CONTACT CAROLINE
facebook
rss
tumblr
twitter
goodreads
youtube

  • Home
  • Write Away Blog
  • Books
    • Books
    • Trompe l’Oeil
    • Heart Land
    • Gothic Spring
    • Ballet Noir
    • Book Excerpts
  • Video Interviews
  • Press
    • News
    • Print Interviews
    • Plays
    • Ballet Noir in the Press
    • Trompe l’Oeil In The Press
    • Gothic Spring In The Press
    • Heart Land Reviews
  • Contact
  • About
  • Resources
    • Writer Resources
    • Favorite Blogs
    • Favorite Artists



On Parting

Jul 17, 2017
by Caroline Miller
being unaware, friendship, schizophrnia, sense of loss
0 Comment
Yesterday my neighbor of almost twenty years moved away. She was a paranoid schizophrenic who often fought taking her medications. Sometimes, during a fearful spell, she’d call to ask me to sit with her. I watched, sometimes for hours, while she wept, or laughed or ranted about being spied upon by the FBI. Once I had to call for an ambulance because I was afraid she would hurt herself.

Image of Marc Chagall art

(Marc Chagall. courtesy:art.com)

She and I have grown old together and, like me, she attended Reed College and lives in a Victorian house. Unlike me, she has neglected her property for years. That level of order was beyond my neighbor’s ken. Sometimes I’d look out from my kitchen windows and grumble at the eye sore opposite. Sometimes, I wished she would move away… And now she has and all I feel is the pain left by the hollow.

I watched her nephew pull away from the curb in a U-haul carrying all her tattered belongings. As she and I had already said our goodbyes, I didn’t appear on the porch for a final wave. The truck disappeared and suddenly I realized I had no idea where she was going and that I would probably never see her again.

Tears clouded my eyes. I thought I knew my feelings but until that moment, I hadn’t a clue. I would miss this flawed but gifted poet who feared the FBI. All the years between us, all the worry and laughter was broken with the slamming of a truck door. My neighbor was already a memory.

The closing lines of a poem I’d written decades earlier sprang to mind. It seems appropriate to repeat them here:

But though we pranced like

                        Red-nosed clowns

                        To entertain the moon,

                        We could not stay its journey

                        Nor with laughter cancel ours.

(This blog first posted 6/6/2012)

Social Share

Contact Caroline at

carolinemiller11@yahoo.com

Portland, Oregon author Caroline Miller had distinguished careers as an educator, union president, elected official and artist/advocate.

Her play, Woman on the Scarlet Beast, was performed at the Post5 Theatre, Portland, OR, January/February 2015

Caroline published a serialized novelette, Marie Eau-Claire, on the website, The Colored Lens.  She also published the story Gustav Pavel,  a parable about ordinary lives, choice and alternate potential, on the website Fixional.co.

Caroline has published four novels

  • Ballet Noir
  • Trompe l’Oeil
  • Gothic Spring
  • Heart Land

Subscribe to Caroline’s Blog


 

Archives

Categories

YouTube-logo-inline2 To access and subscribe to my videos on YouTube, Click Here and click the Subscribe button.

Banner art “The Receptive” by Charlie White of Charlie White Studio

Web Admin: ThinPATH Systems, Inc
support@tp-sys.com

Subscribe to Caroline's Blog


 

Contact Caroline at

carolinemiller11@yahoo.com

Sitemap | Privacy Notice

AUDIO & VIDEO VAULT

View archives of Caroline’s audio and videos interviews.


Copyright © Books by Caroline Miller