red onions

i remember the red onions at my grandmother’s house. she loved red onions, but i don’t mean the vegetables although she did eat them like fruit. lasca--named after a deeply romantic, deeply tragic poem that takes place “in texas, down by the rio grande”--lasca would peel the skin and take a huge bite of the purple red onion just as though it were an apple. and like an apple the clear nectar of the fruit would run down her chin.

but i digress.

those crisp red balls that bit back on the tongue aren’t the red onions i’m talking about.

everybody in my family tends to play with words: lasca became grasca as per a great-grandson, we all adopted my sister’s “who-genken” (he chicken?) for rooster, and reunions will always be red onions to me. 

old fashioned family red onions with aunts and cousins and cousins who were called aunt that i didn’t know from adam (as they would say, frequently quoting and misquoting the bible). they knew me though and it was all very confusing for a young girl who only showed up in the tiny town every couple of years.

the red onions had as many kids running around as it did adults. i’m not sure what my sisters did but i ran wild with the others. mostly with my cousin patti. one red onion we had just arrived in town and i called patti (second cousin--grandfather’s side) at her mother’s house only three doors down (wasn’t that the name of a band in the late 90s maybe?) anyway, we made plans to race to the midway point, the driveway at vangie’s house. vangie was patti’s grandmother and my grandfather’s sister. she was a little off because as a young girl she had given herself an abortion with a knitting needle--some things have changed for the better.

but i digress again.

i was newly arrived in town after a long absence, and long is forever when you’re young, the red onion was on, and i was going to meet my friend, my cousin, patti. a race. for me passing hairy carey’s house (she was crazy mean and scared us kids, but not like jasper scared us. jasper was truly scary. a witch. probably anorexic although that was not a word people knew in those days. hairy carey would just grab us and yell at us to work. snap peas or string beans).

but i keep going off on tangents. i have a little trouble with linear narrative.

so. i was to race past hairy carey’s house to vangie’s driveway from my grandmother’s patch of lawn with the big spreading tree and the rope swing and patti was to leave her driveway and race past her grandmother vangie’s house to her driveway. i got there first. i’m six months older and though later patti grew much taller and faster than i, at that age (maybe 7?) 6 months still gave me an edge. 

but as i reached the finish line--the middle of the driveway--i fell, the sharp rocks of the gravel driveway gashing my knee open. patti arrived a millisecond later and walked me back to lasca’s house. There the assembled adults who peered at my knee with the accumulated wisdom of the ages decided that a butterfly bandage would be much more appropriate than stitches. nobody wanted to leave the red onion and drive 20 miles to the nearest hospital; the hospital where i was born. to this day i have a thick scar on my right knee--smooth, shiny and pink, shaped vaguely like a butterfly wing.

but i loved the red onions where we kids would trash the adults for pinching our cheeks and remarking how we had grown. we would declare brashly that next time we were going to pinch their cheeks and tell them how much they’d aged. the red onions where we lurked in the backyard eating huge purple grapes off the vine, keeping a sharp eye out for jasper who only came to the back door. the red onions where we spoke in low tones, telling our tall jane and butch family stories (tall jane lived in lasca’s north closet, a big dark attic, and butch was the faithful henchman who drove her horse-drawn black carriage to git the bad children.) the red onions where we whispered of sightings of the family pooka hound and who might die next.

so those are the red onions i’m talking about. 

this summer has been a summer of red onions--not with the scraps of my small-town family that still know me even when i don’t know them--but with others, new and old, who have become members of my extended family along the way.

it started with linda. linda and i were classmates (in a class of 13) in a girls boarding school my senior year of high school. i went to 4 high schools in 4 years. traveling all my life in an age before “chat”, before email, when even telephoning was difficult and expensive. my life has left me somewhat isolated from my past. in an earlier post i wrote about remembering margaret, one of the handful of people who knew me as a child. 

linda didn’t know me as a child but she did know me as a teenager, caught between childhood and adulthood.

one late night when i couldn’t sleep i was playing around on the computer, doing facebook searches for names i remembered. i found a page for margaret hall, the girls boarding school where i knew linda. i “liked” the page, but didn’t know anybody there. a few weeks ago though, the margaret hall page had a brief viral moment as most of my class discovered each other and began sharing pictures and memories. the online red onion was under way. then linda’s sister posted that though linda didn’t have facebook she was in town, san francisco, the town i live in. we hooked up, met for fancy cocktails at a tourist restaurant with sidewalk seating on the waterfront, and talked and talked and talked some more. we giggled like the schoolgirls we had been together. we didn’t have long that first day, but we reconnected anyway. then linda came to my open mic at kaleidoscope. she read sonnets in french and english and i remembered how we got drunk and spoke french together (the best french i’ve ever spoken) at the convent just north of new york city on our senior trip. then i quoted puck’s closing speech from a midsummer night’s dream that we had performed our senior year, she as titania, i as puck of course. “if we shadows have offended, think, but this, and all is mended...”

linda’s niece and her boyfriend came too and linda had two red onions going at once. the open mic eventually turned into a salon with poets and human rights lawyers and journalists mulling over the state of the world. finally, it was just linda and bobby and me, talking all night. it was the first of a series of red onions this summer.

the next red onion story involves the australians. if you’re reading this check out the original story about them. and i’ll update another day. that red onion is a whole other story.

the australians

first there were three. kate, cody and jamie bounded up to me on the sidewalk and asked "is this kaleidoscope? can we listen to the poetry?" the kaleidoscope reading series had just ended and everybody was clearing out.  i informed them regretfully that the show was just over and asked if they were from australia. it seemed fairly obvious but they could have been local now. if they weren't i wanted to find out where they'd heard about poetry at my little arts space here in the mission district, san francisco.
they confirmed they were from sydney and added that somebody named sean had steered them my way. thanks sean.
there was something about these three australians i liked. they seemed merry, eager, intelligent, friendly...
i asked them inside and told them if they wanted to hang out while i closed down i'd take them to the rev, my local hangout. they did and i did and we walked down to the cafe where i introduced them to a swirl of names and faces. we hung on the patio a little while drinking beers and smoking then made our way down to the elbo room for afrolicious. my friend diamond had invited us to come hear him drum. drinks and dancing later we parted for the evening. it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
we spent a fair amount of time together for the next ten days or so. kate and jamie photographed and filmed while cody wooed the audience with a sea shanty on diamond dave's show on pirate cat radio (please don't confuse diamond with diamond dave. they are friends though), and at kaleidoscope. i really liked the shoeshine boy song too.
laura and alia, numbers four and five, arrived in just in time to catch umka & bronevik rock the house in an intimate set at porto franco who produced their first u.s. vinyl. australia meets russian in san francisco. they arrived in time for the kaleidoscope shows, too. the five and i sat up late in the closed gallery and shared ideas, wine and laughter. we told stories. when they bought frank from frank i knew they really were leaving soon. frank was a luxurious ride for their u.s. walkabout and even came with fancy rims, bullet holes and a sub-woofer to make any oakland gangsta proud. they ditched the sub-woofer.
we planned a slumber party for their last night. we were gonna watch movies but it didn't work out that way. it had been open mic and people had stayed. they took off the next day for the giant redwoods (that i, regretfully, have yet to see).
then, a few days ago number six showed up. jesse. i saw someone peering at the kaleidoscope sign on the doorbell from halfway down the block. i asked if i could help him. he countered by asking if i was sara. when i admitted to it he confessed to being number six and my australian family extended. jesse and i shared dinner at a diner, jazz at kaleidoscope, the rev--of course--and buxter hoot'n at blue six. (the five saw buxter hoot'n at my place with quinn devaux). it was cool that all six australians got to see buxter hoot'n, even if it wasn't at the same time. and i sent jesse with jessica to specs. jessica had hung out with the five too and is apparently very reminiscent of another jessica who is friends of the five, nay, six, in sydney.
i hear number seven may show up sometime.
if you want to know more about the continuing adventures of the australians they're making it easy to keep up. presshatch.com is their online travel zine. i wrote a short piece for it.
global nomads. global community.

Fifth Annual Poems Under the Dome is this Friday, April 30th

Fifth Annual Poems Under the Dome is this Friday, April 30th

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Remembering Margaret

I heard the news about Margaret today. Her picture was beautiful; she looked a lot like her mother when she grew up. I hadn’t seen Margaret in years. Probably close to thirty so I really didn’t know her as an adult. Living here in San Francisco now and owning a gallery I think about her mother a lot. Margaret’s mother and mine were close friends and she painted the picture of the window in Margaret’s bedroom in Tehran where I looked out onto the wall we used to jump barefoot off of as part of the thieves club. Now I look out the window of the painting where it hangs on my bedroom wall. Margaret’s mother was a painter and owned a gallery in Virginia for a while—my only experience in gallery work before I opened my own. And Margaret’s mother used to live here in san Francisco for a while, that was after my mother died, and then Margaret’s mother was dead and now Margaret is dead of a brain tumor.

 She was younger than I was and played the flute and doodled curlicues and walked on her toes. Her brother told me she had died. I’m really bad at keeping in touch with people having moved around so much in the days before email and easy international calling so I had lost touch with the family. But one day at a demonstration in front of the white house a few years ago a man walked up to me and asked if I was sara powell. I said yes but I didn’t recognize him. It was Margaret’s brother Garrie.

The last time I remembered seeing him was on his twenty-first birthday when I rode with him and his mother up to cabin john where the rest of his family was waiting to celebrate with a dinner. I remember Garrie had to slam on the brakes at one point causing his mother to plunk her hand down in the middle of his birthday cake. As an artist she used to make the most amazing birthday cakes for her kids—I remember one—it was either for Johnny or Willy (the two younger boys) and had an entire marzipan farm on top.

But this cake was plain and Vida ruefully remarked that she hadn’t had time to personalize it before and imprinting her hand wasn’t really the way she would have chosen to do it.

That was probably the last time I saw Margaret and Garrie told me then she had a brain tumor. I wanted to call but I didn’t know what to say. I’d known Margaret and Garrie and the others since I was a little kid in Sri Lanka. We were both embassy families and hung out a lot together, especially since our mothers were friends. Once we all went up into the mountains together at Nuwara Eliya. We stayed at a tea plantation and my older sisters and Garrie tormented Margaret and me by putting granddaddy long-legs into our underwear. There’s a picture of us kids standing by a river—all of us in high-water pants because we had outgrown our clothes. But then they moved and we moved and like all the other friends I had growing up we lost touch.

Margaret

photo by Garrie Rouse

But then, after a stint in DC, we were posted to Iran and there they were. My most vivid memories of Margaret are from this time period but the picture of the window that was in her room was only later in our stay there. First it was her parent’s room and her room was on the other side of the house. It was in that room that I remember lounging on her bed, reading comics that were forbidden at home and listening to The Beatles’ The Long and Winding Road. And I remember sleeping on her roof in the summer and watching shooting stars and wandering the small streets together, buying sunflower seeds and visiting the cook’s family.

The list of my peers who have known me--and whom I have known--since childhood is tiny. I can count it on one hand. Now it’s one fewer person. I wish I had had the courage to call Margaret.