Weather was the last pizza delivery person.
They are all from Brazil, and when I asked Weather what his name was, he said,
―Weather. Like the weather.‖
Weather wanted me to give him English lessons, but then he moved on another job delivering vegetable in the middle of the night, and I lost touch with him He was very young, and small and slim and fair haired. I hope he‘s all right.
Octavio had been delivering to me for about 15 years. When I first knew him he couldn‘t speak a word of English, and he hissed and growled at me when I came to the door in my bathrobe. I moved, and he kept delivering to me, learned some English, like ―No problem,‖ married and had a child. His wife cleaned for me for a while, and her sister.
The young women were tiny and when his wife was pregnant she was larger around than she was tall. I told Octavio that she shouldn‘t work when she was so near due. I made him promise that he would carry the laundry bags down and just let her sit and watch the laundry and then he would come and fold it up. I think he thought I saved the baby. He was so grateful. I gave him a huge teddy bear from the Vermont Country Store before he was born. His eyes popped out with pleasure.
The baby, Guillaume, was born and was fine. Octavio was wriggling all over with pride and happiness.
I knew the father who owned the pizza place, and the three boys, and I remember when the youngest son‘s wife had a baby. The family was Greek. The son was so happy, he showed me pictures of the new born, still partly blue. A big boy.
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I decided to give one of my most recent paintings, a large green monotype on linen canvas, to the pizza place, and the boy I gave it to when he delivered said, ―Oh, wonderful technique.‖ The next week he told me that the brother was arranging the whole shop to show my painting.
Now that we‘re in a depression, I cook for myself. I order from the Evergood, where I and my family have shopped since 1963, when I came to Radcliffe, and my mother and Misletoe moved to Shepard Street. Eleanor and a terribly nice girl, always smiling, carry the food up the two flights of stairs. They admire my painting. The girl, who has stripped hair, says her boyfriend paints in oils too – he doesn‘t like acrylics either. Eleanor said,
―You should have a gallery,‖ and I told he about the woman-owned gallery in the woman‘s house that I had shown at, and how she had had two police dogs and treble locks, and that I didn‘t want that. But I started sending my slides to galleries.
A boy who delivered from the Evergood for me and who help me when I was moving kept saying, ―Ellie! Elllie!‖ She is so wonderful.
It‘s a hand –to- hand struggle to keep alive these days. The toilet is more dependable than it was, but sometimes it won‘t stop filling. Eleanor and the girl deliver every Thursday.
We discuss the economy. Eleanor is probably about 70. She says she has to keep working now. She says, ―This country needs a LOT – MONEY!‖
Every Thursday they take a huge bag of the weeks newspapers down the recycling for me.
After 9/11, two little boys delivered the groceries for me. And all they could talk about was the CIA and surveillance, and bombs. Kids are growing up who never knew what it was like before the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.
The old structures stand, Victorian, Edwardian, Colonial, but what is inside them? Are they hollow? Has the wrecking ball already got to them?
We wait for news.
It comes in scraps and floods, but it comes.
My stepmother and her new boyfriend, in his eighties, watch the early news on PBS
together. I can‘t get it until 11, but I watch it then. My aunt who is in New York has the radio and the TV on all the time. My aunt who lives in Connecticut and whose husband died just after my mother died, and who has two children, says she‘s lived out of the world all these years and she‘ll never catch up.
Where are these people? Are they alive, or are they already dead?
I am doing a book on how to attain peace in the Middle East and in Muslim and part Muslim countries.
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It‘s the whole world now.