Castroville. My sister Gail was born fifteen years and one day before I was. I scarcely knew her when I was young; she was away in college at Centenary and then she got married to Sam and they lived in California, where he was from. Sam's folks ran a health food store in Castroville starting way back, I think in the 1930s. Very early hippies. There were two things we got from Sam's folks: alfacon and salve. Alfacon was compressed alfalfa pills; I suppose the con meant concentrated. You had to take a lot of them. They were supposed to improve everything about your health; alterative is the herbalist term. Salve was ground up aspirin mixed with petroleum jelly, and it was actually pretty good for minor skin irritations. Just a little gritty.
La Mercè was an unexpected high point in the long drawn out misery of my marriage. Gail and I dropped in on La Mercè in the early 2000s when we traveled to Spain with my wife and her husband Billy in the early years of my marriage, just as I began settling into a miserable ease. My wife and I had taken a three week trip to Italy a couple years before. Spain was our second and final European outing. Both trips were a sign of how low I'd sunk. I had managed to forget what I learned so well living in Kenya: tourism is bullshit. Barcelona was our first stop. None of us had ever heard of La Mercè. We had no idea we were parachuting into a joyful chaotic drunken war zone. When we arrived at our bed and breakfast in El Born it was going on all around us. We were miserably jetlagged and Gail and Billy went to bed. But I was intrigued. I wanted to find out what the hell was going on, and my wife gamely came with. We wandered out into the smoke filled streets. Fireworks were going on all around us, and sometimes right at us. We would have been run over as the clueless tourists we were but for the grace and good humor of the Catalans around us, snatching us out of harm's way. It was an incredible experience. Happily lost, we wandered for hours until the blinding smoke finally drove us back inside.
Forever. The fifteen year interval between our births fascinated me. I learned some math from it. When I was about six I announced that when I turned fifteen I'd be exactly half her age. After that our ages would gradually get closer together every year. I said it like that, without using words I didn't know, like proportionally or relatively. Our birthdays became a special connection between us. In Melbourne that connection got drugified. We celebrated our joint birthdays with joints and endless toasts. After I left college and the Fishfarm, we drifted apart. Gail and Billy followed me to Boulder and joined a Self-Harmonizing group. They didn't stay very long. A few years after I migrated to Seattle they followed me out here but lived in Shelton. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Gail and Billy were regular visitors at the house I bought with the help of my dad. That's when I saw Gail leave me, during those years. They'd drive over and we'd have a big fancy dinner with lots of wine and planked or alder smoked salmon or whatever I was into at the time. Gail and Billy would discreetly augment the wine by smoking dope. At some point Gail and I would go for a walk together to renew our old connection. I watched Gail get progressively vaguer and less present through those years. Finally, when I looked into her eyes, there was nobody there. Just a drunk stoned old woman looking at me vaguely, somebody I used to know. I held my own internal memorial service for Gail. My old friend had left me forever.