Poem In Which I Insist This Is A Good Day
I’m listening to my meditation app when Gregg pulls up
and I can’t figure out how to shut it off. This is a good day!
the chirpy voice says and I’m embarrassed,
exposed, as Gregg opens the door of his blue Prius.
This is a good day, or at least it’s starting off that way
because I get to walk by the sea with Gregg. When the app
won’t quit, I turn down my phone’s volume. We gossip
and talk about books, like Freda Love Smith’s I Quit Everything.
Gregg is interviewing her about how she’s given up
whiskey, cannabis gummies, tea, and a crappy job. We gossip
and talk about movies. I have just seen Golda, Helen Mirren
unrecognizable with prosthetic wrinkles and cankles.
I am still self-conscious about the app so I tell Gregg, the atheist,
I was listening because I knew what was coming — in a few hours
I’d be at university meetings about getting rid of tenure,
our union rep valiantly fighting our governor. Gregg understands
as he rages against Florida politics, too. This is a good day!
We take a selfie in front of Margaritaville, Jimmy Buffett
recently dead. Oh flipflops and catchy riffs. Jimmy died at only 76.
Our friend Maureen, only 75, left us just a few weeks earlier.
Gregg and I agree 75 is too young. How did we get this old?
Decades ago, Gregg smoked and I drank vodka tonics
as Emerson undergrads. We danced at Spit and saw Joni Mitchell
at an outdoor concert on The Common. It is a good day!
Now Gregg is a vegetarian and I like yoga. Even so,
we do not trust that the planet will be here much longer,
that democracy will protect us in our dotage. We both miss
Maureen, and I do not always have the words for my heart
that bumps in a loud Edgar Allen Poe arrhythmia.
Is it simply anxiety? Do I have A-Fib like my father did?
Like my mother did? I insist with this un-iambic
sentence — This is a good day! — as Gregg and I reminisce.
We both hosted parties back then, when we were students
in Boston. We had questionable boyfriends and snuck into movies
at the Beacon. Freda Love Smith was a drummer in her youth,
in bands like Blake Babies. Her first memoir was Red Velvet
Underground. My father was a baker, but I don’t remember him
ever making a red velvet cake. I remember my mother’s
love of Harvey Wallbangers and dark chocolate. Gregg’s mother
is still alive and just got her first tattoo. The first drag queen I knew
was named Tattoo and did performance art at the Pyramid
in New York where I headed after Boston. Gregg went
to Chicago back then, where performance poetry was just
getting started at the Green Mill. The textile mills in my hometown
in Rhode Island are mostly dead. My parents are both dead. They wore
heart monitors with sticky tape and both took Coumadin
which thins the blood. I already bruise easily — a blue bloom
on my shin. I have no idea what I bumped into, how it got there.
In fact, I often ask myself, “How did I get here?” Gregg wrote
a book called Gregg Shapiro: 77 based on the album
Talking Heads: 77. Both had that same red cover and Gregg’s book
was a perfect square! He and I both once lived and walked the streets
of Boston and now we are both walking the broadwalk in Hollywood.
We were once seniors in college and now we are seniors
in life, almost ready to embark on Social Security and Medicare.
Dame Helen Mirren — we look it up — is 78. The waves
are gentle, even though it’s September and surely hurricanes
and tropical storms and street flooding are coming soon. Gregg says
he’s going to let mother nature finish what she started, meaning
he’s not going to fight death. Happy healthy happy healthy happy healthy
dead. That’s another mantra from my app. Why suffer? Everyone wants
to die in their sleep, don’t they? We stop at Café Club for breakfast —
two kinds of toast, French for Gregg and avocado for me.
We once brought toast to midnight showings
of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when we were young,
when Susan Sarandon (76 now) was young too. When Frank (Tim Curry)
proposed a toast, we’d throw slices at the screen. I used to sleep late
and eat too much, but now I am a convert, a zealot, trying
to stay healthy. This is a good day. Gregg and I count our steps —
13,000 already! Aerobic exercise raises our heart rates.
A student once wrote aerobic when she meant Arabic.
The Arabic word for heart — qalb, which can also mean an axis or hub.
Arabic coffee might raise my heart rate, in an unhealthy way,
so I should probably drink decaf. But then how would I wake up
in time for this walk with Gregg? This is a good day. I’m still embarrassed
about my reliance on the app and find myself justifying it to Gregg.
Last night I tried a soothing nighttime meditation on YouTube
but, just as I was dozing off, was awoken by a loud “Make Gold
Part of your Portfolio!” ad. I should have been angry
but I knew today would be a good one. So instead I just laughed.