Excerpt: Resident Aliens (Redux)

There were many other things going on in my life during the last years of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series had spawned a large number of online role-playing-games which took place in the Potterverse; Virtual Hogwarts (http://www.virtual-hogwarts.org/rpg/index.php?act=home) was one of these. I began to play, creating a character named Veracity Tourmaline Weatherwax (a shout-out to Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax), and taking her through sorting into Hufflepuff, classes, disappointments in love, dueling matches, quarrels with other students, and assorted adventures. Just for fun I provided the studious Veracity with an alternate personality, Pirate Jenny, whose interests were not nearly as academic as Vee’s, leading to some amusing classroom episodes when the functionally-illiterate Jenny showed up. Jenny was much more at home on the duelling platform than the classroom, and shared none of Vee’s fear of broomstick aerobatics. Like any normal teenager, Veracity fell in love with a boy named Spike who was in love with someone else, and suffered mightily in the cause of true love until being distracted by someone else. Veracity/Spike was the ship that never sailed.
When Veracity was about to graduate from Hogwarts and become heir to the family barony in Romania, I brought in a younger sister, Winter von Wiederwachse, who had been raised in a grim castle, Schloss Wiederwachse, by the girls’ great-great-great-grandfather, the evil Baron Hugo, who dabbled in the Dark Arts as well as a little illegal genetic research on the side. Winter was sorted into Ravenclaw, to her (and my) disappointment; Veracity had been such a good girl that I wanted to try a little evil in Slytherin. But it was not to be. So when my first NaNoWriMo came along, I simply grafted most of the characters into a slightly different universe (Romanian aristocracy; no Hogwarts; tame dragons) and wrote a short novel in which I married Veracity off and even put myself at age 99 in as a leading character. (It’s called He Kindly Stopped for Me and can be purchased at http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/he-kindly-stopped-for-me-%28paperb... if anyone is so inclined.) I left Pirate Jenny out of this story, because I might want to use her in another context.
In 2005, I went back to Chicago with Ron for my fiftieth high school reunion. Working my way through the magickally-talented but socially-inept Veracity’s fictional teen years had been helpful in dispelling my fears of seeing those people again. Veracity had been a bit less geeky than Valerie. She had made friends and had adventures, and was a fully-realized character. And so, come to think of it, had Valerie. I was not at all the intensely shy girl I had been in high school. I had done things and had adventures and made friends, and there were people who valued my opinion. I was not the complete loser I had seen myself to be, and now I was ready to face the people whose value-judgments had crushed me fifty years before and left me with a residue of self-doubt that I was still carrying around after all these years.
As it turned out, the experience was good. Most of the women, while older of course, were still recognizable; but the men! Holy cow, what happened to all those good-looking young Jewish Princes who had never seen me as anything but a geek? Bald, fat, wrinkled, a bunch of alte kakers with no conversation. And one of my worst tormentors among the women actually came up to me and apologized for treating me so badly back then. It appeared that some people had grown up. Others, not so much. I was shocked at the appearance and demeanor of one woman who had been one of my few friends in high school. She was haggard and showed the effects in her leathery complexion of far too much sunbathing. And when I greeted her enthusiastically, telling her that she had been one of the few people in high school who had been nice to me, she answered sarcastically. Apparently the friendship had meant much more to me than to her, as she seemed to have forgotten it entirely. But who the hell knows what lurks in the minds of men, and women, anyway? Not me.
In 1999 Mark’s wife Michelle had given birth to our first grandchild, Evan. I went out to New Jersey to visit them shortly after his birth, and immediately came down with a great big case of grandma-love. I hadn’t expected to feel this way, because I had never had a lot of time for little kids; but I was smitten, and chronicled his every move on my camera while I was there. The three of them came out to San Francisco when Evan was about eight months old, and damn, was he cute. His arrival was followed a year and a half later by that of his sister, Mackenzie. They have grown into bright, pretty children who run rings around their parents. Evan is fascinated by the way things work, and loves to build Rube Goldberg contraptions; and Mackenzie is a little rock-and-roll diva whose mannerisms reflect the Disney shows of which she is a fan. Evan’s favorite TV show is “Storm Chasers,” on the Weather Channel; during our last visit to their current residence outside Boston, there was a tornado in Chicago, and after we talked by phone with Jason, who still lives there, evan kept looking hopefully out the window and saying, “Maybe we’ll get a tornado here, huh?”
Another thing that had gone on during the run-up to the Millennium was my stint at writing articles for The Mining Company (now About.com), about the sights and neighborhoods of San Francisco. I got into the habit of traveling to unfamiliar neighborhoods and taking notes on the local stores, restaurants, and amusements.  
You know you live in San Francisco, I wrote, when:
• A really great parking spot can move you to tears.
• You are thinking of taking an adult education class, but you can't decide between a Yoga, Channeling or Building Your Web Site class.
Your boss runs in "The Bay to Breakers" ...and it's the first time you have seen him nude.
I wrote for them for a couple of years before they turned into About.com, and put the content on my website. It can still be found at the Wayback Machine at http://web.archive.org/web/20030104202437/www.wiggage.com/sftoc.html. Much of the content is out of date, especially the restaurant listings-- restaurants in San Francisco have the lifespan of the average mayfly-- but it’s still a fun read.
I have a long history of volunteering, beginning with pregnancy testing and abortion counselling at a feminist bookstore back in Chicago in the 1960’s to working with the activities director in a nursing home during my studies at San Francisco State in the late 1980’s. In recent years I have joined a group of women singers, the Threshold Choir, who sing at the bedsides of people in the last stages of life. Every Monday afternoon I walk down the hill to Laguna Honda Hospital and sing for an hour to patients in the hospice. Most of the songs in the official Threshold Choir repertoire carry the message “it’s okay to die” with more or less subtlety, but I’ve always found that people at the hospice would rather hear their own particular favorites, so I have compiled a second book of unofficial songs: Beatles tunes, show tunes, gospel songs, country songs, blues, doo-wop-- you name it. Cynthia has been singing at Laguna Honda with me for about a year now, and I generally take the harmony while she sings the melody. It’s much more fun singing with someone else than singing solo.
We have even been allowed to sing for the recently dead: when someone dies at the hospice, their bed is covered with a pretty quilt and flowers are placed at the foot of the bed, so their family can see them before the undertakers come to take the body away. I have almost always experienced the feeling that the dead person is still in the room when we come in to sing for them. It takes a while for their spirit to leave. If the family is there we generally get requests for “Amazing Grace,” which is the all-time favorite song of just about everyone. It was the last song I sang for Cora when she was in the hospital, just a few hours before she died, and it always makes me think of her.
Patients at the hospice can last for a surprisingly long time before dying, sometimes for years. Others die within a few days of being admitted. There’s a change that takes place in people’s faces when they are about to go, which is really difficult to describe, but is a sure tell-tale. Of course, not everyone wants to be sung to, so we always ask “would you like a song, or would you rather rest?” This always brings up the memory of singing carols at General Hospital one Xmas with Lori and a group of her friends, back in the ‘70s; we were singing our way through the wards with great enthusiasm, until a voice piped out wearily from one corner, “Enough. Enough.” It’s a good thing to keep in mind when you’re trying to be generous that not everyone wants what you want to give them.