Drove to Boston, to BU the back way, Jamaica Plain, Arnold Arboretum, along the Greenway, wouldn’t know where to begin if you asked me to tell you about my relationship with the Arnold Arboretum. Sit down and read the Boston Notebooks. Before and after hitchhiked to New Orleans, Texas, the hobo camp on the Yuba River, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Read them no you read them no you read them. The back way to BU to see my niece Hannah Lily of Sunflower Valley, off Richardson Bay, where Oakman had the epiphany of epiphanies, changed his life really, brought him clarity and understanding, mind body and spirit, Hannah in Boston with her high school friend, Sofie, attending a two-week summer on campus program, similar to Summer @ Brown. High school kids trying out the dorms and college classes. Are you ready, kids? Do you want to get in to Brown? Do you want to get in to BU? We visited their room on the sixth floor. Walked down Commonwealth Avenue past Fenway, to Newbury Street.
Found a sidewalk restaurant, ordered early dinner at five. Chatted, ate, dropped an IPA, relaxed, people watched, that guy with the hair, that lady with the dog, Haven found a dollar bill on the sidewalk, Lincoln saw a McLaren and dubsed it (called it as his; it is now his; he owns it, can drive it wherever he wants, dispense with it whenever or if he wants, just how it is, special powers); hot today in the low 90s, breeze-in-shade we crossed the large avenue and walked on the shaded side of the
street till we arrived at the BU Bookstore we should buy a shirt a hat a sticker a mug; and then deposited them at the dorm. Kisses, goodbyes, safe flights, back to San Francisco. My goodness. Growing up. I held her in my arms and rocked her. Saved her from falling off the couch while she drank milk from a bottle. I pushed her into Sean Penn’s shins in downtown Mill Valley.
My niece! Boys! College! Parties! No way! Took a journalism class in Abnormal Psychology. Quickly, seated at a dorm room desk, I learned that there’s no such thing as “mental illness,” that it’s not really a thing and this is what we mean by the phrase; that Winnie the Pooh had ADHD and other disorders, that the entire series is about dysfunctional, melancholic, psychiatric characters and their cartoon bodies but very serious mental landscape; and that schizophrenia exists as some identifiable and definable thing that sounds very close to Oakman’s every day, and Lucia Joyce had schizophrenia, and Joyce was as wack as they come but managed to autistic-ally/Asperger’s-ially make it through space and time, and a cosmopolitan knockabout flat-living hotel-living existence, because of his writing, or in spite of. The circle. In quick reading I learned these things about Abnormal Psychology. From Hannah’s reader, as she told stories about the PhD students teaching the course, and the arguments some students had in Journalism, in that building right there, BU’s Department of Communications.