Castroville. My sister Gail was born fifteen years and one day before I was. I scarcely knew her when I was young; she was away in college at Centenary and then she got married to Sam and they lived in California, where he was from. Sam's folks ran a health food store in Castroville starting way back, I think in the 1930s. Very early hippies. There were two things we got from Sam's folks: alfacon and salve. Alfacon was compressed alfalfa pills; I suppose the con meant concentrated. You had to take a lot of them. They were supposed to improve everything about your health; alterative is the herbalist term. Salve was ground up aspirin mixed with petroleum jelly, and it was actually pretty good for minor skin irritations. Just a little gritty.
La Mercè. I dropped in on La Mercè in the early 2000s when I traveled to Spain with my wife and Gail and Billy. This was in the early years of my marriage, just as I was beginning to settle into a miserable ease. She and I had taken a three week trip to Italy a couple years before. Spain was our second and final European outing and Barcelona was our first stop. None of us had ever heard of La Mercè. We had no idea we were parachuting into a joyful drunken war zone. When we arrived at our bed and breakfast in El Born it was going on all around us. We were miserably jetlagged. Gail and Billy went to bed. But I wanted to find out what the hell was going on, and my wife gamely came with. We wandered out into smoke filled streets where correfocs were going on all around us. A couple of times right at us. We would have been run over as the clueless tourists we were but for the grace and good humor of the people around us, snatching us out of harm's way. It was an incredible experience. We wandered around happily lost for hours until the blinding smoke finally drove us back inside.
Forever. The fifteen year interval between our births fascinated me. I learned some math from it. When I was about six I announced that when I turned fifteen I'd be exactly half her age. After that our ages would be closer every year than they were the year before. I said like that, without using words I didn't know, like proportionally. Our birthdays became a special connection between us. In Melbourne that connection got drugified. We celebrated our joint birthdays with joints and endless toasts. After I left college and the Fishfarm, we drifted apart. Gail and Billy followed me to Boulder and joined a Self-Harmonizing group. They didn't stay very long. A few years after I migrated to Seattle they followed me out here but lived in Shelton. We all went on a big adventure in those days, our joint trip to Spain. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Gail and Billy were regular visitors at the house I bought with the help of my dad. Thanks Dad. That's when I saw Gail leave me, during those years. They'd drive over and we'd have a big fancy dinner with lots of wine and planked salmon or whatever I was into at the time. Gail and Billy would discreetly augment the wine by smoking dope. At some point Gail and I would go for a walk together alone to renew our old connection. I watched Gail get progressively vaguer and less present through those years. Finally, when I looked into her eyes, there was nobody there. Just a drunk stoned old woman looking at me vaguely, somebody I used to know. I held my own internal memorial service for Gail. My old friend had left me forever.