January 26, 2005 - 10:57 AM

It's Pronounced "long A"-lin

You're not supposed to have flowers in bloom and 60 degree weather in January, unless you're south of the Equator. It's just too strange. But here we are, tumbling into the throes of mid-Winter, with blizzards eating up the cars in the northeast; and I, driving around West L.A., smell fresh, fragrant flowers. The triggers of spring-time smells, slightly warm winds, and twinkling sun cause the familiar throbbings of the heart.

Oh terrible, lovely perfumes of the spring, how you taunt me with your gentle prodding of dormant memories to the surface. The ache of these old wounds in my chest feels ten times too large for the capacity of the cavity to contain. In the jumble of pieces of my past that now swell in the cockles of my heart, I feel the tug of the springtime of my 19th year as I struggled to establish who "me" was at Amherst...I skip back a few years to my days in high school, running around the track while the days were still short and the afternoons still crisp and I was still frustratingly unformed...and then I remember grade school, and the recess yard, kickball, field day, cherry trees in blossom, and little league baseball.

These things, these personal little fragments...how can I get across the way they tug at my heartstrings? How can I paint the feelings they stir up, the way I become lost in my heart? I cannot control their overwhelming sway, I can only allow the disconsolate longings to fill up my chest and then dissipate on their own. Do you know what I mean?

************
I skipped out on the Kinnie Starr show last night, but I had a good excuse, honest! Phil's sister-in-law, Elin, was in town for a few days and we hooked up for dinner with my cousins. I haven't seen her since Phil's wedding, even though she moved to San Francisco a year and a half ago, and I've wanted to go up to S.F. ever since I moved out here. There are people there that I want to see, there are shops I want to go to, and there are baseball stadiums that I want to explore, I just haven't made a determined effort to transport myself north of L.A.

Elin's a cool girl, awfully cute (just like Jen..and their nieces), and smart who I've only met, like, twice. So I was surprised by how worried and frustrated I felt when Phil called me last fall to shoot the shit, and he dropped the bomb that Elin had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. My brother's wife's sister who i hardly know has cancer, and suddenly I feel helpless, angry, confused, sad. I want to break something, anything, and drive to S.F. to give her a giant hug. Fortunately, I'm of sound enough mind that I don't want to break her and hug San Francisco. I've been worrying about her ever since and feel really bad that Soph and I didn't make it to S.F. after Vegas, but good news; Elin's finished with chemo, has surgery next week, and then only has some radiation and remission left to deal with. I was so relieved and happy when she told me this at dinner, I discreetly exclaimed "Yay!" Why did I react in such an emotionally attached way?

Because, as dorky as it sounds, Elin's my sister. Screw that "blank-in-law" crap or that "once-removed" dren: if you married into my family, you are a part of my family, no-holds-barred. We've seen this rule apply to Matt, who married my cousin Sharon, and who I now refer to as "my cousin Matt" even though he's white. And this applies to Elin, too. I will worry about her just as much as I will worry about Phil or Jen. She matters to Jen, she matters to Phil, she matters to Me.

We had dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant called Tanino's in Westwood. She hadn't met Margaret, Matt, or Sharon before, but they all got along like gangbusters. Tony, of course, was wary of the white she-devil, but eventually warmed up to her a bit. And I'm joking. She turned down Tony's offer of after-dinner-family-game-time because she had to get up at 6:30 this morning for the deposition that she's down here for, but we might wrangle her into some family initiation rituals if she comes back to L.A. next week.

Now Listening To : Caroline Lavelle- Brilliant Midnight
Random Thought : No, she didn't dye her hair, Tony. It was a wig. Apparently, she decided to leave the pink wig at home.

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