Sirenita

In the mornings, before I go to work, I have lately taken a peculiar sort of comfort in drinking a cup of coffee or tea and sitting at the kitchen table, reading the obituaries. Morning sounds in our house: the heater, gasping up big clouds of foul smelling diesel exhaust; the tortoise, stomping around methodically in her box, measuring the perimeter in reptilian footsteps and muttering to herself in chelonian; the cats, alternating between complaining bitterly and ripping at the carpet or buzzing with self-importance while trying to place their rumps on the newspaper (”that’s where my butt GOES! Right there where you’re looking!” and as often as not, since they’re placing their ass right on a photo of the president, I end up agreeing that IS where it should go.)

Anyway obituaries - I guess after years of avoiding looking at them when I lived in San Francisco during the AIDS plague, while one after another bright young man wasted to death, day after day, there’s something sort of comforting about looking at the obits in Portland. The people who die here are named things like Florence and Clem, and they’re 78, 80, 94- they had whole lives before they died. Often they had whole long BORING lives, filled with pot roasts and church socials, but even that seems comforting. And every once in a while, there’s a strange obituary, or one for a child, or one for somebody my age, and I think about them a couple of times that day.

Yesterday there was a man my age who had never learned to drive, not once in his 35 years. He was hit by a bus while he was crossing the street. I wondered if he’d never learned to drive out of some sort of premonition that he’d die in a car accident. If that was true, I wondered if the irony of dying in somebody ELSE’s carwreck while he was a pedestrian had hit him, right along with the number 77 bus that day.

Last week it was an elderly couple, married for over 50 years. She died, and the man said something like “this is an unforeseen complication” to his family. Then he went into his room, put his best suit on, shook hands with the family and said “I’ll be going now” and died, six hours after his wife.

Last year there was a clown, complete with grainy picture of him in sad-face clown makeup and an obit about how the happiest times of his life had been when he hosted a local kiddie cartoon show. He’d had his tv show for three years in the early 70s, and there wasn’t any mention of what he’d been doing since then. I thought, “good for Chuckles that he got to do what he liked the most for at least a little bit.” and then I thought less charitably, “Dude. You’re wearing clown makeup in your OBITUARY PICTURE.”

Today’s best obituary was for “Pistol” Pete, pictured wearing shades and a bandana. He was from the Chumash reservation down in California, and the services haven’t been held yet. It says in the obit where and what time to come, and it says “NO ALCOHOL” so that’s kind of too bad because I bet Pistol Pete would have liked a nice tequila sendoff. It had a quote from the deceased, too. He must have written it down ahead of time. “I came, I talked a lot of shit, I left - Pistol Pete” Rest in peace, Pistol Pete, and here’s to you.