Late October azure afternoon. Beechwood Avenue front porch--a rainbow at the bottom of a rye and coke--Waits wailing on the CD player--growling about a grapefruit moon and one start shining with sweet sad jazz voice. Stray cat with patchwork fur leaps onto the porch rail from the garbage piled below, eyes me, pissed off with stray cat annoyance, mutters a feline obscenity and wanders off the friendlier garbage. During this--I think of this--Not of her, but of this idea, this notion, this adventure--this healing.Two weeks exactly since we made sex in a fitful weirdness, one day after the anniversary of the other great love, seven days before another anniversary-- of the night we fell in love. Waits brings this sort of thing out. This began once before--more than ten years ago--That time it began in beside a wonderous woman who was drooling and scratching and groaning in a sweet solace sleep, whose thick warm, inticing mouth had a gathering of white gunk in both corners, white gunk that reminded me of the similar sticky puddles that gathered in the corners of the scarlet painted gashes of mouthes of mother's gnattering friends, dangling as their mouths chimed on and on, gossiping all over the Beanie and Cecil dementia of my early youth. A likely place to begin as any, i began back then.