The last coupla days

So, I'm not blogging much. National Poetry Month takes up a little time, looking for the right poem to put up... looking for something I haven't read before. Learning about poets I hadn't known before.

Housewarming, Shmoop Style
And then life has been eventful and noneventful all at once. Dan had his housewarming party on Saturday night. Great people (great). Good food (incredible carnitas and everyone yummed and ummmed and I said, "Dan you should send out your recipe as a "Thank you for coming to my party."). Perfect space — Dan bought his shack (and/or shanty, you can pick) two years ago and my heart kind of sank because ohmigod there was so much to do and was my friend really moving into hobo land?

But he made good, as I knew he would and everybody oohed and ahhed about how far it had come and what a good job he had done. We stayed til one and Erin Tuttle had us playing a loud, raucus parlor game (are there parlor games anymore?) which would take too long to explain here but that kept us jumping up and yelling and pointing and clapping and hooting and all other et ceteras.

Memorial
Saturday was also the memorial for Adrien Brown and maybe that is why I haven't been writing. Adrien was a happy, easy-going, welcoming, friendly, quick-to-smile guy from the UK who'd been working in SLO town for years. I worked with him at the Hell Hole (tm NickB.) way back in the day when I was still figuring out what HTML tags were. I know it sounds contrite and cliche and oversimplistic, but Adrien really was one of the nicest guys you'd ever meet. Kind. Fun loving. Goofy. Cool. Adrien died on March 30/31 while walking home. He fell and hit his head.

There's a lot of life that doesn't make any sense at all.

Adrien's memorial was held at the Mission. "At the Mission?!" I had asked Tom because I never really thought of Adrien as a religious kind of guy, much less a Catholic. But Catholic he was and the Mission filled up with two soccer teams in their jerseys, every bartender in town, co-workers, dear friends, acquaintances, and the like. There were people who had gone to university with him in England. There were people who had only just met him once but thought so highly they still came to the service.

The priest was perfect: self-effacing, gracious, a good storyteller and seemed genuinely saddened by such a senseless loss. He said "think in your mind the first word that comes to your head when you think of Adrien" and everyone was very quiet. He had to coax this mostly non-church-going crowd to make a noise.

"Social," someone said. "Yes," said the father, "social. Adrien was very social, wasn't he...." and then he would trial off about Adrien's social nature. "Generous!" said someone else. "That's right," said the father, "Adrien was very generous" and then he said some more. Word after word tumbled out and he had us all thinking of the nicest parts of Adrien. And while I think tears were trailing down everybody's cheeks, thinking of all of his good qualities made you think good thoughts of Adrien instead of the sad, sad, sad ones.