The Ginger Tiger Cat

Sunday, July 12, 2026, is the fifth anniversary (is that the right word?) of Colleen's death. (I'm starting this on the Friday before; don't know when it will be finished and I'll probably edit this out anyway.) We had been married fpr 45 years, and a couple for 50. Best friends for longer than that.

I'm torn between wanting to tell a story, and wanting to say what things are like for me now. (Of course, to do the latter, I'd have to figure out what I'm feeling, and that's always been difficult.) Maybe I'll start with a story. Sort of a story.

Back when we were living in San Jose, we used to love going for a drive. Sometimes it would be to get someplace -- a convention in LA or Portland, a restaurant in Monterey or Big Sur, a show or the zoo in San Francisco... Sometimes it was a late-night drive trying to get a baby to go to sleep. That worked with our older kid, but not the younger -- everything was way too exciting. Oops.

The longer drives had a sound track -- Oak, Ash, and Thorn; Stan Rogers, Dave Clement, The Grateful Dead, ... I'll save that for another time, maybe a Saturday.

But eventually Colleen told me what I should have figured out sooner: that she just liked sitting next to me when I wasn't distracted by a book or a computer. Sometimes we'd talk; sometimes we'd get into an argument, but mostly we'd just look at the scenery and quietly enjoy each other's company. Often we'd take SR9 over the hill to Santa Cruz, North on Highway 1, over 92 to the ridge where we could turn onto SR35 and go home. There were redwoods at both ends, the ocean in between, and a conveniently-located fruit and vegetable stand somewhere between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. Sometimes we'd just turn around at Santa Cruz, or turn South and go to Gilroy or Monterey.

After we moved up to Seattle, we could circumnavigate Lake Washington, sometimes after a trip to our dentist in Bothell, and after moving to Whidbey go up over Deception Pass, South on I5, and back using the ferry from Mukilteo. It was always the journey that mattered, and the coming home.

I miss those drives.

I'm on a different journey these days. At least three journeys, actually: one literal and two metaphorical. And unlike my drives with Colleen, my immigration journey, my life journey, and my grief journey are both one-way. One foot in front of the other. "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow..." I often wake up with a quote or a bit of a song in my head. Sometimes I recite it to Bronx before I get out of bed, but I don't think he pays it much attention.

Recently, increasingly, the poem fragment I wake up with is the last verse and a half of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium":

Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

That's going to be a Songs for Saturday post as well some day. I'm not too happy with my body these days. It works even less well than it ever did. I'm not too happy with my brain, either. At least they're both still working.

I don't have any illusions about immortality -- eternity scares me -- nor any kind of afterlife besides the one I imagine in my memorial posts, which you can find in my Rainbow Bridge pages. But when I'm gone, I'll live on with her there as long as our friends, our families, and the Internet Archive remember us. That will do.

And somewhere over the The Rainbow Bridge Colleen is sitting, surrounded by cats, and holding a tall glass of gin-and-tonic. She raises her glass in the general direction of Midgard and takes another sip.