The day after my father’s cremation, my sister, step-mother and I stopped to get something to eat at a McDonald’s before the long flight back to the mainland from the island of Kauai.

We’d debated stopping at many places on the way to the airport but none appealed to my step-mother. They were too “native” looking.* Thus, it was Mickey D’s or nothing. She was not happy but back in 2006 the airport on Kauai offered only coffee and donuts. Maybe a pineapple but you get the picture.

At first my step-mother didn’t want to leave the car. She didn’t want a hamburger; she didn’t want fries. She didn’t want anything to drink and she didn’t want to leave my father alone in the car. “Your father didn’t like McDonald’s,” she said. It was a hot, humid day and she’d just spent three days being chauffeured:

• to the beach where he’d died to thank the lifeguards who’d tried to save him
• to the tiny hospital to thank the doctor who declared him dead and whom she hoped had saved the speedo swimsuit he’d died in (don’t ask why – you really don’t want to know)
• to the offices of the island newspaper so she could buy an ad thanking all the people of Kauai she might have forgotten to thank, and finally:
• to the police station to try to expedite the release of his death certificate (they hadn’t even done the autopsy yet). She’d gone bonkers. She needed to eat something other than cookies.

“We’ll bring Dad into the McDonald’s,” I finally said. “He can sit with us.”

“Okay but he’ll insist on paying. That’s just the kind of man he was,” Kathy sniffled, handing me his wallet.

I was exhausted and perhaps a bit hung-over (my sister and I had managed a quick trip to a nearby liquor store) but holding his wallet in my hands it dawned on me that he was gone and all those plastic cards and pieces of paper that were once so necessary were now worthless where he was going, where all of us are going regardless of our immigration status. In the end we are all undocumented aliens.

The funny thing was, the McDonald’s was full of Native Hawaiians who didn’t think that carrying a large urn full of the ashes of a loved one into a fast food joint was at all odd.

I haven’t been around lately because I’m planning to re-release two books I wrote over ten years ago. The first one Flipka has a modified ending but otherwise is the same wacky tale described here. The second book has undergone a different POV and will get a new name. Readers had complained they didn’t know what the heroine would do next. That’s not an issue any more!

Many decades ago I spent the week before Christmas hanging out at the Officer’s Club in Worms Germany with military personnel, primarily civilian, who’d opted not to return to the states for the holidays. The club had been decorated for the season with plastic poinsettias and cinnamon scented candles. Canned Christmas carols played. Drinks and bar food were half off but it was still a dreary place. One evening I sat at a table with a be-speckled young man who barely looked up at me as he scribbled on a notepad.

He was a cartoonist for various publications distributed to military personnel.

It was fascinating to watch him work. But eventually Happy Hour was over. I told him how much I loved his work – having spent many a Happy Hour waiting for my uncle to finishing schmoozing with his co-workers so that I could drive him home. And he handed me the drawings.

I wish I’d caught his name but I was so young. At least I had the sense to hold onto his scribbles and the memory of that evening all these years ago.

When I was thinking of a new title, those cartoons came to mind. And a record my uncle used to play …. every damn evening! Stanyan Streets and Other Sorrows by Rod McKuen. And every damn evening it got stuck on the same song:

For a while the only earth that Sloopy knew was her sandbox
Two rooms on 55th Street was her domain
Every night she’d sit in the window among the avocado plants
Waiting for me to come home
My arms filled with canned liver and love
We’d talk into the night then contented but missing something
She, the earth she never knew, me, the hills I ran while growing bent
Sloopy should have been a cowboy’s cat
With prairies to run, not linoleum
And real live catnip mice
No one to depend on but herself
I never told her but in my mind I was a midnight cowboy even then
Riding my imaginary horse down 42nd street
Going off with strangers to live an hour long cowboy’s life
But always coming home to Sloopy who loved me best
For a dozen summers we lived against the world an island on an island
She’d comfort me with purring
I’d fatten her with smiles
We grew rich on trust needing not the beach or butterflies
I had a friend named Ben who painted buildings like Rouault men
He went away
My laughter tired Lillian after a time
She found a man who only smiled
But Sloopy stayed and stayed
Winter 1959 old men walk their dogs
Some are walked so often that their feet
Leave little pink tracks in the soft gray snow
Woman fur on fur
Elegant and easy only slightly pure
Hailing cabs to take them round the block and back
Who is not a love seeker when December comes?
Even children pray to Santa Claus
I had my own love safe at home
And yet I stayed out all one night and the next day too
They must of thought me crazy screaming Sloopy Sloopy
As the snow came falling down around me
I was a madman to have stayed away
One minute more than the appointed hour
I’d like to think a golden cowboy snatched her from the window sill
And safely saddle bagged she rode to Arizona
She’s stalking lizards in the cactus now perhaps, bitter, but free
I’m bitter too
And not a free man anymore
But once was a time in New York’s jungle in a tree
Before I went into the world in search of other kinds of love
Nobody owned me, but a can named Sloopy
Looking back perhaps she’s been the only human thing
That ever gave love back to me