 All right. It's six o'clock, so I'm going to go ahead and get started. Hope that you are all here in the right place. We're here to hear from Tony Morozovic about Spell Heaven and other stories in conversation with Celeste Chan. We are so thrilled that you're here with us. I want to let you know that we've partnered with your fabulous local queer independent bookstore fabulous of books and our trusty chat monitor will be putting in the link in the chat for you to purchase this book and of course you can always check this out from your local library as well. So hello and welcome everyone. My name is Christina Mitra and I'm the program manager for the Hormel LGBTQIA Center of San Francisco public library. It is my utter pleasure to welcome you to tonight's program with Tony Morozovic and conversation with Celeste Chan. Whoo, we're all in for such a treat. Before we begin, I would like to start with a land acknowledgement. So we are on a lonely land. And this is a land acknowledgement that was developed in partnership with the American Indian cultural district of San Francisco which I believe is one of its kind and hopefully the model for many more throughout our nation. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledged, excuse me, the San Francisco Public Library Commission acknowledges that we occupy the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramatish aloney peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that the Ramatish aloney understand the interconnectedness of all things, and have maintained harmony with nature for millennia. We honor the Ramatish aloney people for their enduring commitment to Mother Earth. As the indigenous protectors of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatish aloney have never seated lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as caretakers of this place, as well as for all peoples reside in their traditional territory. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples, and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramatish community. We recognize to respectfully honor Ramatish peoples, we must embrace and collaborate meaningfully to record indigenous knowledge in how we care for San Francisco, and all its people. We recognize the land acknowledgement and we just wanted to recognize that since the library is an institution dedicated to free and equal access information. We hope that the land acknowledgement inspires you to reflect on this history to appreciate indigenous peoples culture history and ongoing contributions to society. Thank you. We have some announcements to begin before we hear from our fabulous writers and authors. We do have some wonderful programs coming up here at the Hormel LGBTQIA Center. This Sunday, please don't miss in partnership with Foglifter Press, generational treasures in afternoon of queer and trans storytelling. This is not an afternoon to be missed and that is back here on our virtual library at 2pm this Sunday the 25th. Look for the link for registration in the chat. We're really excited that we're starting off a new zine making meetup every third Tuesday here at the main library in the Paley room. It's at six o'clock, starting October 18. You guys are so welcome. Even if you think you don't have a creative bone in your body we you are so welcome we actually know that people have attended this workshop, never created a zine before and now are on a zine making frenzy so you two can be inspired. All of these programs are brought to you by the Hormel LGBTQIA Center and if you're joining us for the first time. Welcome. We're so glad that you're here. We are a unique dedicated space for LGBTQIA history, arts, culture and memory. We're truly one of a kind in an urban public library. Since 1996 we've been the gateway for all kinds of library offerings related to the LGBTQIA community. Since we have over 10,000 books over 200 archival collections public programs and community partnerships to make sure that your LGBTQIA needs are met all throughout the year so if you have ideas about things you'd like to see at the center books you'd want us to carry archives that you think would be interesting to us please reach out to us you can email us at Hormel at sfpl.org and you can also follow us on Facebook. And we'd love for you to sign up for a newsletter which we curate each month with book lists upcoming programs and community offerings. Today at long last, what you're all here for this wonderful program that we have set up for you tonight. It's my very wonderful pleasure to introduce our two special guests. My name Marosa which grew up in an Croatian American fishing family in Everett Washington. Shout out to the PNW folks previous books include pink harvest, the takeaway been queer street, my oblique strategies, and the rooms we make our own. She is an alumna of McDowell Hedgebrook, Jirasi resident artists program, amongst others, a multiple push cart prize nominee, and she named San Francisco Library literary laureate. Thank you for that Tony. After early years working in various labor jobs she began teaching creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1991. Go Gators. A professor emeritus of creative writing at San Francisco State she lives with her wife in California. Give it up for Tony. And then before I invite Tony to speak I'm going to introduce our other special guest Celeste Chan. Celeste moved to San Francisco in search of creative community in 2004. Since that time, she founded and directed queer rebels. I've enjoyed many, many of those amazing shows curated experimental films for mixed NYC created a one woman show and toured toward with sister spit. She taught queer ancestor writing workshops for LGBTQ youth for four years. And now she is writing her memoir. Please go ahead and unmute and welcome with all your love, Tony and Celeste. Take it away folks. Welcome Tony and Celeste. That's great. That is great. It's great to see friendly faces across the zoom screen. And thank you so much Kevin and Christina and Tony, and your new book. Oh my goodness congratulations. Well, thank you but and that was again that was wonderful. Christina that was just a great, a great intro and I know Kevin is behind the scenes doing lots of important stuff but you all have been so welcoming to us so thank you. And Celeste, it is a big old treat to be chatting with you and, and to see the rest of you out there who have your screens on and even if you don't have your screens on I'm picturing you so thank you for being here. And I have Tony to thank for the. I can bring you the ocean anytime you want just ask me I'll bring it to you. So what do we do now Christina, you know we're so such pros at this. We're such pros that we've kind of gone through it and now we're fatigued and now we need to be told what to do is that what how it goes. Yeah, go ahead. Let's go. Let's go. Celeste, start us off. What do you think. Yeah, yeah. I'm Tony I wondered if you might want to read a passage from the book and tell us a bit more about it. I have. Yeah I would love to. I mean I've. Yes, oh no it's disappearing into the sea but please tell us. The book disappeared into the sea that is perfect that's actually just perfect. Well, you know for, for people who haven't heard about the book. But it is actually based on life events that I've fictionalized and so there is a queer couple and they moved to a seacoast town. They are initially welcomed into their neighborhood with open arms. And then, and what happens is that the narrator grew up in a, in a Croatian American fishing family and immigrant community up in the Northwest. And so when she ends up in an academic world, it feels really foreign to her. It feels just very, very foreign so what she, what she's decides to do is she go decides to go down to a place that she feels very familiar, and the familiar place is the sea. And there's a quote at the start of the book from CD right, the wonderful poet CD right, and it is, you will wake up in a year in a dear yet unfamiliar place you will wake up in a dear yet unfamiliar place. And the thing is, is that the sea is familiar to the narrator. It's a new place so it's unfamiliar it's dear yet unfamiliar and when she gets down there she finds. You know in the academic world she didn't it felt very foreign to her but somehow this group of outside in outsider community down by the beach beach she feels very comfortable. She suddenly feels comfortable with this group. So the very start of the book I'm going to read just a real short passage at the start. She's called the devil wind, and initially this narrator goes to some pier, even farther down the coast, because she wants to get close to something that feels familiar. So here's the devil wind a chill settles on the empty crab boxes stacked around the storage room a chill that doesn't so much descend as rise up from the sea below the crab fishery up through the planks of the pier, the planks of the fishery stands through the concrete first floor where the crab tub, crab tubs hold their incarcerated. A chill that climbs the wet stairs to the storage room door doesn't bother to knock comes right in, carrying with it the smell of crab and diesel and brined to find me here where I sit at a makeshift desk with a pen and the pad of paper before me turning to pulp in all of this wetness, the page on top, a damp blank screen, which stays empty. Why go to the small tight window of the page when a bigger page beckons a large picture window right above the desk that looks out on the harbor. Why sit when you can stand and watch crab boats very in and out and see them head to see empty, riding high above the harbor service with their barnacle keels showing their pants hitched up high, then watch the return in the evening, the waddling to set procession after a heavy meal of cod or hell of it or salmon their belt lines well below the water. I can stand, I can see the Lucy, or the intrepid, or the Irene be pull up to the dock right outside, see the docs rusty crane swing out over a boat. The roped basket at the end of the cables hook swings down like an empty string bag, you take the market, only to come up full to bursting with crabs, their red arms gesturing this wet this way and that was so much to say. That's the breakwater at the horizon, a straight blue line of sea by sex and see white skies blank screen waves scribble their cursive below the line filling up that page. A reminder, I'm supposed to be writing working, yet have no precedent for this type of work. There's nothing in my DNA. This isn't the work of my captain, the luck, my father the life and death job of the fishing boat captain on the Wicked Bering Sea. You're the work of my mother her youth spent standing on her feet all day packing tuna before child labor laws gave the cannery owners of conscience. When I found this place. I tell them I was looking for a new perch that I walked out onto this pier one day, and simply asked the owner of the fishery, a man named Dan, if there was a place around here where I could buy. See I told him, I grew up around boats, the smell of Brian is perfume to me the smell of twine of diesel perfume. Know how to bullshit. Having learned this on the docs when I was young. I know how to swear. How you say you motherfucking piece of shit with conviction. I told Dan I had this half baked theory. If I were near the sea again on the dock again, maybe I'd be able to tap into that salty vein of memory were called tales I heard listening to the fishermen bullshit. What if like them, you woke each morning and looked forward to the day's prospects, the shining possibilities of luck and work and whether. What if you could look forward to the adventure no matter the conscious consequences, throw caution to the wind and believe there would be. Now that I've gained the perch. How do I get past the window in front of me. How do I get from this chair onto that sea. To that life from this life. That's the dilemma. And that's her dilemma. How does she get there. How does she, how does she leave the interior world of academia and get outside and out to a world that feels expansive and larger and full of memory. So, she starts she better head on down to the sea is what she better do. She better head down to that place right behind your head so that's that's what she better do. Right here. Right. Right the sea that you've given me. Yeah. Well, what a wonderful place to start Tony. I feel like there's so much there, like that. There's a line that you said about the salty vein of memory, and the, and I think trying to both trying to reclaim that past, like, this narrator is like I hear within that the struggle to be an artist being trying to get closer to those fisherman stories to the past to family, and then being in this. Like, I feel like there's transformation or possibility within what you just read. And I wondered if in the process of. Originally I was going to ask you what sparked the collection but perhaps I'm going to add to that. So it's both like what what sparked the collection for you. And then it's also, was there, was there anything surprising as you were writing as these stories were coming together. Yeah, you know, I think the surprising thing for me. There were a number of surprises but one was that the stories were built over time and they were again they came from life events that I fictionalized, but initially this narrator goes for this walk and while the people are familiar, they're familiar, they're, they're, how should I say this, they're familiar and familiars. They, they talk a language that she feels comfortable talking. They don't. It's not elevated. It's like let's just, what I call the art of bullshit. They know how to tell a good story. Well, let's just tell the story and I'll tell you one and you tell me one. And, and the other part that I think that starts to surprise me in it is that over time the narrator I think feels a certain I don't know. I don't know if other people feel this but a certain loneliness just a loneliness in the world, a loneliness, even though she's happily partnered. There's a certain lonely feeling and that these little, these little tiny encounters with human beings end up being the things that lift her, and that she slowly. She slowly starts to see that some of her assumptions about people like oh that guy's a drunk on the bench. Oh that woman's living in her car with her kid. And you know all the little assumptions that you come up with and storylines about people. Well, she starts to find out that those storylines are really but the assumptions aren't very useful. If you're getting, if you go just a bit deeper. And so over time, slowly. That's the surprise of the collection I think to me is that not only that she feels more comfortable down there with with people than she does in academia but that she feels closer less lonely. She learned something that assumptions aren't the best way to operate in the world. She learned some things that she needed to learn and I don't think she knew what she needed to learn before she went down there. Yeah, yeah, no I definitely see the journey and the transformation through here. And I think one of the stories that did really stand out. I mean many of the stories stood out to me but I remember that encounter with the mother who was living out of her car and appeared to be on meth and her little girl. It was a narrator's internal struggle and I felt that was handled very sensitively that you know, do, do I need to intervene. And at one point the narrator's partner says listen a present mother is, is better than a dead mother. And I think yeah I definitely see that like, sensitive observing of and there's so much like neighborhood character in here, there's so much of, of the people who are in it. I actually wonder jumping around to take questions. Go ahead. Okay, I'm jumping that word or Tony. Yeah, because I believe you talked a bit about this about what it would mean for the narrator to claim a place among the other seaside outsiders, especially after time in academia. I was curious about that line and one of the stories. I hope I'm paraphrasing correct correctly please correct me if I'm wrong, but quote if I've been a different gender and maybe I would have been captain. I wonder if you could speak a bit more about that. Well I like the narrator I ended up in a place I didn't anticipate. I really imagined when I was young and part of the part there's a story that I'll read later who I used to be. And I often like ask people who they thought they were going to be what they wanted to be when they were young. And it usually turns out they're never that that rarely happens that they turned out what they wanted to be. So, so the, so the narrator assumed that she would do physical work because her parents did physical work and that that's what she would do for her life. She would do physical jobs and sometimes be the first woman to do those jobs on all male crews but she would go and do that and that that was a great way, you know hard work was a great way to make a living. So she, I think. I think she. Let me get back to the original question. She's just, she surprised she didn't anticipate that she would be land where she landed. And I think that's true for a lot of people, they don't anticipate they would they landed where they landed. And then you then you, you make a life from there but it's, it's just not anywhere that I thought I would be or this narrator thought she would be. I think part of the wonderful thing about teaching and this is back to the good thing about teaching at the university and teaching in a creative writing department is that when you were in classes it was like you were captaining a boat. When you were working working with a crew, like the crew, you're all together, you're all together on this vessel, you're inside. Everyone has to like participate and pull. Now I'm going to really go with the metaphor, pull in the metaphorical nets. I mean you remember the Celeste, I mean you know you all have to do it together, and the captain might give you a few little, like okay, a direction or here do this do that. But you all have to work together and it has that same quality inside the classroom sometimes as being maybe a captain on a boat. There is a great, great quote I just read the other day from a fisherwoman named Tella Absin. And I was, she's a fisher poet, and she fishes up in the Bering Sea with her partner Joel. And she was in an article the other day and what I wrote it down, what is it, it's not a, it's not the catching part, it's the fishing part. I was talking about fishing, it's not the catching part, it's the fishing part and I thought, that's just like writing. It's like, and so, I think this is a jumble of things I'm saying but with teaching and I didn't end up on a boat on the sea as a sea captain it's a different type of captaining that happened in teaching writing. And when people would catch an idea say in class. That was pretty cool. That was pretty wonderful. Yeah, that's what I would say. Yeah, I love, I love that fishing metaphor catching the idea, the, yeah, the fishing for the creative process. I think I was curious about I know that if you've written about happenstance across different genres within the pink harvest title. I wonder if you could speak more about that kind of possibilities portals happenstance. Yeah. This little tiny story I want to tell you, because I think that it happened this week. Okay. This is happenstance. Okay. And this is real life. My wife and I are going down to the beach with the dogs down to the sea. It's in the afternoon we have to go down a big hill to get there. And there's a stop sign at the top of the hill. And we stop. And there's two little girls that want to cross the cross the way cross and my wife says okay go ahead and cross, you can cross. So, they're crossing and across the street, there's a woman picking up. She's cutting sunflowers in her front yard she has a number of sunflowers in her front yard. My wife yells out the window. They're beautiful. The woman takes the sunflowers runs across the street, puts them in the open drivers window and says, go, go. And there's cars lined up behind that and behind us. And I couldn't believe it that this woman didn't even think for a moment. She didn't think for a second about generosity or I think I'll give them this she just went like that. And then, and as I was leaving I saw that those two little girls went into that house. And then we're driving back from the beach, still kind of stunned by it. I see the little girls in there in an open garage and their one is singing and one is dancing. They're making up some kind of dance and I wave the sunflowers at them and they all laugh. And it's this. It's an extraordinary moment. It's happened. It just happened. It just happened. Right. And this is about writing in the creative process. A week before that. There's a woman at the beach named Mary she's an Irish nurse who came here from Ireland in the 16th moved to the Haydash very. Now she's 80 she's a wonderful person. And I knew she was going to be 80. And I went down to the beach I saw her in her car, and I had brought down a small little vase with a little flower in it. And I caught up to her car and got out and handed it through the window to her. Okay. Those two events are connected, but they weren't planned. I mean, I was going to give a flower to Mary, but they weren't planned. So, in terms of the creative process, what happens is that this moment of happenstance in this moment, back into each other and start to come together in a piece of writing. And that happens with memory to you're walking along and something in the present moment reminds you of something else. And then you put that memory in that piece so that I think happenstance is actually where everything is happening that I'm interested in. I don't want anything other than happenstance. I do find that that's true too. I'm going to ask you a question, Celeste. Okay, oh, I hadn't thought of responding to that question I think what what you said made me think a lot about neighborliness and oh maybe this is happenstance I was on Twitter I saw this Mr Rogers thread, where he was saying. Mr Rogers was saying how to forgive someone who's been mean to you that might include yourself so that you can be neighborly to others and that neighbor is anyone who you have met. I may be so it made me I was looking at that last night on the internet so maybe maybe there's a resonance it's talking to this book that is in the sea. But you know, neighborliness. It is, it does strike me that lately these very little connections with people end up being an extraordinary. God, I don't know a necessary thing to during these days, especially during this time, but that's the thing that lifts right. It's just like a little well here, like this woman I still can't get over that this. There's a great quote from Lucy by the sea the new book by Elizabeth Strout and it's the quote is, What is it like to be you. And I was thinking what is it like to be that woman. That woman who would just so generously do that. I mean that's where I think where the fiction, where you start to imagine things but it's, it's striking isn't it. Neighborliness. Hey, how you doing. You know, it's a, it's a small thing. Yeah. Yeah, those moments of connection those moments of, yeah, absolutely. Like, another thing I was thinking of as I read spell heaven was the. No, why is it escaping me those. Jump over here. Oh yeah, I was really I think struck by the moments you included on the page of like imagining into the what if, and into the gaps, and, and you, you have that here. And I think speaking of portals to memory, which you mentioned earlier. I remember that moment in the story the one second sandwich where one moment the narrator's in the classroom and there's a trigger, and then it's, we're tumbling back into memory. We're going back into going back into this other action. I wonder if you could speak more about some of those tumbles into memory. But it happened just instantaneously. It just happens. I know you. In that story, the narrators in the classroom there's a student who's who ends up doing a presentation on Robert Olin Butler's book severance about what happens to historical figures when they are beheaded and there's the last 200 240 minutes. It's not 200 to an last to 200 words they think I can't I have to go back and look at it. It's this little short period of time that you still have consciousness. And so this kid in class is doing that, and that triggers in the narrator that her best friend's mother was decapitated in an accident when she was young. And also, that classes about teaching lessons and in the memory. She and her best friend learned from that mother how to make a one second sandwich. So, so it just the memory just, if you allow it, you dive into it every other second, you're talking with a person and they've had an operation. You immediately think of, Oh God, I remember what it was like to be in the hospital. So your dives, you immediately just start diving, but if you include that in the writing, then it becomes a kind of a weave that you're in the present. And then you dive and then you're in the present and then you dive. And that's a particular type of movement in writing that can keep some sense of momentum and a kind of a thickening. You write, I mean, you write also memoir, and you're writing a memoir now and I mean is there's because we've worked together, you know, there's like the present and then there's just, it just, it's a natural fall into memory. I think that if you keep yourself in the present that's the time when it feels a little bit more, at least to me a little bit more claustrophobic. There's a lot of incredible journeys to the past, and or complicated. Yeah, and or complicated. That's right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, because that that dive in the past was like a whole journey as well like the story of the friendship the story of that tragic accident. But yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Well, maybe I should read one, one story from the piece. And what do you think that sounds good. Yeah. There is, I'm going to read one kind of a story from the pieces toward the end just to give you a little bit of the flavor of the people that she meets. And this happens more towards the end of the piece. This is another of the book. It's a man that she sees every day at the beach, and it's about also who we used to be. That's the other thing, another thread in the book, the narrator used to be used to be other people, other jobs other communities that she grew up in. And then, then you look back on that a little bit. So who I used to be. I can tell from the start of my walk on the beach promenade that he's at his post can spot the top of his faded baseball cap in the distance. Most of his body is obscured by a concrete, concrete casement housing trash can, but as I get closer I see his legs crossed the knee, his tan gans, his flip flops, a few more steps up pops his face, florid flushed eyes at half staff, smile on full beam. His body is every day all day in his spot on the bench kitty corner to the chat and shoe cafe in the pier, where he holds forth, holds court holds my attention whenever I pass his spot. One morning a few months ago I mentioned crystal the counter person at the chat of the chat and shoe that the guy sitting on the bench outside told me the weather was about to change. I've been talking to Tommy Bench, she says that's what we call him. That's Tommy out there, and that's his bench. She went on to tell me that he was one should once a checkered safely. As soon as she said this. I remember seeing him when my wife and I first moved to this town standing behind the checkout counter dressed in the official Safeway uniform, short sleeve shirt navy blue apron blue tie shiny name badge. I was wondering with the customers as he scanned the groceries. Crystal says he lost that job and never found another. That was years ago. What does he live on now. I noticed his buddies often bring him a can of beer when his supply gets low. Here's looking at your kid. He wants yo, then raised his can in a bag and top and toasted me as I passed Tommy Tommy and I have our own form of chit chat. I'll say something about the weather about the local baseball team. What about those giants, and he'll have some funny come back. I laugh and give a short wave and carry on with my walk. I never hang around for a longer channel. My wife says it's because I'm a solitary, but maybe it's that I just don't know where the conversation my way. We're from such different worlds. I've been attending lessons to students at the university, a very privileged position. Tommy tosses out bon bon to the seat seagulls his privilege perch. I've worked a lot of blue collar jobs in the past truck driver labor or swimming pool operator at a consolation, but that was before I landed a job in the halls of academia. What would he and I have. Would he and I have anything in common now, something that would tip the scales in our favor. Tommy has colored up. It's obvious he's a drinker and alcoholic, whereas Stevie once called him a drunkard. I told her that drunkard was such an archaic word that the word harkened back to skid row and prohibition and songs like little brown jug. Well harken isn't too modern now either isn't she replied. He has the eyes the unfocused gaze the slurred speech, the ever present brown paper bag at his side crinkled around the beer can. There are the obvious signs. Tommy sits on his bench every morning and afternoon deeply pickled in a Hawaiian t shirt cargo pants a baseball cap propped up against his bench is the driftwood walking stick he carries with him wherever he goes more like a staff and a walking like a staff a drunken apostle would use to lead his flock. There's permit man, who has a running feud with the big break repair shop near his house, something about the shop, not having a permit. He made a plywood cut out of a not so cutesy clown, nailed it to his backyard fence that faces the shop. The cartoon bubble coming out of the clown's mouth reads, got permit. There's the chewer who talks out loud to himself as he walks a running stream of conspiracy theories about the government. Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, Medicare fraud, Medicare fraud, who choose and spit sunflower seeds leaving a trail of split seeds in his There's happy day, who always says those two words and only those two, whenever I see him, I hear he used to be a merchant. Every day, each one finds a spot on the bench chat with Tommy to chew the fat and shoot the breeze. Tommy's always at the head of that welcome wagon. He's always ready to share a sip and a smoke is rarely alone on that set of bar stools with the black magic marker. He's inked each person's name on the bench, where they always sit like place cards, set out for a fancy dinner party. It's late afternoon by the time I get down to the shore. This is a month later. I button up my jacket start my walk spy Tommy's cap in the distance. It had taken Arctic blast to keep him from his bench. When I reach in my stop say hey and we start bullshitting about nothing important. How the Giants lost again how they blew it in the night. I compliment him on his fall outfit, plaid flannel shirt, khaki Bermuda shorts, a royal blue baseball cap I haven't seen him wear before. This one sports the logo of the Golden State Warriors. The cap has a small tear in the brim, like the cap I say, got it at goodwill as is he says pointing to the tear, like me as is I say, or is it as you were. I give him a quick salute and start to move on. Then I stop. I don't know why my wife says I always have an exit strategy. Maybe it's this feeling I have about not wanting to get too close. Or it could be that only when I'm alone do I feel to free to think my thoughts. I've got something I want to show you he says he's slurring his speech a little but I catch his drift. He reaches into a shirt pocket and pulls out a small square photograph. His hand is shaking as he holds the photo up to me here. Take a look. I take the photo from his hand staring back at me a handsome young guy in his 20s or early 30s, full head of hair big grand clear eyed confident looking, the look of a guy who can handle whatever life throws in him. It's like Tommy like I've never seen him. Like I've never known him. I used to own a house he says up on Sunset Ridge, beautiful deck and everything. The wife got that and everything else. I try to picture him years ago in his prime with his dreams and hopes and plans for the future with his life still ahead of me. You cut quite a figure I say with a smile. He looks me straight in the eye as if to say, look again damn it. You're missing something. It gives a cough like he's clearing his throat. Then in a voice as serious as I've ever heard him say, he says, this is who I used to be. Who he used to be not just a guy on this bench with the half can of beer hanging out with the rest of the beach can a guy who had a life with the wife a house a job and responsibilities with cash coming in. A person with a pension plan and health coverage and whatever other benefits a lifetime of indentured servitude to Safeway offers. As if I need more evidence he lifts his shirts. They're in his skinny forearm, a tattooed column of blue letters runs down to his wrist. I tried to decipher the code but the letters don't combine to make up any word I know. One initial for the name of each member of my family. I tell you he says proudly a photo and arm of beer, the sea, who we used to be. Who is the chewer in a former life or permanent man or happy day or me. I don't tell Tommy that I once worked all those blue collar jobs that I went to school and wrote some stories and now teach at a university that I never wanted to follow the rules academic or otherwise. I married and divorced and came out and married the love of my life. But when I was young I wanted to grow up and be a sea captain and watch the waves roll by that I was once that person, and that person, and that person, and now this is who I am. A woman walking alone by the sea, a person who soon to call it a day on that cush university get ready to leave it all behind. I look who I used to be is still in here, tucked inside my shirt pocket tucked inside the skin. A grocery checker becomes a drunkard. The truck driver becomes a professor. A merchant Marine becomes the minister of happiness. Transformers every one of us. I hand his photo back to him watches he slips it in his shirt pocket. He looks up and gives me a grin. There's nothing here to fear. What if I joined Tommy on the bench, if I sat right down next to him, if I didn't rush on and instead left behind my monkish ways. If I went to the local liquor store and brought back a bottle of four roses to share. What if like the old timey song, I harkened back to another gentler time and realized there is no separation in the land beyond the sky, as my friend Henry says, and then went a step further and believe there's no separation right here on earth. If I had a revelation like the monk Thomas Merton once had on the streets of Louisville, that he loved all the people, even those seeming strangers that none of us were alien to each other. Would Tommy accept me as is with the others. I make my move. I walk over to Tommy and sit down. I sit right next to him. He laughs a nervous laugh and scoots over a bit and laughs again. We both fall silently sit there staring out of the sea. Two surfers are trying to catch a few waves. Hey Tommy, why here every day this spot always the same spot. Well I don't have anywhere else to be. I don't have a job he says. I don't mention that I once knew that he did. You know that's not quite true he adds and gives me a wink. I'm in the coast guard. Oh yeah. Yeah, I guard the coast. Don't let your guard down a toss back and he laughs. After a moment he says hey what are you sitting on. This must be his lead up to a joke so I say in high English, my arse kind sir will always look down before you sit down you never know what you'll find. Maybe he's nervous about us sitting so close, or maybe he stuck chewing gum on the bench I get up, make a big show of looking down where I'm going to sit. And that's when I see it. New letters inked onto the bench. My name with the drawing of a tiny anchor. They're right there with all the others in the row with the ink names of the surfer dude and crystal and the chore and permit man with kite man who died from a heart attack last year his name beginning to fade. Here it is, the proof, the acknowledgement, what I've wanted all along to be accepted to be in with this out crowd. Jesus Tom you have no idea what this means to me no greater honor. And I can't finish up. I tear up. Tommy turns red takes a sweep from his can. He's embarrassed as I am to lighten it up I offer him a line I learned from the crab King. Listen, if I'm lying I'm dying. I'm going to back down and put my arm around his shoulder. I don't move on. We sit there together silently for the rest of the afternoon, and watch the sunset take the sky through the color spectrum, color after color, after color. So, brava brava. So that's, you know, that there's that wonderful quote from Thomas Merton about, and no one, no one is no one is it stranger than like, you know, suddenly this, this sense of all these people that you don't know are strangers you don't know them, you better not get too close, whatever. And that's true actually even in the woman's work world. It's important to. It's important that she makes some kind of this is it the line from Toni Morrison, like to vault the mere blue air that separates us is the line to vault the mere blue air that separates us that's what she's trying to do. And I think she's trying to do that there too. Yeah. Yeah, so who did you used to be Celeste. I was going to say that was so poignant that I think especially that moment of the little photograph and that moment of witnessing and then it kind of ripples out. Like, it's it's both about Tommy Bench and it's about the narrator and all of these folks who are marginalized and I think not full not fully seen a lot of the time. And I think like that fullness and that richness and that chance. Oh my God, going back to happen stance or going back to that possibility. Like, she does sit down. Like, there is the anchor. And, but that's true. The march, the people who are not seen or aren't acknowledged or aren't don't get in the paper. I think that that I think that that's very true and and again that she really does start to. She just just starts to see that her job is that she has to open up. She has to like, she has to say hello, she has to like make a move. I mean, and people have to make a move back you know I always say at the beach you know you see a person you see him the first time and you guys, you know you pass by. That's a stranger. The next time you give them a little nod. One day you smile at them. And then the next day you say hey, and then you know and I mean you know it's like this slow process but you know it's that that she has to, she has to be willing to be less closed. Right. So that's the. Yeah. Then she founds her finds a group. Yeah. So, good. Good. Is this the chat time. I think so I think this is the chat time if folks have questions and thank you so much Tony like a beautiful reading that a beautiful journey. Well, and Celestia again.