Yes, it’s true, the old waterfront Naked Oyster collided with age and had something to say about it last week:

Eve of Another Year Older

It’s a weeping time: a Weeping for Joy for an extended loving family and friends who allowed me, nurtured or supported or laughed with me as we got this OLD and put up with my “way too many e-mails.” For every teacher who taught me something or really tried. For every employer who hired me, then tired of me or bored me up to layoff or my leaving. Was I really that big a dent in your budget or was it that I just didn’t want to transfer to So.Cal, Texas or Maryland? Then face layoff? Who gains from that? To every pet, bird, duck, chameleon of colors, rabbit, dog or cat who allowed me to feed, water, clean their litter boxes, or pull their tail slightly in jest. To every singer, male and female who lit me up, for Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty, and others who we’ve lost, for Neil Diamond now diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, who was my first mentor ever from the Land of PiRSquared to where we are today. To Cathy & Michelle, to Richard Railton, my first hotrodding mentor! Thank you!

©Peter Bray 1/29/2018
All rights reserved

Grief & Never Saying Goodbye

Our grandparents pass and that’s really sad,
and in ’98 we also lost Dad,
but losing a child is beyond the worst,
Grief is like no other curse –
So I’ll never say Goodbye to Cathy
but carry you on my shoulders forever,
wearing and singing our
“Two Right Shoes.”
©Peter Bray 1/29/2018
All rights reserved

Poor Gloria’s /They Call Her Branigan
(I won’t be denied)

Poor Gloria’s been misled but not from the voices in her head, she skips in the truck’s CD player. My online birthday present arrived this morning, but she skips. I won’t be denied my birthday joy at 75 singing “the alias you’ve been living under,” so I cross the bridge to the next county, look under “Branigan” in the Rasputin Rock Section – I can’t find her so I ask at the counter. They say “Check the trays also,” so I return to look, they send a music clerk who looks too, and we find the “Best of Branigan,” two copies in the next tray over.
I buy them both. I can live with my broken door handle (until I fix it), and have learned to live with grief without our traveling daughters (until we all meet in Heaven) but I won’t be denied “the alias I’ve been living under.” Not at 75.

©Peter Bray 1/29/2018
75 tomorrow
All rights reserved

Traveling Daughters

In a recent poem about Laura Branigan and her song “Gloria,” and not being denied, and Grief, I referred to our “traveling daughters” – perhaps they are traveling meteors of flame, sub-atomic particles of energy, non-verbally whispered thoughts that only angels can know and state, harbingers of what humans can only know as bone-crushing Grief. I am at a rare loss for words, and Gloria in her confusion, with voices in her head, crashes here on the coastline rip-rap of our post-corporate and post-daughter existence. Natural seaweed becomes the stuff of churning foam, and perhaps we are all just “traveling,” in different mediums and speeds.

©Peter Bray 1/29/2018
All rights reserved

Peter Bray lives, writes, and works in Benicia since 1983
and has written this column since 2008.

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