fromthemouthofmoi

  My mother opted for assisted suicide in November of this past year. I wish I could say more, but I really can’t. She’d had enough. There wasn’t much going on with her health other than a recent fall, she just didn’t want to go through another winter, she claimed. Neither her children could keep her here nor her pet dog.  I don’t really know who my mother was. She was a complete mystery. She had demons that only God knew about; personal insight was not her forte. She spoke French, Spanish, English, Latin, knew some Greek, and at one time was learning Mandarin. My father once told me that she spoke German fluently as well but hid that fact because of the war. Her father was from Buch, Germany. She used a lot of German words in my upbringing with a ‘gesundheit’ here and a ‘halt’ there. She was an exquisite painter, an excellent chef, and could look at fashion magazines and whip up clothing from sight alone. She never went to a beauty salon that I know of and instead cut her own...

  In part, Diane’s passing marks the end of an era. The end of a time in history when the work in HIV research was experimental and run by mavericks. Diane was a ‘maverick’ in the truest sense of the word. We all were no matter the discipline we worked in. We were trailblazers. Diane was a complex woman. If you didn’t come to know her she was just a tall British woman who put the fear of God in you. She was pragmatic, demanding, and proudly British, even though she confided in me that she felt much more American than British. Diane liked things just so. An inch either way would be enough for her to voice a strong opinion. Opinionated women can often be alarming, but in Diane I found a heroine. I admired and looked up to Diane. She was no-nonsense. I can remember her calling patients into her office for pelvic examinations with a loudly overheard: Let’s have a look-see, or a get those feet up in the stirrups. I am sure that had she been a man she’d have been reported into oblivion, ...

If You Knew Ellen Bass What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line’s crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die. A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned agai...

Nothing bad or sordid can be said about Mike. He was the most gentle and kindest of men, inspiring my life in a multiple of ways. I loved him and was in love with him because he understood me. He whistled in the morning as he made breakfast for whomever was in his home at the moment. His whistling was clear, strong and always cheerful. I write that I was in love with him but he was also peers and had been friends with my parents, and thus, nothing ever transpired between us. Everyone thought we were intimate including his ex-wife but we never were. I was old-fashioned and Mike understood this quality about me. When his kids wanted to go out club hopping I preferred to stay at home with him watching old classic films. He would laugh at me when we watched films together because invariably I would notice a lamp or something else as trivial in the background of a scene and he would laugh and say: This is the best scene in the film and you focus on the lamp! He knew all of the old movie ...

I have to get this one out. There are so many pieces that I am writing right now and so much going on in the world but this is the one that I wake up to each morning. Last year when my daily morning email arrived from, The NY Daily News, I quickly scanned the headlines and noticed the phrase: Headless Body in Topless Bar. The email only mentioned that the writer who'd coined that phrase had died. And then I heard someone knocking at my door and I failed to open the story or follow up on it at a later time. It was a phrase I was well familiar with and one that made me, as well as others, chuckle. What I did not know last year is that the writer of that phrase was a man I had dated back in the 1990's. Vincent Musetto. Everyone called him Vinnie. The only reason I didn't call him Vinnie is I think I started laughing when he suggested I call him Vinnie. It was such a goombah name and I couldn't say Vinnie without sounding like I was his Italian mother. And he introdu...