Two Losses

My Uncle Jet died on Sunday. He'd been very ill for a while. He was a tall Texas farmer, who looked just like the man with the pitchfork in the American Gothic painting, although Aunt Pattie looks nothing like the woman. He made whirligig birds whose wooden wings spun in the wind. He always had a chichuachua, a tiny dog he kept with him on his lap as he drove the big tractor out to check on the irrigation equipment. He wore glasses and feed caps, and was charming, dry and funny. Once when I was a kid, our family visited theirs and in all of that hot dust, we got to swim in the huge water tank under the windmill.


My friend Catherine Ryan's memorial service was last Saturday. I knew Catherine, who died suddenly and unexpectedly, from dinners with beloved friends. She was older than me, in her seventies, I think, and very beautiful. She was Irish, and a gorgeous talker, interested and engaged, looking sharply at the world and its losses. She gave our friends J and V little colored glass markers to put on the stems of wine glasses, so everyone could tell whose drink was whose. They clink musically when you picked up a glass, and there's something about that that just sings of Catherine to me, a kind of elegant and eccentric humor. She had an intense reticence, a quiet voice, and no nonsense about her. It was a pleasure to be in her presence, and there was always more to know of her. She wrote poetry, which I have never seen. I want to. I hope I do. Someone read Lake Isle of Innisfree at her service, that grand poem by Yeats that ends, I feel it in the deep heart's core.