Mom’s cancer resurfaced a few years later, on a routine x-ray ordered to troubleshoot pain in her back. We remained impressed by the supporting cast members who moved symmetrically in matching outfits of red, green, yellow, and blue as they sang hanging from the rigging of a pirate ship or stepping out of a painting in a ghostly hall. To my dismay, their wrinkles, crows-feet, and faded costumes became more apparent as they walked up the aisles to autograph our programs. Mom took us to Gilbert and Sullivan plays at the Lamplighters Theatre, where the lead actors and actresses impressed me with their caked-on beauty and flashing smiles. Being the youngest, I would often get lost at the Fleischacker Zoo - despite the blue helium balloon tied around my wrist meant to mark me for easy identification. At wind-swept cliffs leading to the Palace of the Legion of Honor museum, we giggled at the statue of a naked man by Rodin, counted the painted folds of Elizabethan collars, or looked for monsters in the heating ducts - only to get our picture in the paper, all knees and elbows in over-starched dresses. From that point onward, Mom was always in a hurry - as if to make up lost time. At that time, Mom took my sister, Sarah, and me across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco to catch up on various artistic and cultural events.

She traded in her nightgown for an olive-green suit and attended a commuter college in San Francisco to study creative writing. I also envisioned my mother’s cancer spreading across her body on its crab-like legs, infecting first one part and then another until there was nothing left but the disease. Not quite understanding the events that were occurring, I looked for God in the cloud-covered sky – picturing the man with pale white skin, a light brown beard, and blue robes that I had recently been shown in a Sunday school book. She drifted in-between life and death for the next six years. When I was an eager three-year-old, growing up in California, my mother was diagnosed with cancer and returned from her surgery drained and incomplete. This was an important lesson to a woman who had lost her mother while still a child. The physical evidence of bone, metal, and stone, told me our lives could never completely be erased. As layer after layer of dirt was peeled away to reveal the lives of those before us lay just below the surface, I found myself strangely comforted. On digs in England, Washington, Virginia, and California, I had soiled my hands in the rich dark earth, longing to connect the present with the past - to find that thread of continuity. In my former life, my life before Richard, I had been an archaeologist. * * * The author at Artifacts Gallery and Cafe, 2018.

Historic San Francisco by Rand Richards