365 True Things: 115/Glads

I love gladioli—they make me glad! I especially love red-orange glads, though that particular color also makes me feel bittersweet. They were the favorite flower, and favorite color, of a friend of mine, Leslie, who was killed in a car crash in 2001: her husband swerved to avoid a deer and hit a concrete telephone pole instead. She was only forty-two, and had a six-year-old son, Jesse. Who must now be twenty. So very sad.

Leslie's birthday was in June, and her friends knew to shower her with red-orange glads.

I met Leslie working at a publishing business in San Francisco: we put together the printed programs for the symphony and opera. She then moved over to PC World magazine, and finally to MacWorld. I freelanced for all these publications each month during the production period—that was back in the day of doing paste-up and spec'ing photos to fit in rubylith boxes. Old school.

Leslie and I were in a book group together—she loved to read and had excellent taste in books. She also had big beautifully clear blue eyes and dimples. And a wonderful sense of humor.

While I was going through photos recently, I found a Christmas card from Leslie, from 2000. In it she mentioned troubles in her marriage but said that they were finally starting to work things through. She sounded optimistic, hopeful. I also found a picture of Jesse at age three, in the cockpit of a United airliner. And I found the "program" from her memorial service, which features a photo—as if she's peering out through the double-lined box—and the poem "The Wild Iris" by Louise Gluck:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again; whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Today when I saw they had glads at Safeway, and the right color, and for only $2.99 a bunch, I had to buy some.  Every year when they arrive, I think of Leslie and am glad I knew her. For too short a time, and not as well as I would have liked. But she enriched my life even so.

Reading "The Wild Iris" out loud to David this evening while he cooked pork chops, I cried. "It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth. // Then it was over: that which you fear, being / a soul and unable / to speak, ending abruptly." Love you and miss you, Leslie.