The food was good, the wine better, though one really shouldn’t drink wine on a hot night because it provokes a giddiness that gin never does. The lone disturbance through most of our meal was a diner with iPhonitis, a condition for which I demand a cure or jail time. The lone disturbance that is, until, without warning, and luckily for my stomach, at the conclusion of the meal and the bottle of wine, an elderly man outside our window seat collapsed on that unyielding sidewalk.

The short story is, someone started CPR and I saw an Automatic Defibrillator used. The restaurant next door was an approved public access center for AED’s, and the owner and staff are trained. The ambulance came, the victim appeared to partially wake up, though he didn’t look great he was moving, once the ambulance came they were off — the hospital being only minutes away.

The whole experience was enough to make me feel nervously inadequate, so as the evening wore on I started texting people who knew people, who knew people, who knew people, and Sunday afternoon I was in a CPR class. It was the one for health care workers because it was the only one available. It was an all day event from which I emerged with a resusitation facemask kit (this exact one as a matter of fact but for 12 dollars less), and confident that if the life could be saved I’d be able to save it.

As Bone said, summer is waning, and though Autumn does not feel as close here I’ve noticed the shorter daylight. It makes me feel more desperate, like those closer to the autumn of their life must feel. Like the man on the sidewalk might have felt. I’m sure there are better poems and songs about increasingly shorter days and autumns of life, but I think only of this verse from an old show song lyric sung by my grandmother through one summers visit when I was 8. She told me it was about love. I always thought it was about death.

But if I’d ever leave you,
It couldn’t be in autumn.
How I’d leave in autumn I never will know.
I’ve seen how you sparkle
When fall nips the air.
I know you in autumn
And I must be there.

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I forgot who Alex Chilton was, my father reminded me in an email.

The world remembers most fondly Big Star , so I’ll post the well known, but less heralded — not as cool piece, by the Box Tops.

RIP

Peace

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I’m thinking, though not deeply, about death. The grandfather of a good friend died today. Funerals are sad, death not necessarily so. Sometimes death is a relief, or so I hear. I’m not sure how we can know if death really alleviates anything. The dead can’t tell us. The best we can hope for is it all ends with death being the balm of life.

The consequence of this death is that my friend is coming this way for the funeral, and I’ll get to spend some time with him over the next couple days. I love catching up with people on the “real friend” list, discussing girlfriends, boyfriends, life plans, work, school, and family dysfunctions. It’s peculiar that I totally hate discussing this kind of thing with people who are not good friends. The casual acquaintance bores me to tears with stories I find riveting if delivered by someone I have put in the “life friend” category.

Speaking of funerals. I wish everyone would shut up about Michael Jackson. Now we have to look at his hair burning Pepsi commercial, his nasty old father, his countless friends, who prior to this lived in some heavy woodwork, Larry King asking some of the stupidest questions imaginable to people we’ve not heard of before, not to mention the other CNN histrionic pundits extraordinary. Soon people will be posting autopsy pictures. Watching this stuff makes me sicker than eating ten bowls of cherries. We are an indecent people here on Planet Earth.

peace

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