Domingo Sunday 7 Marzo March 2010
78 Winter 22 Moon 53 Space.Age

1.

YESTERDAY WAS my stepuncle’s funeral. I have always known, or at least for the past thirty-two years I have known,

that he was a great man.
More or less eleven children, dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and almost all of them were in attendance at the Roman Catholic services in Ocean Beach.

The only thing that made me feel bad was sitting up front right behind the widow, my step-aunt. I should have been way back behind all the children and grandchildren. But I was forced to attend my mother. My mother who is the widow’s sister-in-law, her lifelong friend and even college roomate at Berkeley; my mother who had conspired with the young lady to keep her engagement to the great man a secret from her certainly disapproving parents until she turned 18 and could marry the great man, the great young man who had, on the very California night they met in 1939, convinced her to marry him.

Of course her mother found out. But by then it was too late to do anything but come to the wedding.

Yesterday, since my mother was seated behind the widow, I had to sit there too. Mom insisted I accompany her and help her and protect her against the madness of her hordes of inlaws from all three wings of the family. Or at least that's what she whispered to me under her breath.

But I felt extremely uncomfortable. I did not deserve to be there, not at all, not up front like that. I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was ever meant to be. Some attendant lord, some lesser figure, one that will do to swell a progress, or extend a scene. But not up front like that, no.

Not Thomas Stearns Eliot. No.