Remembering, Holding
For Valerie
Promise? you asked when I said I loved you
one summer in Coronado. And I did, on my knees
if that’s what you wanted, on the boulders
at Imperial Beach. You looked away, across an ocean
before saying “yes,” no one else seeing
how we could be.
Friend, we found ways to dream
each other again and again, our holding
making of us more than the world:
our mothers and brothers and sisters came
to the Holy Family Hospital the crisp October
morning when Christa came, our new little family making
family of them all. I wondered how she knew,
waking from a sound sleep to cry whenever
you traveled a shout away, unconsonable
till you came back. “You’ll never see me weak,”
she later learned to think, and you quietly arranged
what she needed, watching her grow strong.
And then Gwen, unable to walk, unwilling to crawl,
running on all fours, a gentle steamroller, sure
of herself and demanding that the world be right.
And the world around her rightened itself, sweet
as rules you taught her, intelligent and good
as laughter or music or food.
Eldon, the agile middle child, lazing in possibility
or climbing impossible ladders toward the sun,
graceful as a young god, wanting to shower himself
into a moment as perfect as the moment creation
began, all glory and thunder and light. And you
waited with him, trusting the slow gathering of powers.
Michael and Becky, “attack babies”
prowling for hugs and laughter, his flaming
enthusiasm and her quiet insight an unlikely rightness,
their twinned laughter a gentle background,
their difference a way of fitting.
The moment you said yes held this
quarter-century, itself a moment
beginning.
Love,
Mike
Duran Family circa 1959
Juan and Stella (Suzies mom and dad) let me borrow this picture so I could make a digital copy.
From left to right, Ruth, John, Gloria, Stella, Suzie (on her moms lap), and Johny.
Virgil Lee “Papa” Clark
Eldon inspired me. This is one of my favorite photos from the Clark clan. This is Papa Clark, Doug’s paternal grandfather, sitting on his bunk at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa in 1951. You can see from this photo where Doug gets his great smile. . .the first time Keilana saw this photo, she brought it to me excitedly shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” It took quite a lot of effort to convince her it was actually one of her grandpas.
