Sleepless in The Hill Country

As I type, it is nearly three o'clock in the morning. I've been awake, tossing and turning and staring into the dark, for over an hour. I should have gotten out of bed as soon as I woke up. It never works, trying to fall back to sleep. The only thing that works is getting all of these words out of my head and onto these pages.

Fran. I keep thinking about Fran. So many bits and pieces of memories from all these years just keep popping into my mind. I can't even begin to imagine how many telephone hours we must have burnt up over the years.... or the hours of talking we would do at her kitchen table when I was up in NY. Her husband J would be watching a ball game and he'd come into the kitchen for a soda and he'd look at us and say "Are you two still talking? What is there to talk about for all this time?" Our answers would be Anything. Everything. And when there's nothing, we think of something. We would talk and talk till our voices were hoarse and we were getting tired and we just couldn't drink one more cup of tea or coffee or water.

When Fran first found out about her cancer, she would call me on my cell phone and I would sometimes put my sneakers on as we talked and then I'd take the phone outside and I would just walk and walk, around the subdivision, through the park, back to our house, and then around the subdivision and the park again. Just walking, walking, talking to Fran.... mostly listening to Fran....... she was afraid. Afraid of the cancer, afraid of what could happen, might happen, would happen. She didn't want to be a burden to her husband. She didn't want to leave her sons with sad memories. We talked about it all. I remember telling Fran that she would dance at her sons' weddings. I was right. She did, at her oldest son's wedding a few years ago. I told Fran that she would someday hold her grandbabies. I was wrong.

And now, what Fran was most afraid of, what could happen, what might happen, has indeed happened. Last night was her wake. During the hours that the viewing was going on up in NY, I was sitting in a chair and just thinking, of Fran being there, at her wake. I wondered what she was wearing..... we talked about that during one of those long phone calls. She worried about what she would be wearing because she knew that her sons would forever remember the way she looked in the casket.

Fran had called me some months back to tell me the news that her oldest son and his wife were expecting their first child. "It will be sometime between the middle of June and the end of June," she had said. Fran told me that 'the kids' aren't telling anyone if it's a boy or a girl....... they don't want to know... they want to be surprised at the delivery. I asked Fran "How do you say Grandma and Grandpa in Greek? And how do you say Aunt L in Greek?" She told me, and I wrote down the words....... Yia Yia for grandma; Papou for grandpa; Thea for aunt. I laughed and told Fran that I could just see her with the baby, singing songs to him or her in Greek.

Fran sent me two music CDs over the years..... all of the songs are in Greek, and she made labels for the CDs that say "Fran's Favorites." I don't understand the words, but the music is beautiful. After that movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," I had told Fran how pretty the music was...... so she started to collect the best of the best Greek songs and when she had enough to fill a CD, she sent it to me. First one CD..... then another came before the year was over. I would listen to the Greek music just about every time I cooked. My husband and I played Fran's Favorites when he would make his "Greek stuffing" for holiday dinners.

A freight train went by a little while ago. The train tracks run through the center of town..... we are twelve miles out from our 'downtown' area and we can hear the train whistles as the sound travels through the hills. The sounds are muffled by the time they get from downtown to out here. Some of the train whistles are short and quick, others are long and low-sounding. The train whistle that just went by was almost musical.... it had highs and lows, a pretty melody that was sort of a cross between a happy song and a mournful wail. We hear the trains every day, every night. I've never heard one make this particular sound. It was almost soothing.

When Fran's grandbaby is born, I hope her son will teach his child how to say Yia Yia and Papou. And Thea. Fran would have bought a lot of books for the baby. Fran loved books as much as I do. When we both worked at the library, we'd leave work with our arms filled with hardcovers.

I will start buying books for Fran's grandbaby.