It starts to seem normal; that’s the scary part. He’d take the money you put in my account and sometimes there wasn’t much to eat.”

“Oh, no, honey.”

“He has a habit, that’s the thing and, you know, his dad beat him. He told me I was fat a lot, even though I’m not fat, but that’s what he told me, and I guess I started to believe it.”

I stood up. “I’m so sorry.” I so much wanted to take Sally in my arms, but I reminded myself of Pina and the virus. Damn the virus. “Have you thought about doing some therapy, dear?”

Sally didn’t answer, but her face kind of collapsed into the table and I could see a puddle of tears forming.

I felt overwhelmed with a sense of futility and, of course, said the predictable thing: “Sally, the poached pear waffles are really good.”

“Dad,” she said, a slight smile forming on her crumpled face.

Two hours after getting back home and sitting with my head in my hands, I posted Roscoe’s near perfect video, with the aid of a hashtag generator, which suggested: #vote2020, #votenow, #parrotspeaking, #parrotmagic, and #doitforroscoe. I had done my homework and already set up a Facebook page for Roscoe along with a YouTube channel, as well as Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok accounts.

At the start of the video Roscoe holds his head high as he says: “Greetings, my fellow Americans.” He chirps three times and turns his head to the side, before he deadpans: “They call me Roscoe.” His pause after that line is as deft as a stand-up comic’s. Now he looks directly at the camera and his parrot voice deepens, with an assist from listening to many hours of Alfred Hitchcock tapes: “Much as I would like to vote, they will not allow it.” Roscoe winks his left eye before holding his head high again and coming in for the kill, with four crisp sentences: “But you can vote. Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it for Roscoe.”

Two hours after posting the video on each of the platforms, it went viral. It was Sally who let me know. She called just as I was preparing chicken cacciatore.

“Dad,” she shouted, “Roscoe is everywhere. He’s gone viral and #doitforroscoe is trending.”

I dropped my wooden spoon into the Le Creuset.

“If you have any more videos get them out there quickly. Roscoe could rock the vote!”

I was thinking that that sounded like a bit of hyperbole on Sally’s part, when she said, “You know, I’ve been reading the comments and most people don’t think Roscoe is real; they think he’s an amazing manipulation. Anyway, he’s more valuable that way.”

“You mean a fake talking parrot is worth more than the genuine thing?”

“Come on, dad, you know that. The real thing is a dime a dozen, but quality fake things are rare. Everybody wants to know who’s doing the Roscoe manipulation. You could end up famous, dad.”

“I don’t want end up famous.”

“It may be too late for that.”

Pina and I discussed the Roscoe phenomenon and I told her I’d had enough of it and didn’t want to talk Roscoe or the video until after dinner. Pina wasn’t keen on discussing last night’s final debate—I did manage to get in David Axlerod’s good line about Trump’s debate performance: “Republicans were relieved that he was eating with a knife and fork. But it was still the same meal.’’ And since Sally’s revelations were more than I had the heart to reveal at that moment, we were left with too much time to analyze the cacciatore. Pina thought I could have used more wine in it. I begged to differ. I got her to agree that the Kalamata olives I tossed into the stew came to play.

By the time we tuned in to the video on Twitter, it had 890k views, 109k hearts and Roscoe had gained 92K followers. After the third time through Pina said, “You’ve created an icon, Charlie. Roscoe can become a force for good in the world.”

“I think that’s a little much,” I said. “People don’t even think he’s real.”

“It doesn’t matter. Now that you’ve created the Roscoe brand, you can do whatever you want with it.”

So now Roscoe had become a brand?

“And, you know what,” Pina said, “the video makes me like Roscoe better.”

What’s not to like, I thought. Roscoe is the hardest working parrot in the world.

Later in the evening Pina and I walked into Roscoe’s room. I felt bad about waking him, but I decided to take Sally’s recommendation to strike while the iron is hot. I told Roscoe how popular his video is.

“Naturally,” he said, with a wink.

“You’re a rock star.”

We worked hard on the next video, in which I had the parrot take a more jaunty approach: “Greetings, citizens. Roscoe here. I tend to be a non-partisan parrot, but I’m now compelled to say, ‘Vote Biden!’ Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it for Roscoe.”

In the morning when I post it, I will add a hashtag: #roscoerocksthevote.

 

This afternoon I stood beside the slightly open door of Charlie’s study for a few moments as he worked with Roscoe. I suspected that he left the door ajar for my benefit. He confessed to me some time ago that he had the room sound-proofed to keep me from freaking out about Roscoe’s extraordinary abilities with speech and conversation. So why did he want me to experience Roscoe’s progress now? Or was the open door simply an accident, a curious happenstance? I happen to hold the belief that there are no accidents.

The parrot repeated the same sequence of sentences four or five times with remarkable consistency, pausing deftly between sentences, speaking with a trained broadcaster’s voice, albeit in a parrot’s register: “Greetings, my fellow Americans. They call me Roscoe. Much as I would like to vote, they won’t allow it. But you can vote. Do it for yourself. Do it for your country. Do it for Roscoe.”

The parrot’s diction was astonishing. Any of my clients would be delighted to speak so crisply. Charlie offered a flurry of encouraging words; his excitement sounded genuine. “You are amazing, Roscoe, an absolute superstar! You can take a break now.”

“What’s the matter, Charlie?” the parrot said, “are you getting tired?”

The two of them carried on with some banter like a pair of old friends and I moved away from the door. It was one thing to listen to Roscoe repeat sentences, as if by rote, but to hear a freewheeling conversation between the bird and his trainer was unnerving, to say the least. As I walked away I wondered if I was hallucinating or living in a science fiction reality. Perhaps, I thought, Charlie had actually created a monster.

The phrase: This is not humanly possible floated through my head, but a more apt question concerned the animal feasibility of what I had heard. I still entertained the notion that Charlie was performing a bit of industrial light and magic; that he’d designed a voice box and somehow managed to install it inside the bird and operate it remotely. This seemed the most likely possibility. I’d pretty much ruled out the idea of ventriloquism; I had seen Roscoe, with my own eyes, speak improbable sentence after sentence, and I’d closely watched Charlie’s lips to see if he was throwing his voice, but I could not detect the slightest murmur of his lips.

It was all too much for me so I made myself a double martini at four in the afternoon and put on Van Morrison’s Back on Top. I listened to his song “Philosopher’s Stone” over and over, and sang a two-line lyric with Van each time through:

It’s a hard road, a hard road, daddy-o

When my job is turning lead into gold.

By the time I downed my super martini and contemplated another, I had decided that Charlie was, in fact, an alchemist who had turned a pet store African gray parrot into a human.

After nursing a rare hangover all morning, I zoomed with two clients this afternoon. The first, Carl Sneed, a man in his late fifties, has battled back valiantly from a stroke. I’ve worked with him going on three years now. When he first came to me he still had difficulty with swallowing and we spent the bulk of our time doing exercises that improved his swallowing. For the first visits his wife Betty sat in during the sessions. They had been high school sweethearts, raised three kids together, and still seemed to adore each other. I encouraged clients to bring their spouses when they were comfortable with the idea, because many of the exercises we practice during sessions can be sustained with the aid of a spouse at home. Betty was also helpful in providing information about Carl’s history and interests that he failed to reveal.

At an early session Betty told me that in Carl’s pre-stroke life he was an ardent singer, both in his church choir and in a popular barbershop quartet, which performed regularly at civic functions. “He has a gorgeous baritone but he won’t even try to sing anymore.”

“I   have   tried,” Carl said.

“When have you tried?”

“In       the       shower,” Carl answered. Rather than stuttering, he seemed to occupy a silent fog between words. Three-word replies could fill a moment, in which his lips formed a vacant O between each word.

Betty also let me know that prior to his stroke Carl was a newshound. He read the Chronicle and Times cover to cover every day, and was also a MSNBC addict.

In due time, after Betty stopped coming to the sessions, I got Carl to sing his answers to my questions and he quickly attained another level of fluency. Singing, it turns out, comes from a different part of the brain than speaking. Pretty soon I had Carl sing me a news story during each of our sessions. It’s a practice that has continued as our sessions have resumed via Zoom.

Carl has become quite sophisticated with his lyrical news briefings; he no longer sings a news story verbatim, but synthesizes it and drops it into a well-known melody. Clearly he spends time rehearsing his stories before our sessions. Today Carl sang about this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for a new Supreme Court Justice, to the tune of “Over the Rainbow.”.

According to

Amy Comey Barrett

she has no opinions,

                                  neither does she have

                                  an agenda,

                                  but she confuses

                                  a person’s sexual

                                  orientation

                                   with the idea

                                    of choice.

 

                                    Lindsey Graham,

                                    the chair

                                   of the committee,

                                   referred to the

                                   good old days

                                  of segregation.

                                 He’s the one who said

                                 he would never do

                                 what he is

                                 doing now.

Fitting the words to the tune was a little tortured, but the ditty made me laugh.

My session with Carl was delightful but, following that, I had a disaster of a session with Aubrey, who weeks ago told me I looked fine. I had counted that time as an aberration or a misunderstanding on my part, and in the subsequent weeks Aubrey hadn’t made any untoward references to me personally.

Today’s session began amiably enough; Aubrey seemed to be in good spirits. “Pa-pina,” he said, stumbling over my name, per usual, “things have . . . have been going better for me.”

Aubrey was dressed in a freshly ironed shirt with a tie and, surprisingly, he wore a face mask. It appeared like he had carefully staged his Zoom background, sitting in front of a full bookshelf with a bouquet of sunflowers atop it. I   suggested that Aubrey take off his mask as it would be better for our work.

“No, no,” he said. “Don’t you see, Pa-pina, that’s the whole point. I wear the mask all of the time now. It’s the cover I’ve always . . . I’ve always wanted. I know you want to see my lips, Pa-pina. Everybody wants to see my lips. They think that if they see my lips they can see what’s wrong with me. Now, with the mask, nobody can see my lips, and I’m being . . . I’m being socially responsible at the same time. Sometimes I even think of wearing a mask to bed because . . . because then I might not stutter in my dreams. Is that weird, Pa-pina, wearing a mask to bed?”

“I suppose if it gives you comfort it’s fine.”

“It does give me comfort. That’s ex-exactly what it does, Pa-pina. It gives me comfort.”

“What would you like to talk about today, Aubrey?”

“Hmm,” he responded, his eyes widening.

I can’t say why, but I was beginning to feel odd about this Zoom session; my eye fixed on the button that reads: leave meeting. And yet there was something strangely addictive about Aubrey’s performance, like watching a man self-destruct before your eyes and not doing anything to stop it. Aubrey’s conduct, I decided later, was not self-destruction, but raw aggression aimed at me. The shame I felt afterword involved my passive complicity, which is consistent with the feelings that victims of sexual abuse sometimes describe.

Aubrey kept talking “If you want me to wear the mask to bed, Pa-Pina, I will.”

I should have hit the leave button right then, but I just watched and listened.

“I’d like to have a meeting with you in Sa-mona, Pa-Pina. We can meet at a safe . . . a safe distance. I will wear my mask and you can wear yours.”

“That won’t be possible,” I managed to say.

“We could . . . we could make it pos-possible, Pa-pina.”

That’s when I noticed that Aubrey’s breathing began to change, his eyes closed, and his head appeared to shake. At first I thought that Aubrey might be having a stroke, perhaps because of my earlier meeting with my client Carl Sneed. Later, I cursed myself and asked, how dumb can you be, girl?

Only after Aubrey said, “We can do this together, Pa-pina,” punctuating it with the obscene exclamation, Ahhhhhh, did I realize that Aubrey had been whacking off. It took all that to get me to leave the meeting.

Charlie and I had a quiet dinner—I made a simple omelet and a salad with the last of the little gems. By the time I’d whisked the vinaigrette, I had successfully expelled both Aubrey and Roscoe from my thoughts. At dinner there was no need to tell Charlie that I wasn’t in the mood for conversation. We spoke in short sentences about nothing in particular and smiled at each other across the table. At one point Charlie rested his hand on mine. When I told him that I was going to turn in early, he shooed me out of the kitchen and said he’d do the clearing up.

I took a long, decadent bath; whenever the water began to cool I turned the hot back on. As steam rose around me, with the light scent of lavender from the bath oil, I found myself in the midst of a mindfulness exercise, considering the choices I’d made to arrive at this moment: bathing in the house of a man I came to know less than six months ago, after the pandemic began. With little effort, I peeled away successive layers of my life. It was a dispassionate exercise. I clearly saw myself as middle-aged, as a widow, a married woman, a young professional, a college student, a rebellious teen, and a sweet-souled girl. The surprise, if any at all, was how straight the path had been, how little it deviated from the standard trail. Chance had played its part, no doubt, but my responses to heartbreak and serendipity always kept an eye on due north. Whether I should have lived a more adventurous life seemed a question for another time. Instead of soaking away the years in the tub, I had the odd sense that I’d regained them.

Charlie asked if I minded him coming to bed early with me. I think we both were surprised by the tenderness of my response: “You don’t have to ask, my love.”

Neither of us was in the mood for making love or reading, nor were we ready for sleep, so we lay on our backs and talked for a long hour about nothing and everything.

At one point Charlie asked a question that reminded me of his sharp intuition: “Do you miss your youth?” It was as if he were privy to my thoughts in the lavender bath.

I puzzled over how to answer. The way he said youth made me think of a person who’d gone away forever, but that wasn’t how I regarded that period of my life. “No,” I said, finally, “I feel like I have my young self with me and that it comes along wherever I go.”

“I know what you mean. I suppose we can’t shed our past. I just had a funny thought.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s silly. What if we had to carry all the clothes we ever wore, our lifetime wardrobe, on our back?

“That sounds like a tortoise’s life. How about you, Charlie, do you miss your youth?” I enjoyed pronouncing that odd word.

Charlie rubbed his chin, pensively. In the lamplight he looked handsome, his features accentuated in profile. “I have the feeling that as a child, I was older for my age than I am now, if that makes any sense. If anything, now, I feel younger than my age.”

“You’re very youthful, Charlie.”

“Get out.” His lips bent into a shy smile. “It’s not like I try to forget my childhood. In fact it’s been coming back to me more than ever, little episodes in the life of the only child, scenes that have an iconic glaze.” Charlie paused as if he were recalling something in particular. I turned away so as not to intrude. A moment later he faced me. “Do you think about your parents much, Pina?”

“Yes, yes, I do and, even when I don’t, I have the sense that they are always present—my mother’s solidness, my father’s, oh, I don’t know, his kind awkwardness. I have them with me more now than I did when they were living.”

“And more selectively, I suppose.”

“Yes, I have them, just the way I want them.”

Charlie and I gazed at each other for a long time. I thought it interesting that during all of our talking we had little need to say anything about us. That was understood. Charlie asked if he could turn the light off. I nodded and settled into his arms.

 Vince came to the door of the condo this afternoon. I should say, he assaulted it. He leaned on the doorbell like some angry trick-or-treating kid who figures the residents are blowing him off. 

“Sorry,” he said, apparently about going rabid with the doorbell, “but this is getting rather heavy.”

In his arms he cradled a long rectangular package wrapped in layers of tinfoil. Given his surprise visit, I was in no hurry to relieve his burden. 

When the doorbell began to ring I was working for the first time with Roscoe on the concepts of voting and elections. It wasn’t going well. Whenever possible I try to spell out abstract concepts for Roscoe, but often, as in this case, one abstraction leads to another. We talked about candidates, political parties, even taxes, and a woman’s right to choose. 

Finally, after digesting as much of this as he could, Roscoe asked, “Who should I vote for, Charlie?”

“You can’t vote, Roscoe, you’re not a citizen.” So there was another concept that I had trouble explaining.

Roscoe made a series of angry caws. He does this when he’s exasperated with me, as if to say, if you’re going to be like that with all your words and contradictory theories, I’ll just revert to being a bird. He cawed three times purposely and then spoke very slowly, to underscore my dimness, “So, Charlie, who can be a citizen and who can’t?”

That’s when the doorbell began driving me crazy.

The last time I saw Vince, only a few months ago, he was propped against a wall in the Tenderloin, looking like a man who’d been clobbered in the head, awaiting his next beating. Now he appeared put-together, almost preppy despite pushing seventy, in a blue seersucker suit and fancy beige loafers with tassels. His denim face mask was made to look like a monkey’s mouth and had stitched lettering that spelled out: Regards. I have to admit I found the mask witty.

I’ve known Vince for years, from the time he bought a condo in the complex after his second or third divorce. He was looking for a friend, back then, and I got a kick out of him—an emergency room doctor who talked incessantly about everything from political theory to medical abnormalities. He also offered pedantic teachings on the lives of poets and jazz musicians. 

As an observer by nature, I tend to enjoy Type A narcissistic characters as long as I’m not emotionally involved with them. My tolerance may be selfish in part, because in the company of creatures like Vince I think: I’m sure as heck glad I’m not like him. In any case, I always found it fascinating to notice the disappointment and sadness behind Vince’s pronouncements and bluster, something akin to watching a bittersweet performance in which it’s clear that the clown is actually suffering. I might feel the same about Trump if he hadn’t killed tens of thousands of us, and wrecked our country.

Vince and I played on a trivia team together on Tuesday nights at Murphy’s Irish Pub. Neither of us was particularly sharp with trivia. One night on our way back from the pub, after our team finished last, and Vince again failed in his attempt to pick up a much younger woman, he went on a rant: “You know why we lose, you know why we lose, Charlie, because the fucking questions are designed for Philistines. It’s all moronic pop culture bullshit. The only way to train for this—I mean the idea repulses me—is to sit and watch hours of sit-coms. That’s the only way. Where are the questions about poets and poetry? Why not a token query here and there about America’s only true art form, jazz. And Heidi and Janet, tell me what they know, tell me what they actually know.” 

Vince often disparaged our teammates, primarily, I suspect, because neither Heidi nor Janet was drawn to him. If it weren’t for their combined knowledge of TV shows and celebrities our team would hardly compete. The women routinely teased Vince and me for our lack of knowledge about sports. Janet, a local real estate maven with a Brooklyn brogue, really provoked Vince’s ire the time she said, “What’s the matta wit you guys? Are you even too intellectual for baseball?”

A year or so after Vince got the place up here—he also had a house in the city where he primarily lived—he told me about his new girlfriend Pina, and I invited them over for a steak dinner. I remember being impressed with Pina and surprised that Vince was able to find a woman so intelligent and lovely. The effect she had on Vince was remarkable. It was as if he mellowed overnight. He deferred to her like a wild horse that had been broken, and Pina appeared to have a regal ease in the saddle. After she moved into the San Francisco house with Vince, I saw him rarely.

“So what do you have there?” I asked.

“It’s a fifteen pound Chinook salmon that I brought for you and Pina. I just took it out of the fridge. Caught it yesterday on a charter out near the Farallon Islands. I have too much time on my hands, Charlie, and I keep doing crazy ass things I’ve never done before. It was rugged fucking seas out there. I’m not ashamed to say I upchucked, any first-timer would have. Other than that it was quite an adventure. Pricey though, when you figure in the cost of the charter, the fishing license, and all the damn lures I lost. I was the only one of the six of us to land a salmon. Beginner’s luck, I guess.” 

It all sounded to me like a fish story, the kind normally told by a guy who didn’t catch the fish. “Why don’t you keep the salmon for yourself, Vince?”

“What am I going to do with a fifteen-pound Chinook? Thought you and Pina could poach it, or some damn thing, and have a party with all your friends.”

Vince was taunting me a bit with that since he knows I pretty much keep to myself. “The only people having parties these days are Republicans, and I don’t happen to know any, Vince. So, Pina tells me that you’re intending to spend some time in Sonoma.”

“Yeah, yeah. I checked the air quality index and the forecast was green for a couple of days. Thought I’d come up and have a look-see.”

“I’d tell Pina you were here. She’s in the middle of a Zoom meeting with a client.”

“Zooming it, huh? That’s my girl.”

I wanted to tell the prick that Pina was no longer his girl and to shove his fifteen-pound Chinook up his ass, but I remembered my manners, held out my hands and said, “Thanks for the fish, Vince.”

“What are we supposed to do with the fucking thing?” Pina said, when I told her about Vince’s visit and the salmon. “Why didn’t you tell him to take his damn fish and go to hell?”

“I thought of it, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t want to start a war.”

Pina stood in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips, looking genuinely angry. I’d rarely seen her so angry. I sat on the sofa with my legs outstretched and reminded myself that it wasn’t me she was angry at. 

“It’s not a gift,” she said. “Why would Vince give us a gift? It’s his way of taunting us, like Luca Brasi putting the horse head in Jack Woltz’s bed.”

The comparison seemed a bit much, but I was glad to flash on that scene from “The Godfather.” 

“The fish is probably rotten, too.” Pina said, and then surprised me by shaking her head and laughing. “The fucker brings us a fifteen pound fish. A couple of weeks ago he tries to pawn off his leftover meat. What next?”

“I’m thinking some form of fowl.”

“Or a ninety pound pumpkin.”

“Maybe he’s just trying to make amends,” I suggested.

“That’s as likely as Trump making amends.”

Funny, I thought, that Vince has a way of reminding us both of Trump. “Speaking of which, are we still going to celebrate tonight?”

“Of course.” Pina flashed me a mischievous smile and sidled next to me on the sofa. “I put a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the fridge.”

“Yes, I saw it, it’s next to the Chinook.”

Pina narrowed her eyes on me in a faux glare. “Don’t, Charlie.”

“It so happens that everything in the fridge is now next to the Chinook, it’s so damn big.”

We had decided this morning to celebrate Trump’s COVID diagnosis with a bottle of champagne and a couple of dozen oysters tonight. “After that,” Pina said, “we jump in the sack. You can be my main course tonight, Charlie.”

I had a five o’clock appointment with Bobby Sabbatini at the duck pond, and decided to get there early so I could choose a pair of benches from which we could safely distance. Sabbatini was already there with his wife, Blossom, who’d dyed her hair the color of over-ripe cantaloupe. Usually I’m repelled by these florid hair colors, but on Blossom it somehow looked witty. The couple was seated on one of my favorite benches. Blossom wore a facemask that read: FREE and, to her left, Bobby’s read: VERSE. It was Blossom who spoke first.

“Golly, what a sight for sore eyes you are, Charlie. Look, Bobby, he’s in love. Don’t you see that twinkle he has? I’m right, aren’t I, Charlie?”

I nodded. “You’re right.”

“See.”

I stood in front of their bench and greeted them both. Sabbatini had yet to offer a word, although he wore a wide smile, and an oversized iPad sat on his lap. 

“Bobby’s shy at first.”

“You weren’t shy on the phone last week.”

“It’s the in-person thing that gets him.”

Bobby shrugged.

Blossom, deftly deflecting attention from Sabbatini, asked: “So how’s your daughter doing? I’ve forgotten her name.”

“Sally.”

“Yes, Sally. I remember when she was a little kid and got up on the pulpit and recited a Shel Silverstein poem. That was très cool. So how’s she doing?”

“Fine, fine. She just moved to Sonoma. Has her own apartment. I guess you could say she’s in reinvention mode.”

Sabbatini smiled at that, which one might expect from a guy who transformed himself from a police detective into a poetry priest.

“Shall we find a place where we can sit together safely?” I asked.

“Sure,” Blossom agreed. “How about on the grass?” She rose in a flash and led us to an ample patch of lawn. I watched how nimbly both Sabbatini and Blossom sat on the grass, like a pair of teenagers, while I, a newly minted fifty-nine-year- old, with the stiffness of a centurion, was obliged to deliberately squat and then tumble, as slowly as I could manage, onto my butt. 

Sabbatini laughed soundlessly and, for the first time, typed on his iPad. A few seconds later a rusty, speakerphone version of his voice crackled: “That’s the way I talk, tak  ing lit tle hops as soon as I go mul ti syl lab ic.” 

“Wait till I have to get up.”

Sabbatini went back to typing. The crackly voice said: “Have you got a poem for us, Char lie?” 

“I’m working on a new one from Louise Gluck who, as you know, just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I can give you the last couple of lines from her poem “Nostos”:

As one expects of a lyric poet

We look at the world once, in childhood.

The rest is memory.

Sabbatini smiled and the three of us sat quiet for a moment in the glow of free verse. He tapped out another sentence and pushed the device broadcasting his disembodied voice toward me. “See what you can do with this, Char lie.”

      I glanced at him and Blossom before pulling a small bottle of disinfectant out of my pocket. 

”Good idea,” said Blossom. 

But before taking hold of the iPad and spraying the screen, I said, “Look, Bobby, I could fart around with this thing for awhile and get nowhere. You really need to go back to the developers to get at the source. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

Sabbatini nodded his head, clearly disappointed.

“I have an idea, though. Your voice comes across just fine when you use single syllable words. You should consider speaking only with them. It will be like learning a new poetic discipline. Retrain your brain to converse monosyllabically.”

Sabbatini typed and the device blurted: “That’s ease for you to say.”

“See you’ve got it. Cut off the parts of words that are understood. You’ll come off as a hipster. It’s not, How are you doing? It’s, How do? Hemingway understood the power of the simple sentence. You can do the same for the sole syl. You once were a detective, now you’re a dick.”

Blossom exploded with a horselaugh.

Sabbatini typed. “But I can’t call you by your name, Char lie.”

“Call me Chuck. My ex-wife did.”

“Did you like it when she did?”

“No, but I will when you do.”

Blossom grinned at me. “It’s a great plan, Chuck.”

Sabbatini went moon-eyed as he gazed at his wife and typed: “What should I call you?”

“Oh, Bob, how I love you. Babe, why don’t you call me Um.”

After I struggled to get to my feet, I suggested that Bob and Um come by the condo. I told them I couldn’t invite them in because we were being very vigilant due to Pina’s asthma. Nonetheless, I had something for them.”

Um pronounced Pina’s name with relish.

“That’s Peen to you,” I said.

“Can we meet Peen from a dist?” Um asked.

“She’s in San Fran now,” I lied.

At the condo, I ascended the stairs quickly. “Back in a flash.”

I handed the old dick the tin-wrapped pack. “It’s a King Sam. Pulled from the sea.”

Bob tapped on his pad. “Thanks, Chuck. Um and I will have some peep come by and I’ll grill it.”

 

I tried to get a little work in with Roscoe this morning but he wasn’t up for it. After Sally woke and departed for the day—where she goes I’m not quite clear—I visited with the parrot. He’s been down, the last few days and has gotten in the habit of greeting me with a “Sorry, Charlie,” pronounced in a sad mumble. I’ve told him many times that he had nothing to feel sorry about, but there seems to be no way of convincing him. He’s clearly been traumatized by Pina’s outburst about him a few nights back. The bird not only commands a vast vocabulary and possesses a sound mind, he has genuine feelings. When I explained that our president lacks all of these qualities, Roscoe perked up. He looked at me sideways he said, “But isn’t that, to coin a phrase, like comparing apples and oranges, Charlie?”

“Indeed. You are incomparable, Roscoe.”

“Merci, Charles,” he said in his birdy French accent, “mais, je suis désolé.”

I realized that there was little hope of working with Roscoe today and, as a balm for his angst, I put on a recording of Anne-Sophie Mutter playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, a piece of music I’ve heard the parrot moan along with.

Pina was contrite the morning after her outburst, saying she was so upset about RBG’s death and the Republican response that she wanted to kill somebody. In the last couple of days she’s shared items from the dark news with me as if reversing herself on the intake of news and feeding me tasty crumbs will mollify me. I’ve explained that I’m not upset with her, and that I perfectly understood her response. What I didn’t say was that the best thing she could do, would be to apologize to Roscoe.

Nonetheless she continues with her morning briefings. Today, while I was out on the deck having coffee, she offered me a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and said, “We’ve now passed 200,000 dead of COVID and Trump bragged last night at a rally in Pennsylvania that he’s done a great job with the virus.”

I thanked her for the orange juice.

The briefing continued: “The Republicans have enough senators lined up to ram through a radical right judge for the Supreme Court. It won’t be long before we’re back to coat hanger abortions in the alley.”

When I shook my head in dismay, she changed her tune: “But, there may be remedies. If the Democrats hold the house and win the senate and presidency, they can add Supreme Court judges and make Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico into states with two senators each and untold numbers of electoral votes.”

I was impressed with how much news and opinion she’d ingested.

When Pina realized I wasn’t interested in engaging with her news—we’ve done a complete reversal on the matter—she looked around and asked, “Where’s Sally these days? I hardly ever see her. Has she found a job already?”

Or a boyfriend, I thought, and smiled benignly at the mystery.

In a time of such darkness—and I refer to the period since the pandemic began—it’s odd to have pleasant surprises. My first was back in March when Pina reintroduced herself to me at the duck pond. I’ve counted all that’s happened between us, even our rare disagreements, as a blessing. Then Sally, in a time of difficulty for her, came back home, as it were. We have looked each other in the eye and realized what a delight it is to be together in the same town. And just this morning, surprise of surprises, I got a call out of the blue from the poetry priest of Guerneville, Bobby Sabbatini. Sally had mentioned him the night she arrived. He and I have been out of touch for eight or nine years, since just after he was attacked. From what I understand, he and his wife moved out of the area for some years.

Also, to get a phone call from a man with an artificial voice is beguiling, to say the least. Sabbatini was attacked, if I remember correctly, while reciting a long David Meltzer poem. A crazed evangelist, who believed that Sabbatini’s little poetry chapel was a threat to Christianity, fired an arrow at him with a crossbow. The wonder is that the arrow didn’t kill him, but it severed his vocal chords. The would-be assassin had effectively taken away Sabbatini’s voice, but Posey, as he was affectionately known, would not be silenced for long. He managed to get a voice synthesizer, which, in the manner of Roger Ebert’s artificial voice, was fabricated to sound like him with tapes of his former voice. He typed on his iPad and out came a facsimile of his voice, sounding stiff and jagged without any of the sweetness and cajoling magic of Posey’s actual voice. So when the call came through today, I was about to hang up. The voice pronouncing my name sounded like a robot call gone haywire. It existed without breath or the normal rhythms of speech. Then the device pronounced the name of its client: “This is Bob by Sab ba ti ni.”

All I could do was echo what I just heard, in one fell swoop: “This is Bobby Sabbatini?”

“The  one  and  only. How  are you, Char lie?”

“I can’t believe it’s you.”

“Be lieve  it, Char lie. I didn’t    ex ac tly  rise    from  the dead. Did you think  it was  Laz a rus    call ing?”

I must say I was stunned by the mechanical voice and left in a bit of a stupor. I held the phone a good distance from my ear because the voice was so difficult to listen to.

“Have    you  been    keeping up  with  your    po et ry,    Charlie?”

“Yes,” I muttered.

“Re cite some thing  for  me.”

I began in a halting way to recite “The Second Coming.”

The voice cut me off two lines in. “Not  the Yeats,  you’ve  known  that poem  for a hun dred  years. Give me  some thing new  to  you.”

I felt like I was stuck in a confession booth, a place that I’ve never been.

“Have you for gotten that  po et ry is a  liv ing  re lig ion, Charlie? You  have to  keep en gag ing  with  fresh mat er ial or you be come like one  of  the old re lig ions, a par ody of your self.”

I was beginning to forget about my distaste for the mechanical voice—the spirit of Bobby Sabbatini was coming through. “It’s good to hear from you Posey.”

“Yes, I’m  glad  to  have  found  you, Char lie. For give my hec tor ing and this ter rib le ex cuse  for a  voice.”

“How did you find me? I changed . . . ”

“Did  you for get that I was a de tec tive  for twen ty five years?”

“Right.” My mind drifted to Sabbatini’s wife, a beauty, and their young son. Suddenly their names came back to me. “So how are Blossom and Milosz doing?”

“Blos som . . . what   can I   say? She’s   my   true   north. She   keeps me hap py   and more   or   less   sane, which is   not   as eas y as it used to be. She’s been cook ing up a storm as   us ual and is   writ ing a book of   food   poems. Her work ing tit le: ‘Rut a bag as and Oth er Un pop ul ar Pleas ures.’ As   for Mi losz, he’s a nor mal ten year   old, at   least as nor mal   as a   kid of   mine could   be. He’s in to   base ball   and po et ry. His lat est lit er ar y   ex er cise   is re writ ing   fam ous   poems. He   calls them   trans la tions. Frost’s   poem ‘Fi re and Ice’ has   be come ‘ Spi res and   Mice’ in Mi losz ’s   ver sion.”

“But   let   me cut to   the   chase, Char lie.   Here’s the   thing—a friend re min ded   me that   you   were at   In dust ri al   Light and Ma gic for years   and   that one of   your   spec ial ties was ar ti fic ial   sound. I   wond ered if   I could   get you   to look   at my  voice   syn thes iz er   and   see   if   you   could   tweak it in   some   way so that   the   voice   sounds more nat u ral.”

“I’m afraid that may be out of my league, Posey. I’ve never been particularly clever working on other people’s software.”

“Then  cre ate  your  own, Char lie. I  know what  you’re cap ab le  of. The wor ld  of po et ry  will thank you. I ’d  like  to come ov er  to Son om a  next  week so  we can kick  this a lit tle  fur ther  up the road”

I offered Sabbatini a couple of times and he told me he’d firm it up in a few days. What the hell am I getting myself into?

“You re al ize,” he said, “I’m teth ered  to this so ur   voice box  of mine all the time.” He quickly segued to a Kenneth Patchen poem:

THE IMP AT IENT

EX PLOR ER

IN VENTS

A  BOX  IN WHICH

ALL  JOUR NEYS

MAY BE  KEPT.

As glad as I was to hear from Sabbatini, the conversation wearied me and I took a lengthy nap in the short of the afternoon.

After dinner I took a walk by myself. Pina decided to stay back and do some work on a Zoom meeting she has tomorrow. I headed up through the cemetery at twilight and could hear small animals running through the grounds. I was unable to see them, but I had the distinct feeling that they were watching me, that I was the odd-one-out in their neighborhood, rather than the other way around.

I made my way down the main path through the sloping hillside of graves. The gravestones on either side of me, some more than 150 years old, appeared like crooked teeth, due to gravity and erosion. Pina and I have walked through the cemetery numerous times together. We love it for its natural beauty and for the way time and geological processes have reshaped what was once “set in stone.” We are also fond of the sentiment expressed on some of the gravestones that can still be read. And yet we see the cemetery as an anachronism. Pina once asked me what I’d like done with my remains—that’s an appropriate question, even for new lovers, in the time of COVID—and I answered without hesitation, “Send me to the furnace.” Pina, almost cheerful, agreed, “Yes, I want to be ashes as well.”

I strolled down the hill, past the modern part of the cemetery, mostly reserved for veterans, and then made my way towards town along First Street West. I wasn’t looking for Sally exactly, but I thought I might see her in town.

As I walked past the diners outside of The Girl and the Fig, I recalled a time when my father came looking for me. During my senior year in high school, I became distraught after my girlfriend, Rita Sanders, broke up with me. I’d been slow to dating and Rita was my first real girlfriend. One night at dinner with my parents, after weeks of being uncommunicative, they each suggested that I see a therapist. I stormed off from the table, slamming the front door on my way out of the house. An hour later my father found me running around the outdoor track at Lincoln High, which was a good mile from our home. He pretended he’d just been walking by. As I circled the track the third or fourth time since he arrived, he called to me: “Did I ever tell you about the time your mother left me?” I didn’t want to hear about it.

I decided to circle the square and walked south down First Street, past the El Dorado Hotel and Kitchen—the diners outside looked like determined tourists. I was surprised how loud everybody was, especially the men. Oh, what a little drink and braggadocio will do. I took a wide berth around them, stepping out into the street. At the Sign of the Bear, the superior kitchen shop, I looked at the window display, trying to find a gift I could buy for Pina, and then I noticed my own reflection in the glass and half expected to see Sally passing behind me.

I cut through the park to the east side of the square and strolled up the alley beside the Basque Bakery. Loaves of sourdough were on the cooling rack. The tables were full outside of Murphy’s Irish Pub and across the way at Taste of Himalayas. Everybody seemed like locals here. I waved to a librarian I knew from Murphy’s and she waved back and then bent over and whispered something to the two women she was with. I’d once asked the librarian out for a drink at The Fig. We talked for two hours, but now I can’t remember her name. I never called her again. All of the things that could have been.

Out of the alley, I cut across to the north side of the square, and went past the old barracks, where a young couple was kissing on a bench, past Mary’s Pizza Shack, with people at tables and standing in line for takeout, and then, in front of the Swiss Hotel, I saw Sally at a table, holding hands with a guy wearing a mountain man’s beard. I don’t know if she saw me, but I walked right past. I wasn’t going to bother her on the spot.

Instead, I waited up for her after Pina went to bed. It reminded me of when she was in high school, but this was more serious. I wasn’t sure if she’d return, but I heard her singing to herself as she came up the steps, a little before midnight. I could tell that she’d had too much to drink, and met her at the door with my face mask on—she, of course, wasn’t wearing one.

“Sally, you can’t come in.”

“What do you mean, I can’t come in?” she said, too loud.

The drink seemed to have made her face rounder. “You broke one of our rules.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you out front of the Swiss with the mountain man.”

“Mountain man?” she echoed, like it was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard.

“Maybe you should stay in your car until you’re sober. If you need money for a motel I can give you some. I can’t have you coming in here. Pina is high risk with her asthma.”

Sally mimicked me in a nasal voice: “Pina is high risk with her asthma.” How quickly a thirty-year-old could devolve to a teenager. Sally turned, stumbling down a couple of steps before grabbing hold of the handrail. After a pause, she glowered up at me and flipped me off. I walked into the condo with a knot in my stomach, wondering if and when I’d see Sally again.

 

The smoke and toxic air has finally lifted, courtesy of the west winds. Even my afternoon was clear—I’ve been doing Zooms with my clients in the morning—and Charlie asked if I wanted to take a picnic to Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The Marin County beaches are still closed to parking.

Charlie was enthused in that boyish way he gets. “We can clean out the fridge,” he said, “and pick-up a baguette along the way.”

Five minutes after I agreed to go, Charlie asked how I’d feel if Sally came along. We could all wear masks in the car or she could drive her own car, he suggested.

I did my best to swallow my disappointment and mouthed the word sure before forcing myself to pronounce it again out loud. At least he didn’t ask if he could bring Roscoe along. I pouted discreetly for a moment. Sure, it would have been nice to have a day just with Charlie but, as time has gone by, I’ve gained some empathy for Sally.

All the talk about Trump possessing nary a scintilla of empathy has made me wonder about my quotient of the stuff. It’s never been one of my strong suits. Fucking Charlie has it in spades.

We ended up driving in a single car and Sally’s enthusiasm for the outing made me glad to have her along. Charlie drove past Kelly’s Cove, down the Great Highway to an open beach lot out near the zoo. We found a sweet hollow in the dunes and had our picnic. When Charlie said clean out the fridge, he meant it. In addition to our baguette, we had a good hunk of Sicilian salami, four or five cheeses, a half eaten tub of goose pâté, a jar of creamed herring, and a bunch of Muscat grapes. I’d packed a tablecloth, utensils, small glass tumblers, and a chilled bottle of Grüner Veltliner. The three of us sitting atop a mound above the ocean reminded me of an iconic Cartier-Bresson photo of a French family picnic.

After he’d eaten half the jar of herring, Charlie mused, “I like a group of three. I don’t mean a ménage à trois, but a little family unit like this. Maybe it’s because I was an only child. We were always three. You, too, huh, Pina?”

I nodded.

Sally said, “Not me. I had the single father.”

“Somehow you survived,” Charlie said, and smiled at his daughter. “So here we are, three only children in a group of three. Freud described a couple as a group of two, which was his way of describing the baggage of each person’s parents brought to the twosome.”

I have to admit that I love the way Charlie spins out little factoids about everything. It’s never done in a pretentious way, but more, by the way . . . I’ve determined that Charlie and I have different kinds of brains: his continues to accrue knowledge, while I gradually shed the little I have.

It turned out that we each went off on a walk along the beach alone. Sally came back first with a large handful of intact sand dollars that were the color purple. I’d never seen sand dollars that color, or so many at once. Sally laid them out in a wide circle and she and I made a fuss over their color.

“That’s because they’re still alive,” Charlie said. “Turn them over.”

Sally flipped one and there was, indeed, a complex network of tiny, whispering hairs. The purple fellow was not quite ready to give up the ghost.

“I’m taking them,” Sally said, “dead or alive.”

We drove up Clement Street on the way to the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped at one take out for dim sum and at another, a couple blocks further, for a large coppery-red Peking duck. Charlie and I picked up the duck while Sally strolled up the street, looking a bit astonished to be in an actual city.

Charlie and I stood staring at the hanging duck before we decided to get it. “You know,” he said, “they pump air through the neck between the skin and fat. That’s how they get the crispiness.”

By the time we got home the sand dollars had lost their purple.

Vince has moved back into his house on Liberty Street, defying the recommendations of his recovery program, which wanted him to stay three months in an SLE, a sober living environment, where he would be tested regularly and linked with meetings and other recovery services. So now the man’s on his own, with too much time on his hands. Yesterday when he called he told me he’d grilled a two and a half pound tri tip and didn’t know what to do with all the meat. He said his friend Bernard, who he described as his only remaining mate, would have taken a hunk of the meat, but he’d recently flown off to Hawaii to get away from the fires and the Covid. Finally, Vince asked, “Do you want some meat, Pina?”

It’s not the kind of question you want from your former lover in the middle of a pandemic, but then things got worse. Vince said that he’d be coming up to Sonoma soon and staying for a while in his condo. “If you don’t mind,” he added. It was nasty the way he said that, and I didn’t respond. Of course, he has every right to stay in his own place, but the notion of him lurking around the grounds, where Charlie and I are working at being a couple, upset me.

I want Vince to recede into my past or to somehow expel him, like a meal you eat when you’re famished that turns out to be bad. And yet every time the man calls, I answer. Why do I still let him sink his claws into me?

I’ve been in a bad place since we got the news that Ruth Bader Ginsberg had passed last evening. I couldn’t get the image of Trump and McConnell salivating out of my head. I saw Ted Cruz with his shit-eating grin in the robes of a Supreme Court Justice. Then I thought of RBG, the worlds she opened for women and justice, and now the coming evil. How total can it be?

Charlie was sweet. He knew how to touch me briefly so I felt his warmth, and then leave me room. He offered a double martini; oddly I turned it down. I wanted nothing, not even a glass of wine. It’s not like me. I hunched a long time over the small Chinese desk in our bedroom that’s become by itself my office. It was as if I felt obliged to make a rational response. Write my feelings. But I had no pen or paper and the laptop was closed on the bed. Something of me had hollowed out and I lost the scant sense of hope I’ve had for this country.

Later, Charlie brought out a bowl of sliced apples and some honey for dipping. “Even though neither of us is Jewish, I think we can dip apple for the sweet justice she brought.”

He told me something he’d read on twitter: “There’s a Jewish teaching that if somebody dies, as she did, right as the sun sets and Rosh Hashanah begins, God has held them back because they are most needed.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t find any solace in the idea of God or Jewish legends.” I felt like a jerk as soon as I said that, because Charlie was only trying comfort me.

He squeezed my hand and said, “I agree with you,” and then added, “by the way, I don’t think the Jews have legends; they have interpretations and teachings.”

That correction was so Charlie, I couldn’t help but laugh.

We went to bed together early and he held me close but let me be quiet. When he turned off the bedside lamp and the dark cloistered us, he whispered right into my ear. “I have the feeling that Clarence Thomas is going to drop dead early in the Biden presidency, and if that doesn’t happen, I believe the Democrats are going to find a way to add Supreme Court justices.”

Charlie has a touching way of trying to make things better that can’t be made better.

This afternoon he brought Roscoe out on the deck to feast on the deliciously fresh air. When I came out, the parrot was perched on the top of the rail, bobbing his head in a regular beat as if he were listening to some secret music. I had a quick vision of his flying off, wishful thinking, I suppose.

I watched as the parrot became aware of me. The music in his head stopped and only his eyes moved.

“Hello, Roscoe.”

The parrot glued his eyes on me. “Good afternoon, Pina.”

His words were polished, with crisp diction like a butler in a parrot’s crackly nasal brogue. He sounded a little like Alfred Hitchcock at the start of his old TV show: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen.”

Actually, I’m happy he’s stopped saying, Pina, Pina, Pina, where you beena? every time he sees me.

Charlie, settled in a director’s chair, watched me watching the parrot. Clearly he was taking Roscoe out for a test drive for my benefit, and he seemed the most anxious of the three of us. Here we were again in a group of three. Sally had driven out to the Sonoma coast for the day and I wondered if she was becoming so lonesome for the ocean that she’d just keep on driving back to the Lost Coast.

I mentioned to Charlie that with Roscoe and me he had another group of three.

“Not according to Wallace Stevens,” he said and quoted the poet’s fourth way of looking at a blackbird.

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

“So you think that applies to parrots?” I asked.

Charlie nodded.

Now Roscoe took charge of his own head and nodded meaningfully at me. “Pina,” he said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

I stared at Charlie. It seemed like some kind of ventriloquism was going on. I knew Charlie had been a special effects star for years at Industrial Light and Magic, but this was too much. The words were actually coming out of Roscoe’s mouth, but less surprising than the words were the parrot’s affect. How did the gray bird convey such sympathy?

“My loss?” I asked.

Roscoe began nodding his head again, as if it was some strange way he had of winding himself up. The five words of his answer were recited solemnly with a pregnant pause between each: “Charlie   told   me   RBG   died.”

That’s when I went off on Charlie. “How dare you turn Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death into a farce?”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“Well, you managed to do it. Take your damn pet to the freak show.”

With that Charlie signaled to the parrot and it flew to his outstretched forearm. I glared at Charlie as he took the bird inside and spent the next hour alone on the deck, crying my eyes out.

 

Today would have been my father’s hundredth birthday, and I haven’t been able to get him out of my head. He was a sweet man, always encouraging, but often abstracted by problems from work he couldn’t seem to leave at the office. He spent most of his career as an industrial designer at Merz Tool in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up. My father led the product design team at Merz and generally seemed to enjoy his work, despite its spillage into his home life. But then he hit the wall with a project he’d been working on for the last years. I was in junior high school at the time and my father, approaching sixty, with an eye to early retirement.

He had designed the prototype for an aluminum shipping pallet, utilizing recycled aluminum, with implications for the company and worldwide shipping that were enormous. Five hundred million wooden pallets are manufactured every year and more than 90% of freight relies on them.

His aluminum pallet offered comparable strength and support to the wooden at a fraction of the weight. My father described his Alum Pallet ® as a win-win that would lower shipping costs as well as reduce Co2 emissions, save forests, and be fully recyclable. It was estimated at the time that more than 5% of wooden pallets end up in landfills. I was proud of my dad for being an early conservationist. In some ways, he was ahead of his time.

The lobbies of the lumber and pallet industries, which were particularly strong in the Pacific Northwest, erected the roadblock he encountered year after year. I didn’t understand how an industry could block the production of a product, till it was explained to me that that was the price of doing business. All these years later, aluminum pallets do exist, but the fact that they represent barely a blip on the world market testifies to the ongoing power of those lobbies.

My father had a favorite phrase: “The rich and powerful regard progress as a gilded spittoon, a gaudy receptacle for their spittle.” He liked to invent phrases that had a patina of majesty and sounded iconic. Sometimes they juggled mixed metaphors or dubious logic, but they always amused me. My father was a great reader and admirer of the English language but whenever he had to write an abstract for work it was clotted with complex sentences, parenthetical phrases that branched off like spreading vines. After complaints at work he began having my mother, a high school English teacher go over his pages. He wouldn’t let anybody at Merz, especially the professional writers, mess with his copy. My mother untangled the language, distilling it into lucid sentences, which to his mind lost all of his style.

One winter evening when it was dark at 6:00, I walked into the kitchen during my parents’ cocktail hour. They stood at the Formica counter, their usual spot. One of my father’s reports lay on the counter beside a jar of creamed herring. They each had their own forks and stabbed at the herring filets. My father drank a tumbler of Old Crow on a single rock, just like his father had, and my mother, a good fifteen years younger than him, nursed a whiskey sour. She had it in a stemmed glass that she held like a model, her prized pearl ring, set in a dimpled sheet of sterling silver, shining on her arched finger. My parents didn’t mind me being around during cocktail hour. I had the privilege, as the only child, to assume the role of the third adult at the bar. I cruised the counter and tore off a hunk of Larabaru French bread and grabbed butter from the fridge.

I had the privilege, as the only child,

to assume the role of the third adult at the bar.

“Gilbert,” my mother said, and plucked out another filet, “you’re tying yourself up in knots with this foolish idea that you can bring style to industrial writing.” I watched her drop the herring into her mouth. A drop of sour cream feathered across her upper lip and she blotted it with a napkin. “What this writing need, Gilbert, is clarity. If you want style, write a novel. Then you can compete with James Joyce in obfuscation.”

“But not in style,” my father said, his brown eyes fluttering in a brief shadow of remorse.

I chewed on my bread and, after I swallowed it, winked at my mother, “So on my next birthday I can start drinking whiskey. Right?” It was a joke I’d come up with when I was eight or nine that I kicked along like an old stone into my teens. My parents always played along.

“So what do you suppose you’ll fancy,” my father asked, “scotch or bourbon?”

“Bourbon, of course.”

“That’s my boy.”

The truth is I never took a liking to bourbon or whiskey of any kind. Pina has introduced me to cocktails and I’ll have one with her occasionally to be sociable. One of these nights I’m going to pull out a jar of creamed herring and hand her a fork.

The upshot of my father’s frustration with his job was his notion that he needed a hobby and, curiously, he came to me, his thirteen-year-old son, for advice. As a dedicated nerd, I’d been assembling model cars and airplanes out of kits from the time I was seven or eight, and by junior high, when I had two paper routes to fund the kits, I’d put together a clipper ship and a destroyer, as well as a life-size human torso, dedicated to the body’s musculature and digestive system. It consisted of 444 pieces. In some ways I was a little slow for my age. While my buddies were leering at girlie magazine at the drugstore in Goose Hollow, I was still hanging out at the hobby store.

My father lauded the meticulousness of my work. “Charlie, God, they say, is in the details. Even us nonbelievers can see their virtue.”

By the time my father approached me, I’d begun doing some woodworking; I figured that with a little skill I could build and even design my own cars and not have to follow somebody else’s directions.

So one Saturday he found me seated at the workbench in the basement. He appreciated the VW Bug I’d been carving out of a large block of basswood. I remember he particularly admired my work on the car’s doors, which actually opened and shut without a hitch.

“Charlie, you’ve taught yourself to be a master carver in no time at all. You are a very clever boy.”

I think his praise embarrassed me because I said, “No, no, they say that basswood is the most forgiving wood, and if I had any genuine talent I’d be carving a ’57 T Bird with the portholes, or a finny ’63 Fleetwood. A VW Bug is simple, like carving a cupcake.”

“Not at all,” he protested. “For a boy your age, I’d say you’re demonstrating

preternatural wisdom. Aren’t we living in the age of less–is-more? Point of fact: It was the German architect Mies van der Rohe who coined that phrase back in the forties. After he immigrated to America, he only required three things to be happy: martinis, Dunhill cigars, and expensive clothes. And closer to home, at Lewis and Clark we have William Stafford, who says he has no problem with writer’s block as long as he’s willing to keep his standards low enough. Once you get the basic form down you can add nuance.”

For a boy your age, I’d say you’re

demonstrating preternatural wisdom

My father could dazzle with an endless thread of cultural minutia.

“I have no worries about you, Charlie,” he continued, “you will always find your way. Now give me an idea of a suitable hobby for the likes of me. A man doesn’t want to die sitting in front of his television set.”

I knew my father to be a talented welder and woodworker but he said he wanted something removed from previous experience. I thought about things people did as hobbies. He clearly wasn’t the stamp or coin collector type. I couldn’t see him taking up golf or bowling. Photography might be an option. “How about writing a novel, dad?” I said, like I was onto something.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

“You just need to keep your standards low enough,” I echoed. “Arrive at a basic form and then add nuance.”

After he retired, he took to novel writing. I never got to see anything he wrote at the time. Whenever I asked to see what he’d been writing he’d say, “Oh, no yet, not yet. An old man’s mind can become as tightly wound as a hairball, and I haven’t yet figured out how to effectively lower my standards.”

Sadly, my father died only a couple years after his retirement. In his will he made me his literary executor—talk about a dubious distinction—and left a six hundred-page manuscript, titled “The Miscalculation of Hector Rose, or The Aluminum Tree.” I’m ashamed to say that in the forty years since his death, I haven’t managed to get past page five. I see that as a rather large failure on my part, which I’m unable to explain.

My mother read the book a few years before she died, and said, “Well, yes, your father has style. But let’s keep the book in the family.”

My father died, by the way, just as he hoped not to, sitting in front of the television set, laughing so hard at an episode of “Mork and Mindy” that he fatally choked.

Fortunately, I was able to retire much earlier than he did, but also found myself casting around for the right hobby. I bought a sailboat, which I still keep in Sausalito, but I realized I couldn’t sail every day. I spent a few years building things that didn’t interest me. I think it was because those projects represented finite challenges like elaborate jigsaw puzzles not missing a single piece. I was reminded of my best buddy from Industrial Light and Magic, Herb Pivnick. “For a Jew,” he told me once, “perfection is unthinkable. To create something deemed perfect is to have built an idol.”

“For a Jew,” he told me once,

“perfection is unthinkable.

To create something deemed

perfect is to have built an idol.”

I spent a year or two trying to construct problems that were insoluble, but there was artifice in each of these enterprises that made me feel like I was operating in poor faith.

Finally, I discovered Roscoe, whose limits I will never reach. There is grace even for a nonbeliever, as my father might have said, in a hobby that leads me staggering into the unknown with a bird that can think. If nothing else, I believe my old man would be cheered by the parrot’s intellect, not to speak of his prowess with language. Happy 100th, dad.

 

Last night before dinner there was a knock on the door. Pina and I were not expecting anybody, and unexpected visitors are truly a thing of the past. We were sipping Negronis out on the deck. Smoke from the fires had blown east and the air quality, at least according to our phones was rated as Good. Neither of us wanted to answer the door. The knock came again. I stood up and put on a mask.

“You don’t have to answer it,” Pina said. “It’s probably a Jehovah’s Witness. Nothing stops them.”

But by then I was curious. I pulled the door open and stood back in one motion, a maneuver I’ve perfected over the last months when deliveries have come. And there stood Sally, my beautiful daughter, mask less, and forcing a sad gap-toothed smile. I wanted to hug her but knew better.

And there stood Sally, my beautiful daughter,

mask less, and forcing a sad gap-toothed smile.

I wanted to hug her but knew better.

“What are you doing here?” I said instead.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in, Dad?”

I stood on my spot for a minute. “I can’t. I have my friend, Pina, here. We’re in the midst of a pandemic.”

“Did you forget that I live in the middle of nowhere? I haven’t seen anybody except Alger for ages.”

“Don’t you have a mask? What happened to all the masks I sent you?”

“They aren’t necessary where I live, but they’re beautiful, Dad. We hung them across the living room wall.”

“Well, you’ll need a mask down here.”

Sally, dressed in faded jeans and an embroidered peasant tunic, nodded and then shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She wore the same exasperated expression I remember from her teen years, but it’s been a good ten years since she was a teen. Her backpack hung from her right shoulder and she gave it a boost to keep it from slipping down her arm.

“Stay here,” I said. “Let me explain things to Pina.”

Pina was remarkably magnanimous. “Of course, have her come in. She’s your daughter. I look forward to meeting her. We’ll keep our distance.”

“But, we don’t know where she’s been.”

“Didn’t you say she lives on the Lost Coast?” Pina said, as if this fact carried immunity with it.

I brought Sally a fresh mask in a baggie and a small bottle of hand sanitizer. “Here, put this on and don’t touch anything when you come in.”

Sally sneered at me before putting on the mask, which I made from a fabric                 that featured oversized black polka dots, giving her visage a clownish aspect. As she walked in, Sally stuck her hands in the air as if she were under arrest.

“And don’t be a smartass,” I said, just to insure, I suppose, that she’d be a smartass. I wanted Pina to see my daughter as she is, although she’d become a mystery to me years ago.

After I offered the whole liquor cabinet, Sally asked for a beer. Pina sat bright-eyed in the goldenrod director’s chair with her second Negroni. I stood beside my pygmy Meyer lemon tree, and Sally slouched in the faded forest green chair after pulling a joint from a zippered pocket at the top of her pack.

“So you’re Pina. My dad told me all about you, but I don’t remember a thing he said. I’ve been under a lot of stress.”

So you’re Pina. My dad told me all about you,

but I don’t remember a thing he said.

I craned my neck toward Sally to see if I could make her recoil. “So what’s been going on?”

She dodged my question. “Did you tell me how pretty Pina was?”

“I don’t remember what I told you.”

“See,” Sally said, “it runs in our family. Nobody remembers anything.”

“I don’t remember anything either,” Pina said. “But that may be my drinking. There’s no hope for me, Sally. You mind if I join you?” Pina fished around in the pocket of her white camp shirt and pulled out a doob. “The only creature that remembers anything around here is your father’s damn parrot.”

“Ba dum ching!” Sally sat up straight and, before lighting her joint, softened it between the flat of her hands. Pina lit hers directly. They each took long tokes and exhaled through their nostrils, sorority sisters from the start. I pulled out another director’s chair and decided to enjoy my irrelevance.

“You’re lucky you weren’t around for my dad’s hamster days.” Sally said, sinking back into a deep slouch.

“His hamster days.”

“Yeah, I was a six-year-old kid who wanted a hamster and the next thing I knew my dad founded a colony of them. He built an enormous cage on a platform in our basement and constructed elaborate Ferris wheels, slides, and spinning disks. We called it the hamster circus.”

Pina smiled and passed me her joint. “Your father is an inspired man.”

“I guess so,” Sally allowed, “but weird.”

I relit the joint, which had gone out.

“Nice to see you smoking, Dad. I can tell that Pina’s been a good influence on you.”

Pina laughed so hard that she ended up with the hiccups. I have to say the smoke relaxed me. I hadn’t smoked for years before Pina came on the scene. It used to make me paranoid; now, I assumed, I was too old for paranoia.

Meanwhile Sally looked like she’d gotten comfortable on the deck. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but I decided to let her lay her cards on the table when she wanted. Reckless, no doubt, Pina and I decided to bond with her, when she claimed she’d not been physically in the world with anybody for three weeks, since Alger left on a trip. She’d stopped working for the cannabis company up the road from her place, early in the pandemic. She lived off her garden, all that she’d pickled and canned, and the treasures in her freezer.

“We haven’t been with anybody either,” Pina said. “Just keeping each other company.”

Pina was ready to do the bonding thing before me, but Sally was my daughter. May as well live and die with your own.

“You must be careful,” I admonished. “If you’re going to stay here at all, you can’t be hanging out with other people. “Don’t forget, Sally, we’re old people.”

“I’ve become a recluse after all the years on the Lost Coast. I haven’t hung out with people for a long time.”

“Let’s be safe,” I said. “We wear our masks when we’re not eating or drinking or smoking. And we keep our distance.”

We had dinner out on the deck. Pina made a tasty mushroom and herb omelet and I tossed a salad of little gems. Sally looked truly happy for the first time since she arrived and preceded to air every grievance she had about growing up with me as her father: forcing her to eat her Brussels sprouts and making her clean her room every week if she wanted to get her allowance. “I mean, it was like five dollars a week, so there wasn’t a whole lot of incentive. I felt like I lived in a debtor ‘s prison.”

“Do you think I should have raised your allowance when you didn’t clean your room very often?”

Sally stuck out her tongue at me. But after that, to my surprise, most of her complaints were tepid and taken together they created the portrait of a man who, despite being eccentric, was not without his charms.

Pina seemed to revel in all the stories about me as a dad, especially the ones about my taking Sally every Sunday to Ginsberg’s Galley, a poetry karaoke bar in Guerneville that evolved into a poetry church.

“What was that reverend’s name?” Sally asked.

“Bobby Sabbatini.”

“Right. Before Sabbatini saw the light and fell in love with poetry, he had been a police detective.”

“That’s what we need in these times,” Pina said, “more cops who love poetry.”

“Yeah, but those were weird people out there,” Sally said, rolling her eyes, “absolute river rats.”

I wondered if the good people along the Russian River were any weirder than the people Sally ran into on the Lost Coast.

“Every damn week we had to haul ass out to Guerneville, to listen to people recite poems. I think my dad had the idea he was giving me religion.”

“Every damn week we had to haul ass out to Guerneville,

to listen to people recite poems.”

“Hey, it was right after your mom left and, I admit, I was searching for something.”

“But all the way out to Guerneville,” Sally said.

“You were just pissed that nobody was reciting Shel Silverstein poems.”

Sally held up a finger to indicate that her mouth was full. I gazed at my lovely daughter and forgot for the moment where we were and what we were talking about. Sally doesn’t look much like me but she has a lot of her mother Arrosa’s Basque features: olive skin, deep-set brown eyes, and large lips, which frame a mouth that can open wide enough, it seems, to hold a small melon.

I remembered the first time I saw Arrosa, more than thirty years ago now, at the old Depot Café in Mill Valley. I was a student at College of Marin and she an au pair for a wealthy family in the hills, dressed like an American kid, on her day off. She smiled at me first, but when I smiled back she became coy. I felt proud of my persistence in getting her phone number, with complete instructions on when I could call and when not.

“They didn’t even have any Shel Silverstein poems on the karaoke machine,” Sally blurted. She faced Pina and explained: “It was kind of like an AA meeting—everybody got a few minutes to either recite a poem or read one from the karaoke dealie projected on a screen.”

I wondered if Sally had her own experience with AA meetings or only knew about them from the movies.

“I always thought that the people who recited poems from memory were superior,” she continued, “like deacons of the church.”

“Like your dad?” Pina asked.

“Yeah, he was always wailing some long-ass Yeats poem.”

“I’ll never forget the day you stood up and recited that Shel Silverstein poem. How old were you when you did that?”

“Eleven.”

“I was so proud of you.”

Sally’s expression turned solemn and then she stood from her chair in the corner of the deck, raised her head high and recited:

 

The voice
By Shel Silvertesin

There is a voice inside you
That whispers all day long.
“I feel this is right for me.”
“I know that this is wrong.”
No teacher, preacher, parent, friend
Or wise man can decide
What’s right for you—just listen to the voice
That speaks inside.

 

“Remember? Everybody in the café applauded after you recited that.”

“Yeah, and that’s when I got bashful. I didn’t think people in a church were supposed to clap.”

“It wasn’t a real church, Sally.”

“That’s not what you told me at the time.”

It took until midnight for Sally to tell us why she arrived, unannounced, at our door. There was only the smallest hint of smoke in the air, but it had finally turned cool. Pina and I put on another layer but Sally seemed impervious to the chill. I told her that I could set up a futon for her in the second bedroom. “I can bring Roscoe out to the living room in his cage.”

“Doesn’t he sleep through the night?” Sally asked.

“Yes, but he wakes up early and starts yammering.”

“I wake early, too. I’ll yammer with him.”

I couldn’t keep from laughing. Sally didn’t know what she was in for.

“Thank you guys for your graciousness,” she said. “I mean, for not bugging me about what I’m doing here and just letting me hang out.”

Sally took a moment to relight what was left of her joint.

After offering Pina a light, which she declined, Sally inhaled deeply and, instead of exhaling through her nostrils, used her wide lips to blow outsized smoke rings.

“So, Alger isn’t on a trip; he left me for this bitch Gail who runs the cannabis facility where I used to work and where he still works. I stopped going in April. I didn’t think it was safe. A lot of the crew seemed dubious to me. Nobody was wearing a mask. I didn’t like Alger coming home from work, maybe getting us both sick. Our place is small. I told him to stay somewhere else and that’s what he did. It’s been a long time now. He even took our dog, Skipper.”

I caught her eye. “Sal, I’m so sorry. You never tell me what’s going on with you.”

“I am now.”

That shut me up, and Sally was quiet for a moment. She stood and walked to the edge of the deck, looking out at the row of Osage orange trees, and then turned back.

“So what have you been doing all this time, Sally?”

“Living off the money you put in my account and getting high. Asking myself existential questions that I have no answers for. I knew I had to get out of there but I was paralyzed. I should have called you, dad. I’m not sure what I’m doing here, but I had to go somewhere. ” Sally sniffled once, but she did not cry; the joint still burned between her fingers. “Alger and I had been fighting for a long time. I couldn’t stand the isolation any more. He said I was just a big city girl and that you couldn’t take the city out of the girl. I don’t know about that. I think there is a lot of daylight between the city and the wilderness.

“On the Lost Coast you are so many miles away from everything but the pot farms and the ocean. So, staying all those months, I figured I’d either be cured of loneliness or die of it. But, of course, neither happened. I drove away just as lonely as ever, but definitely alive.”

“I’m glad you came here, Sal.” I wanted to hug her, to hold her close, but I knew better.

Sally snuffed out her joint. I watched her bite her lower lip, but I turned away before she started sobbing. It looked like a flood coming. As a young girl, Sally cried forever and then at around age ten, shortly after her mother left, she shut off the valve and stopped crying altogether. I can’t remember seeing her cry since.

Now her tears became contagious. This wasn’t the kind of contagion I was worried about. I rubbed my eyes and gazed over at Pina, who smiled back at me, sniffling.