On Behalf of Diana and Her Request for Stories that Change

Today I recieved email from a dear old friend...
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Ah, the spring! The signal of new beginnings...and with new beginnings are new endings. It's the end of the school year and the beginning of summer.

What better way to mark beginnings and endings than with coffee and cake in the afternoon? So you're invited!

Where: Diana's Place, 354 Spadina Ave.
When: Saturday, May 21st, from 2 to 7 pm or so
Why: To chat, eat, chat, enjoy, caffinate, enjoy...
Bring: a story about an ending or new beginning! Feel free to bring children, pop/juice, wine/beer, liqueur that goes with coffee/tea, a healthy snack to counter the cake, an unhealthy snake, a small hedgehog, a guest, someone I meant to invite but misspelled their email...whatever you like.

Note: There will be several cake choices including flourless, sugarless and just plain fattening!

Hope you can make it out!

Diana

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Summer…
You sit there on the curb, smelling the smell that you can barely smell after years of soaking in that smell. You sit their smelling the fetid rubbish pouring out of half opened bags of garbage; picked clean of depositable cans by the family on Eagle whose living it is to do YOUR recycling. You sit there, again and again same old, same old, waiting for one of the old and tired, old defeated men to come down those stairs… to throw you what you don’t want but always find yourself getting from the fire escape affixed to the place with exactly no hope.

Running you momentarily realize that you, yes YOU are the idiot. You are your own worst enemy; YOU are the worst thing in your life. Forgotten again in a moment, the next moment, the moment that melts into the next moment when you decide moments later to do it all over again. The day after the day before you made your escape to the beautiful places one spends their summers… the places that finds you at peace, but that, upon your return, finds you right back on the curb moments after the car door slams behind you… summer, the heat and fetid smells of half emptied bags… don’t think about it. At least, don’t think about it right now…

Fall…
There’s always hope when the leaves turn yellow, red then brown… There’s always hope as things seem to die and wilt all around your feet… there’s always hope as you start to notice the smoking laws are making you cold and young overpaid men are hitting the balls that climb the fences that actually mean something to you… there was but little hope last year. Not because history was made with a great big yawn, but because everything, everything you did, even sitting on the curb had become one big empty hollow, desperate yawn.

Found some joy in the pigskin drama’s found more joy at the bottom of a bottle, bottled in Kentucky. Found a few friends, yawning the same yawn and waddled on through the tunnel that links the G to the V. The stenches lingered last fall, the old men appeared, then re-appeared, then re-appeared, then re-appeared again… yawn. Praying for an ice, a freeze over that would lock you indoors, that would knock you cold… maybe even end it all and send you back to… ice and snow.

Winter…
Things get busy when the leaves are all gone. Family calls and plans are made… could never have anticipated the plans being hatched by family that year. Could never have anticipated the offers put on the table… could never have anticipated the opportunity that offer would hold.

Favors for old friends, new roomies, little boys sitting, lounging around on great nights, beer, hamburger helper and Andre the Giant spinning his ever growing tale of success, well OK, making the best out of a bad situation. Arguments and fights I grew less and less interested in, placard, buttons, badges and t-shirts telling of the coming aunslauch, doom and gloom in the city of well meaning but never doing anything dumb people. A distraction for the moments, the results, then… a beautiful dinner in Ohio. Then a birthday, then a fight, then a momentary moment of clarity, insanity, what’s the difference? That, all that, each and every moment of that… over. Thank goodness, perhaps, or perhaps, more happiness found at the bottom of the bottle, bottled and corked in the great coalmining dead disastrous state of Kentucky… Change now or don’t.

Midnight Mass after a few days off, then a few more days off after midnight mass… long walks and a lot of conversations with myself… bridges… walking bridges, bridge after bridge, while I looked for a route that would take me from here to there, from there to here. Conversations with myself that turned into ranting and ravings… ranting and ravings… that turned into memories… memories that turned into stories… stories that mean nothing to anyone but me… stories that meant something to her.

Spring…
There is therapy in memories… tons of therapy if you have years of memories. Clicking little keys as you empty those Kentucky bottles, as you empty your mind of memories of sitting on that damned curb. The cold lingers, the ice you had hoped for stuck in the air a bit longer than anyone but yourself had hoped for… A quick message that takes you by surprise…

Admitting defeat, admitting mistakes, admitting you are an asshole whose own worst enemy is YOU; who hates the you YOU became to the people you love, IS, I believe one of the steps those people I met last winter try to take. I took that step by making my rambling self absorbed sappy therapeutic gigga-jagga accessible to everyone I know, everyone I love… never did figure out if they understood what I was doing… one person though, one person did, and that one person also enjoyed the way I was doing it…A quick message… I was taken by surprise!

So, Diana, a story of change… Cake and coffee… enjoying the strains of spring at the moment they become the next summer. On behalf of my old friends who may gather at Diana’s place this weekend, I submit to you my story of change. There have been nights when the stench was there; there have been days when I have prayed for cold; there have been moments when I question the miraculous things that have happened between sitting on that curb, and now sitting at my own desk in my own place; working on the things I have a say in whether or not I enjoy doing them… A wise old young man said quite recently… “It’s crazy how much self esteem can be generated by the simple act of a women telling the guy that she loves him”…

There have been moments when I have looked at what has become what, and have asked myself, “Can this actually happen?”… The answer comes back in a sigh with a Roman accent, YES it can happen… If it could not happen… then I would be doomed, BUT, it has happened, and I sit at my own desk, submitting to you this story of change, a change I am completely, absolutely confident of, confident of the fact it has indeed, happened.

Confident, completely confident as the you, the YOU who was my worst enemy and the one I hated most, put aside it’s YOU, and met the Italian, the Roman… I am now in love with YOU; completely, absolutely in love with you. Completely confident that YOU will never let me down again…

AND with that my friends, the therapy session is closed… OH, sticky, saccrin, syrupily sappy prose will be the norm… but now I write for the frikin’ fun of it. The break is over… see you again in a few more days.

Enjoy your cakes and coffees… I do miss you folks!