I was shopping last week at Salvation Army in Portland OR, looking for something---anything---white. A well-worn and much loved nighty didn’t exactly jump off the rack at me, but instead demurely lured me in and there commanded my attention. It was the kind of nighty that hangs loose and straight to below the knee. 100% cotton, the fabric thin as wet tissue paper from practicality and the former owner’s loyalty to simplicity. Plain lace around the collar, the color so transparent pink that a careless eye would call it white. It was definitely pink though, and reminded me of gramma. It was two dollars and now it is mine. When I slip inside after a bath fresh and clean, it feels like gramma---suggesting nothing in the slightest of sexuality, but overwhelmingly irresistible for the sheer femininity of it.

At the 2003 International Raw and Living Foods Festival last week in the Oregon mountains, I met a funky raw lady from New York City named Echo. It was easy speaking with her right away. I get excited by that and somehow within a conversation about health, I don’t really know how, but somehow I shared that I am bi-polar. Echo spoke these words; “You must be so creative”... Something frozen inside me thawed. She was the first to ever have reacted that way. Could it be that others like me are overwhelmingly creative as well? Echo may never know the gift she gave to me that day.

I have a best girlfriend from Chicago, whose couch tonite I inhabit, who is expecting. Expecting miracles from the mundane, expecting magick from an egg shell, expecting the more and more independent being in her belly to have a dream of light, give the secret handshake, tap the morris code, proclaim the Open Says Me, and rearrange her insides to make a grand entrance into this world within the fortnight. Olivia with her chic hair cuts. Olivia wearing classy black. Olivia turning heads on the dance floor, now savoring every moment of pregnancy’s sweet surrender---my role model in motherdom. In my mind I imagine her wearing flawless red lipstick---like the day she was married, like the day we met---as she separates part of herself for the life of this healthy baby, smothered in life’s fluid and overwhelmingly red lipstick kisses.

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