November 7, 2007

Caroline stopped me in the alley to tell me that Lola has died of a heart attack. “Look at the picture in the Citizen-Times,” she said, “I just took it the other day. The light’s on her head; she looks like an angel.” Lola Gross was thirty seven. In my life she was funny and annoying, often amazingly thoughtful, one of those neighbors at whom you cringe when you see them coming but smile when you think of them later. What was she in her own? She was disabled, put-upon, disappointed and rejected, but managed somehow to keep slugging away. I admired that even when she was a pain in the neck. She tried hard to make a life for herself, and her failures were not always her own. She gave me a glass hummingbird for my Christmas tree one year, and that means that one person, anyway, will be thinking of her at least once a year for a while. No, more than that. I think of her now.

Almost sinful luxury of a day in which there was nothing which had to be done. Painted. Went to the Y after a month’s absence. Napped heroically. Ate tomato soup as I did on days like this when I was a boy.