when i was 16 my family disintegrated. i hadn’t thought about that. i was a teenager and it was 1968, everything was going to hell and it was Up To Us to Stop The War, don’t you know, so i hadn’t had any time yet to realize the nature of family structures, that they were structures and not impermeable objects. the summer between my sophomore and what would have been my junior year my mother decided california was going to fall into the sea and put our house in Daly City on the market. when i begged and pleaded she said don’t worry, it won’t sell.

it sold in three weeks. by that fall we were in a motel in Sedona, Arizona—long before there *was* a Sedona, Arizona as you would know it; there was nothing there but a grocery store and the motel in the wide space in the road where we’d stopped—watching Richard Nixon get elected. my lifeline was writing hundred-page letters to my friends back home, all of whom were scheduled to fall into the sea at some point. i guess they did, because i have no idea where any of them are now. not much idea where i am, either. not too long after that i hit this road.

last month grace drove me back to that house. we were in a screaming hurry to get me to my plane and her back to her family, and it had been 30 years or so and then i couldn’t find the neighborhood, the neighborhood was somebody else’s neighborhood, and gracie was true to her name putting up with my ineptitude, and then finally she found it herself and we drove up the street i have been walking down in dreams every night of my life for the past several decades. walking down and down the hill and never reaching the bottom. the houses were there, my house looked the same. the people next door were probably still there but they’d be about 100 now and I hadn’t been in touch for a couple of years, so I couldn’t just pop in and say hi, i’m leaving now. so i didn’t. i stood in the street and looked at the houses, we weren’t there ten minutes. time warped, but i don’t know just how, exactly. i was rip van winkle. i was the ancient mariner. i was odysseus and penelope in one, i was home. grace took me home. “you’d do it for me,” she said.

yes. yes, i would.

named jan, one of many jans, but this one was at times my “best” friend at the beginning of college.  i believe she’s in oregon now, the last i heard from m.  she’s written plays for kids and things, i think i found her on amazon.  at any rate, our freshman year she was my best friend, i know.  and she introduced me to beignets!

i didn’t know it until just recently, when i began making them at home myself, but that’s just what they were, beignets!  we were at her house, i don’t remember going there often, but we were at her house, her dad’s house, one afternoon and she said haven’t you ever made donuts? and she opened one of those pop tubes of premade biscuit dough like my mom was so fond of and plopped them in hot oil.  beignets!  she must have put sugar on them.  i thought, how strange, never heard of them before or after.  until now.  i wonder if there was some louisiana connections in her somewhere, in addition to the truncated california kids we all were.  i wouldn’t know. and I haven’t seen her, really, since we moved to LA 30-odd years ago—m would know how odd, i don’t. no, wait, we went to OSFA together, that would have been a couple of years later, when i was fixing to leave LA again.  but not much since then?  at least not since i moved to LA the second time, in ‘76.  we were in theatre together, where neither of us have been for a long time, i guess.

and here jan was making beignets in 1972.  i wonder how i might locate her now?

personally hygienated, smelling like magnolia blossoms.

magnolia blossoms.  when my mother came to new york city to visit me just before i moved down here, so that would be, 1989?  in 1989 in Brooklyn, in November, it was as miserable as you might imagine and my mother occasionally walked around my dreary block with me, bravely despite the absence of unimpeded knees, and would pause by a large pink magnolia on the grey corner.  it didn’t smell!  it’s supposed to smell, she insisted, overpoweringly sweet, but even gargantuan magnolias don’t smell outside the south, i guess, which is why i didn’t know.

now i live here and magnolias don’t seem to smell here, either.  perhaps it’s that magnolias don’t smell in urbanish areas?  at any rate i smell like magnolia blossoms.  hove perfumeurs, my friends (accent ague) 824 Rue Royale, New Orleans Louisiana (nee—accent ague again—723 Rue Toulouse, the location of my favorite house.) hove will have you smelling of your heart’s desire, unless your heart’s olfactory desire happens to be, as mine is, the particular scent that envelops one upon entering hove perfumeurs itself.  they don’t bottle that, it’s everything, the young woman says.

that’s what i want, everything.  they do what they can.

off i go.