Hope Marcus

January 3, 2012. Happy Birthday Carole, for us.

2012-01-03T17:55:00.008-05:00

Hi Carole, I bought chocolates in a fine crystal bowl to my writing class today, a tribute .... you'd have liked them along with everyone there. Craig had told me you'd joined a workshop in Key West, were jubilant, getting material ready, but never returned, died instead. Passed he said, jumped ship. I hear his voce as if yesterday, see you leaning against the door frame between my kitchen and computer room mere hours ago. Hey, I turn, but you are not there, not in sight, yet every where. Always.

Thirty-Five

2011-11-16T08:44:00.006-05:00

I saw you last night, on a bright winter afternoon, briskly walking in a denim pants suit with a matching color denim top - not tucked in. More tailored than is worn today. You were 35, my daughter, Celeste's's age in a few day, November 18, and you were as well fashioned as she. Maybe we were on South Beach the lower end with the tchotchke store fronts, or maybe a local strip mall. The day was sparkly sunny, you lively and lovely, brown hair bouncy walking a fast clip, your broad smile across your face. I saw saw as if passing by, next to or a few feet apart on wide walkway, your profile sideways, forward stepping and it was you, into my life again, as always.

Danny and his girl Jesi went to Key West for your yahrzeit. Your son tossed a rose, as he usually does. A rose settled atop of the sea, your ocean grave, floaty, regenerating. Perhaps you touched. On the actual day, October 19, Miguel and Celeste visited. I was so very happy they came over; grateful. It was a Wednesday, midweek, a candle on my fireplace. Miguel is a bundle, 7-years-old, born after you died but am trusting you have seen him, his brown eyes the shape and color of yours.

Infinite Jest

2011-10-13T10:14:00.005-04:00

Hi Carole,

Read an article in The New Yorker (April 2011) about David Foster Wallace, relaying how despondent he became after completing Infinite Jest, even as I continue working on our manuscript. Have changed it some, adding parallel universes to reach you. A fine report by Jonathan Franzen, had not read him previously, the mood he captured! Have a print out of Wallace’s Wiggle Room published in the same magazine. Bought his uncompleted The Pale King from Border’s closing, can you imagine that icon shutting down? Our Borders!!

Anyway, you were dressed and heavily face painted like a Jester, perhaps from the title book, and you were happy, living a run down place. I must rekey the following, grrrr, cannot type, actually Curt did it for me. I so relate to what JF wrote:

“…That he was blocked with his work when he decided to quit Nardil — was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it — is not inconsequential. He’d loved writing fiction, “Infinite Jest” in particular, and he’d been very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude….”

Justly so.

Love, Hope

House cleaning

2011-07-29T09:07:00.007-04:00

Carole, so ordinary and simple, we were together, you showing me how to change the vacuum cleaner bag, we with our chatter above the roar, or maybe silence. The bag was designed with a single wide spiral twist off, more resembling a space image from the Hubble spacecraft, the one of a spiraling universe, minus the colors, the vacuum part a dull plastic beige but similar in its swirling shape. How I miss you you.

Larger than Life

2011-02-14T15:29:00.002-05:00

Today, Valentine's Day, we squeezed and squeezed .... somehow a wheelchair that you surely didn't need, so vibrant, hugging and hugging ... 3, am not sure what the folded wheelchair symbolized ...

Gold Encrusted

2011-01-18T08:46:00.008-05:00

8 AM, January 18, 2011.

Mocha was barking to be let back in and I finally arose from bed yet it wasn’t my house I was in. The hallway was painted blue directly across from my bedroom door, blue like the sea as children would color it. I saw two different doggies in the house in separate bedrooms, they were not mine. Then I saw movement in the closet, a wiggle under something and you emerged from underneath blankets or silk sheets and you were beautiful as if costumed for a play, a harlequin of glittering golden powdered seashells angled diagonally across your chin, up to the tip of your cheekbone, returning to your neck with a loosely strung ivory chiffon ribboned bow like a frilly boa necklace against your cotton shirt: a gift. Your body felt thin and lithe as if seventeen-years-old. I pulled you into the light pouring from the window, the sunlight streaming on you, validating your presence, and we held each other, cradled in arms, I kissed your lips and we stood and stood and stood and I kept asking you, staring at you, to make sure it was you with the sunlight against your face highlighting the shell glitter sparking even as your eyes focused over my shoulder, non committal.

From those ashes scattered in Key West into my arms, a radiant youthful you bathed in sunlight on a new dawning day.

January 3, 2011. Happy Birthday Carole, we're still going strong, together.

2011-01-03T10:17:00.042-05:00

Creative non-fiction, circa mid-1990's, a work in progress my sister and I began, but could not finish together. Please note, apparently meta links to IMC and HCA change the formatting and I can't figure it out. Still relevant today, in Florida, the beat goes on.

Excerpt from Three Attention Deficit Sisters and the Mafia

by Hope Marcus and Carole Marcus

“I don’t know yet, but it’s more than gobbledygook. Think manna from the farm into my arms. Passports, receipts from Panamanian companies, DynCorp, Florida medical clinics — HMO’s, some guy’s Florida driver’s license, still valid.”

I picked up a piece of paper, held it on the edge. “Absolutely nasty, pitch them. They even smell moldy.”

“Leslie, look at them, open your eyes!”

“Look at what? There’s nothing to see! You and your trash treasures.”

Carolee’s hands went to work, rearranging the pieces, making a jigsaw puzzle with parts missing. Torn squares, rectangles, jagged edges, a few legible words and a smattering of numbers. Two airline tickets, Miami to Mexico, Mexico to Miami, Aeromexico, sections of them, enough to tell. An ID card from an HMO. Photos angled from the side, the front, plus a passport. Another social security card. Different numbers, the same name — doubles in Spanish.

My sister turned to me, her eyes wide orbs. I didn’t know what to make of things.

“Holy moley, can’t you see? For the past twenty-one years I’ve been staring across the table at Lou, reading his newspapers, the Miami Herald delivered to our door. Medicare fraud, think IMC and all those clinics, even the newest, HCA. Just you wait. And tickets to Mexico, next stop Columbia, to buy what? Hello Leslie, wake up. These names are headliners!”

Front pages? I nearly drowned on a diet soda, ran to the kitchen sink, choking. Carolee trailed after me.

“You’re so off base, if you think for one lousy minute I’m falling for this, you don’t expect me to believe … .” My sister threw me one of her primal stares, like a guided missile homing in, smart bombs aiming straight for me, her eyes converging into one enormous penetrable, oy ve mia, hallelujah sister.

“You’ve got balls, cojones.” I said.

She pulled her shoulders back, stuck out her chest and strutted out of the kitchen, back to the couch spread with her finds. “I’ve got boobs, potency, and these," she said, pointing to the papers. "Chutzpah, cojones, and these!"

October 19

2010-10-19T10:48:00.004-04:00

Carole, we awoke together his morning at 6 AM, as if a clock mattered. You were helping me straighten the tablecloth, a cranberry-rust color. All the leaves to Nana’s table were in, a long rectangle as if getting ready for a party, our family, who else? You sat under the repro Matisse painting, in that spot of the room, and had a dark short sleeve top on, probably with shorts along with that beatific smile of yours. I’d pitched some bagel pieces along with an old bag of bread rolls from the fridge and was setting fresh ones, a dozen or two I’d just bought, hard crust rolls sprinkled with poppy seeds. It was so joyous ordinary and at first I was happy then thought, of course you'd come today — it is your yahrzeit — 8 years since you died, and I cried and cried. It is stupendous that you came today, if only the tears would stop.

Carole Connection

2010-09-08T22:57:00.011-04:00

Rosh Hashana Weds. September 8, 2010
Written upon awakening.

The workman drilled holes through walls, smack dab in the middle of them, not the bottom or top as might be expected, holes for a cable wire although I didn't know what they'd connect to, the roof from a hole in the middle of the wall? the men supposedly working in my home because a new ordinance said I had to raise the roof for a new building code. They were noisy but nice and they kept showing me their business cards with phone numbers to call the boss, Nautilus, to take up the issue of their being in my house, making a ruckus, drilling through the walls, the center of the gypsum boards. In the dream my house more like your former one on 64 Street, In my dream, the phone line was always busy. During one of my attempts to reach Nautilus, I heard a conversation with a another guy, crossed wires, he leaving a message, not vile or angry but saying he was trying to reach the owner too … I handed to phone to one of the workers at my house … then Nautilus called me, saying everything was all right, he’d take care of things, not to worry. Nautilus from the sea, telling me he’d take care of things, reassuring, Nautilus from the sea the same sea we’d scattered your ashes into, Nautilus, a species surviving relatively unchanged for millions of years.

After a while you called, but there was so much noise, two little girls running around me, and the counter where the phone was, two daughters of the workers, who were using loud tools. I wanted your phone number, told you I’d had been trying to reach you for days, telling you I’d up been cooking until 3. You started to give it to me but I couldn’t read my own writing, and the paper I was writing on, the one in front of me, was loaded with doodads, and the pen was near dry, barely inked. I said hold on, when I came back you fudged with the phone number, gave me a few false starts, one beginning with a 500, like the 800 free calls … then said you couldn’t make it over, asking who would pick up Daniel, Agustin? You didn’t want to see Agustin, no way — I said Josh would get him, and you said OK, you’d come since Josh would pick up Danny in his car and bring him to my house.

You were frightened, hesitant, didn’t want to be seen.

Our older sister had been over earlier and I demanded that she leave even as she had looked innocuous, like her 30 year old self. Mom’s presence was a distant hint in the yonder.

Mostly I’d wanted you and your phone number you finally gave it to me, it began with a 271—had a 6 in it, maybe your former number that I no longer remember? Then you said you’d come…you were still mulling it over, I could tell, still thinking but so close to yes even as the background between us on the phone was obtrusive and distracting.

Then in real time I awoke to the sounds of lawn mowing outside and I was in tears, and in real time, Madeline called minutes later, unusual for her to phone that time of the morning. She was the ONLY person I could talk to just then, in real life, synchronicity, our friend Madeleine the real time connector who’d truly understand … and I told her about Nautilus from the sea, telling me he’d take care of things, the same sea home to your scattered ashes, that freeing sea.

Happy Birthday, Craggie

2010-08-15T17:48:00.002-04:00

Hello Carole and Craig!

Craiggie, I am trying to post the 'youtube' account set up for you but am having trouble. Hope to add:

Happy Birthday dear friend, and to your daughter who shares the day, I have the poem your father wrote, penned on a box after my sister died. A toast to you, Craiggie, and to those here, and here not.

Carole in Red

2010-07-11T23:11:00.005-04:00

Carole I dreamed about you again last night, an 8-year-old sitter was watching your boys, just for minutes, while you looked for another but that wasn’t the significance of the eight. It was eight years ago that you left Miami and moved to Key West - and in another few months you’d be dead. In my dream you were wearing a red shirtwaist dress with yellow and blue circles, not quite polka dots, I remember the design, red with a few small yellow and blue circles, like bubbles, maybe the sky and sun with a red background for bleeding because you didn’t want to leave your young adult boys, they just starting college, you thinking families should be weaned by consent rather than poverty. Yet you found love with Craig, so maybe the red was for love. A few months after moving to Key West you’d die, officially of a heart attack, but I knew otherwise, we all did, especially Craig, whose love and warmth cradled you even as our father sharpened his knife.

Today is Curt's birthday and our 20 anniversary, both together, how practical of us. How sad to be without you.

Carole, Keep Channeling!

2010-05-14T11:14:00.003-04:00

Hey Carole,

Keep coming at me .... we still have work to do.

“It was a dream,” Carolee emphasized. “But the dream was important. Because in another lifetime our sisterhood was cut short. And now we are sisters again. And there is something we must do. Something wasn’t finished, remains incomplete.”

Carolee related that dream years ago, and I remember it as if yesterday when the air between us vibrated with life. I cannot remember when she first mentioned the dream, only that it emerged into our world with the same certainty as the years we shared. Although I could not recall our dying together, I never doubted the experience, simply accepting that Carolee had retained our past. We both knew, too, that Carolee’s vision wasn’t a dream. She was the keeper of our history, a past that would again become our future. We will be sisters forever, and in the intermittent space between us, I now carry our story forward.
more later.

Love, Hope

With You

2010-03-29T18:02:00.003-04:00

Hi Carole, your boys will be here soon, Passover and my birthday ... am so missing you. Have an upcoming meeting with a literary agent about our book ... you'd be proud.

Bermuda Shorts

2010-01-09T18:43:00.003-05:00

You were wearing them, tailored Bermuda shorts, beige, with a pleat down the front and a wide leather belt, your hair shoulder length, maybe with a hair band. We together, in a hallway with pictures, maybe mother was there, too .... but you and I for sure, so natural, talking, walking.

January 3

2010-01-03T15:29:00.001-05:00

Your birthday, you age 60, me 61 ... when again.

Love Mountains

2009-12-30T08:12:00.002-05:00

Carole, we were together again, a few hours ago, maybe flying kites in a mountainous area after getting a quickie cholesterol check in a doctors office, against a broad rectangular wall, coming in from the outside emerging from a lovely tall wooded gate with scant flowers and butterflies painted on it, weathered made to look aged against a narrow staircase, the light grayish gate with a delicate character to it, maybe Asian, and I woke I up and cried and cried, still now in front my computer writing this.

Hanukkah 2009

2009-12-12T21:18:00.004-05:00

Your boys were here tonight in this dimension as you were in another earlier this morning in a dream. You and I sitting across from each other in Nana Anna's living room, which wasn't her living room at all, a tea shop of sorts, but the the view, as I remembered it, overlooking the the woods. There was a Japanese two-some, two women our younger age at another table, each table a narrow short bench. Your brown silky hair fell below your shoulders and you nose squinched the way it did when exhaling smoke from a cigarette. It feathered your face and I didn't complain about the smoke as I would have then, wanting instead that moment to be whole and real and knowing otherwise, you my sister, a mirage?

Tethered. Wireless.

2009-10-19T14:33:00.008-04:00

Oh, Carole .... these obsolete tears, grief unwashable. Seven years, however defined — revisions of home, dust and old thumbprints.

Airborne

2009-10-13T12:44:00.006-04:00

I had the feeling I was in a cockpit, sitting at the rounded edge of my sister’s dinning room table, my feet on the floor. I could feel the phone receiver but could not see it, or my hand cupped around it. “We’ll meet on Lugo,” she’d said. My mother’s presence was evident, she mopping the floor, my mother never mopped a floor in her entire life!

“Not to worry about the kids,” I said to my sister, “they’re arses!” We’d laughed. “Mother, I’m to meet Carole at Lugo ….” Mother was grounded, in real time also died, buried, Carole airborne those vaporous letters at her funeral, and now me, clinging to a telephone cord.

Rendezvous

2009-09-25T19:48:00.005-04:00

Today, together, not in this time, timeless. You and your beloved. I felt it, a flutter. Chagall-like. Bliss.

Lightposts

2009-08-15T10:10:00.008-04:00

My sister, today on Craggie's birthday, I can only imagine your celebrations, all that he'd told me of your happiness. Then cut short, hopefully rejoined.

In my recent dream he was ordering a conch salad with cheese, happily standing in an outdoor cafe by the shore line. Maybe you both did once, a past in Key West, on his birthday, your beloved, energies entwined.

He died earlier this year, we were not told.

"You can't rival the dead for love. Lose every time..."
Toni Morrison, Jazz

August 15

2009-08-14T13:34:00.014-04:00

To you, Craggie, with love for your birthday.

I've begun this post many times, started and stepped back, words in what language to reach you? Each time I try for something bold to write, a thought reflecting loss and bravery, I see instead your evidence on the mossy tree spirit you tacked onto the sea grape trunk, among the sprigs and sway of green welcoming like the great aunts whose echoes you penned on a box after my sister died when the preponderant heavens opened, and you knew then, and before then, those awaiting skies, opening.

Hope with Carole

Sun Setting

2009-01-03T16:26:00.003-05:00

January 3, 1950 — January 3, 2009
Today is your birthday, you 59, me 60 ... if.

December 20, 3008

2008-12-20T00:09:00.013-05:00

I’ve had wine, not much, then yogurt ice cream,
spooning it from the carton
walking by the fireplace,
your photo on the mantle — a nest
between lights, strung for holiday,
colored
twinkles.

I felt you nodding, your smile,
breathing as I strode past
my eyes with you,
your effervescence
a moment beyond
a tangible reach.

Together, reflecting
as shadows, we both
capture sea into sky,
one thousand years
from now, before
until again.

My Sister Carole, My Love

2008-10-19T12:43:00.004-04:00

January 3, 1950— October 19, 2002

Four days ago, a full moon and you. I dreamed about you in Spring Mountain or Spring River, and saw your face, with a curly perm no less, like a celebration of confetti. I cried and cried when I woke up. I am only realizing now, you between and into lakes and mountains, everywhere. Anew.

Speaking in Colors

2008-05-28T20:46:00.001-04:00

My sister spoke to me this morning, silently in colors. “Quit stalling, stop goofing off —get back to our book!” She said this through the switches that control our workstation.

Two electrical outlets charge my computer, one for the DSL and my computer, and the other for the printers and the hub.

Monday, Memorial Day, my husband turned off the computers but forgot the buttons; red and green knobbies glared yesterday morning. The modem, having been all day and night was warm. I’d scowled.

Last night I closed down, waited for the monitors to click off, flipped two switches and went to bed.

This morning the buttons glowed and modem was not warm. It had not been on during the night. My husband did not turn the computers on before leaving for work. I had not left them on.

My sister’s visit.

Thrombotic Twyla

2008-04-01T18:20:00.010-04:00

29 March 2008. A whirl, a swirl, flirtatious teasing tones, and you’re inside NIGHTSPOT… eloquently garish, hibiscus red-bright on a darkened stage. Bawdy bravado; pure genius.

Twyla Tharp’s premiere modern ballet had it debut in Miami this weekend, and the innuendo’s just kept coming —limbs, thighs, torsos enmeshed, arms tangling, going into, coming out of, a red stream of cloth, a cat house bed, or a circus banner, take your pick. Tharp’s evocative chorography is about body alignment, changing directions quickly and the Miami Ballet cast was superb. All through people were attracted to one another, attracted to people they shouldn't be, channeling into the darker side of a clubbing lifestyle. Torrid one-nighters, and then beginning again — with a flamboyant strut.

A sense of Cirque du Soleil along with sleazy jazz, splashes of classical, cocky calypso and boisterous horns, flaunting, taunting. Most of the 32- piece orchestra was on stage, a band in the pit, swaggering, bold punk, daring: conquest. I’d not heard of Elvis Costello before, not in a classical sense, not as a master of all tones and hues and shades scored into music.

Nightspot is Ms. Tharp’s vision of Miami as a thrombotic after hours cruise where Latin, rock and classical meet, and where men and women turn up for (entirely heterosexual) scenes of temperament, flirtation, bouts and reconciliation. At the Ziff Ballet Opera House in the Arsht Center, there were whoops and cheers. All deserved for a stunning performance.

Death, Dreams and the Maiden

2008-01-04T12:12:00.001-05:00

Come back, Carole.

On your birthday, January 3, my friend Sharon posted my first blog. I cried most of the day, too distracted to make heads or tails of it … our sisterhood cut short, our manuscript only half of itself without you. I need you here, to complete what we started …what we began but could not finish together.

You still come in dreams with that bright smile of yours. Just days ago I hugged and hugged you, you standing in the living room in front of a grandmother clock that doesn’t work, you in a long beige linen dress and a funky shmatelich hat with flappy cloth plumes of beige and brown, matching your dress. You tall and elegant: zany and stately, blending the two like no other.

I called out to my husband, “Look she is really back, come see Carole … .” But he was in the shower and could not hear me; my own gruff voice, hoarse from screaming, awakened me … and you were gone again, my sister.

First Blog Ever!

2008-01-03T21:13:00.000-05:00

Writing is a passport, a journey born from the crevices of brainstuff, a constant bloodletting going into and coming from.

Motion. Solitude. Action. Desperation.

Why then do we subject ourselves to its elements, those cursed, mottled ideas, afloat, motherless, untethered, waiting to be reigned in, corralled into what? Attainment of exactly what as we slouch towards Bethlehem?

We BLOG!