Gray Lady
Sunday, Jul. 26, 2015 - 15:42

My friend from Seattle, Mary, crazy Mary, is dying. She has advanced liver cancer and will be dead in days, or weeks. I'm at a loss for words - so let me write something about her.

Mary - I wrote a poem about her, called something like The Gray Lady... "I am a gray lady," it started out. I'm sure I posted it here, when I was posting all those poems in the year 2005. Mary smoked like a chimney. She stopped smoking a year or two after I left Seattle. I was surprised. I think she was just as surprised.

Mary is a patron of the arts, more than anyone else I've ever known. She is a fan of anything artistic. She thought the world of me, she said I was like a female Indiana Jones, she put me up on a pedestal and I couldn't live up to her expectations. She gave me all her copies of The Sun and I know she was expecting to see something by me in there one day.

The cute boy - she admired him at first, too, but when it became apparent that our thing was falling apart she was staunchly on my side and hated him.

She somehow got tickets to the symphony at Benaroya and invited me. She told me this story about how she'd gone to this fancy-schmancy something-or-other, was offered some weed by someone beforehand and decided to partake so as not to be rude, was taken aback by the potency of the weed, then tried to eat the fancy hors d'oeuvres and found her mouth wouldn't work right.

She is tiny tiny and was a long-haul truck driver, which is hilarious to imagine. The other truck drivers showed her how to cook food on the engine. She lived on... the Pine Ridge Reservation, or another nearby reservation, for a few years, then moved back to Seattle and lived in her car for a while. She was constantly just barely scraping by.

She grew up in Seattle, climbed the fence to see Led Zeppelin playing at Green Lake, had this wild and crazy adolescence with the most amazing and unbelievable stories.

We worried about her because she seemed so helpless but I don't know anyone who managed to live a life as interesting as hers.

And now I have to post something on her facebook page to sum all of this up and I don't know how. And you can't sit on something like this. So, I will start out, something like, Oh Mary, I remember you.