Ficre adored the long laughter and various “Girl”s that would punctuate my phone conversations with dear sister friends. He always wanted me to have those conversations by his side while he watched television or read. I like to hear you laugh, he’d say. Near him, is what I miss. And the near-voice of intimacy.
What did Lucille Clifton mean when she wrote that she was spoken to by a “voice from the undead past” in the poem “the light that came to lucille clifton”? What did the old folks mean when they said, “Every shut-eye ain’t asleep, every goodbye ain’t gone?” Isn’t friendship all in the doing? If I cannot take a walk with you and talk my way to the other side of the dilemma, I am not enacting friendship. If I cannot tell you every little thing when I am preparing dinner and you have poured me a glass of wine, how are you my friend? “I loved my friend. He went away from me. There’s nothing more to say.”
Days later it feels like progress when I write to Michele for the spaghetti recipe. She replies:
Are we the only ones who crave this? I came home and made it tonight and we blissed out. OK, here’s how to make the sauce for 1lb of pasta:
1. Cut 2 to 3 oz of pancetta into 1/4-inch dice—you should have 1 cup—and put them in a large sauté pan with 3T of olive oil. Turn on the heat and cook gently until the pancetta begins to brown.
2. While that’s happening, slice four onions (red, white or yellow, or a mix) thinly (but not too thinly). When the pancetta has begun to brown, add the onions to the pan, salt and pepper them, and turn them several times in the oil. Put a lid on the pan, turn the heat as low as it’ll go, and cook for 40 minutes or so.
3. While the onions are cooking, bring a big pot of water to a boil, add salt (2T). When your sauce is almost done, add your spaghetti to the water and cook al dente. (Really al dente. You want it to bite back. It’ll cook more in the sauce.) Drain the pasta and add to the sauce with whatever water is clinging to it. Add more pasta-pot water to the pasta and sauce if need be.
4. At the last minute, add 3T finely chopped parsley and 1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese to the pasta and toss. Serve in a heated bowl and pass more cheese at the table.
This is the best dish!! It’ll make you want to throw rocks at other pasta dishes.
xoxoxoxo, M
As I make the pasta I remember Ficre in our kitchen teaching me how to more adeptly use a knife, to preheat a pan, to press garlic cloves so the paper jackets slip off, to simmer tomatoes until they turn sweet and roast beets until they are like candy. The boys and I eat our delicious spaghetti until sated. Our whole bodies are warm. Ficre is in our stomachs.
Five
We loved Jimmy Scott’s version of the David Byrne song, “Heaven”: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” These days I picture heaven populated by the umber angels Ficre painted in abundance, but that seems too fanciful. I never truly believed in heaven and cannot manufacture it. Little Jimmy Scott’s plaintiveness seems right when he sings “nothing e-ver happens.” How better to describe the infinite solitude of the afterlife?
“When this kiss is over it will start again, it will not be any different it will be exactly the same,” he sings. Each kiss is fixed. It is the same long kiss, but it will never change. That is the comfort, and that is the heartbreak.
One night at bedtime, Simon asks if I want to come with him to visit Ficre in heaven.
Yes, I say, and lie down on his bed.
“First you close your eyes,” he says, “and ride the clear glass elevator. Up we go.”
What do you see? I ask.
God is sitting at the gate, he answers.
What does God look like? I ask.
Like God, he says. Now, we go to where Daddy is.
He has two rooms, Simon says, one room with a single bed and his books and another where he paints. The painting room is vast. He can look out any window he wants and paint. That room has four views: our backyard, the dock he painted in Maine, Asmara, and New Mexico.
New Mexico? I ask.
Yes, Simon says, the volcano crater with the magic grass.
Ah yes, I say, the caldera, where we saw the gophers and the jackrabbits and the elk running across and Daddy called it the veldt.
Yes. Do you see it?
And I do. The light is perfect for painting. His bed in heaven is a single bed.
Okay, it’s time to go now, Simon says. So down we go.
You can come with me anytime, he says.
Thank you, my darling.
I don’t think you can find it by yourself yet, he says, but one day you will.
Six
Ficre stops coming to my dreams, so I lie in my bed after I have sent the children off to school and imagine my dreams instead. Half asleep, I picture him walking through the door with luggage as if from war.
Reunion at the front door: an acquaintance’s bipolar son appearing on their doorstep after years in his vortex, shaggy, smelling, dirty.
To Sleep with Anger, the film I watched the night before he died, and the trickster from the South who knocks at the northern migrant’s door.
The Eritrean saying that you can’t walk by your friend’s house without knocking on the door to say hello.