STAY (Fanny Howe)

Fanny was the person who told me the book about the neurosurgeon who was brain-dead for some time and then he came back and apparently it was quite a voyage. In my memory it was pink with lots of trees. The idea was that life is not so linked to the body or even the brain but something else. I think of that something else as what Fanny was really about. She’s the one who makes me think I wonder where Fanny is now. I’m not sure I’m ready to past tense Fanny. I wouldn’t have a pension or even decent social security if it wasn’t for Fanny. She told me I should take her job when she left and I did. She told me to get an Irish passport and I have. She said go to this artist colony in Ireland and this monastery in Limerick and I would do every bit of it again except for the San Diego part which we both hated and San Diego is just like Boston which she loved and hated which is how a middle child which Fanny was feels about the original. Fanny herself I think was what follows so it is easy to follow her even to the grave which in her way she makes look good. I think she’s someplace good. How could she not. Here we all are loving her, who always thought dogs and babies were a good idea, which is maybe the only philosophy that sticks. Philosophically she was a wanderer, and wound up Catholic which is like following the past into the future perhaps. When nobody in the world thought I should become a parent, it was a question with a girlfriend, Fanny kind of grinned and said I think you would really like a little baby. Everywhere I turn people are having babies, people I love. What did she like about that. In the Wallace Shawn play I saw on Friday a writer was in bed working on his novel and he fell asleep and continued to work and then he began to die and then he did die and then he died inside his dream. I feel like I’m living in Fanny’s dream right now, and with her permission I won’t let go, extending right now her wonderful baleful sense of humor, especially when she didn’t mean to be funny, and those beautiful blue eyes, wondering how anyone can possibly parent, I mean baby, I mean follow her vision of the world. There’s an ancient Irish poem called a blue eye looks back. But it wasn’t shelter from the storm, those blue eyes were deeply in it.