The View from a Drawbridge

Tag: Chuck Guerra

  • The Boy Who Gives Out Toys

    Recently a friend of mine posted this video on her Facebook page. It is of a little boy who has lost both his parents, and one day he decided he was sick and tired of seeing everyone around him sad. So he bought a lot of tiny little toys, and started giving them out to…

  • Telling My Story

    There’s a group here in Seattle called Fresh Ground Stories that meets once a month. I’ve been dying to attend one of their events ever since I heard about it, but unfortunately they always seem to meet on a night when I work. That seems to be the case with all the cool groups in…

  • Remembering Chuck

    Has it only been a year? It feels like I’ve been walking barefoot through the broken shards of my grief for decades. Has it been a year already? Weren’t you lying beside me when I went to sleep last night? It still shocks me to awaken alone. Both at once. Always both at once with…

  • On Looking Homeless

    My late boyfriend had brain surgery about 25 years ago. Because of this, a big section of the back of his skull was missing, and his face was lopsided. To mask these things a little bit, he grew his hair long and wore a beard. I thought he was absolutely gorgeous. Certainly the best looking…

  • “Tell Him Chuck Sent You.”

    So here I sit in the hot sun, on a greasy chair, in a greasy parking lot, in a really scary side of town, with an ominously sedate and extremely dirty pit bull lying at my feet. The prostitutes are staring at me. And I’ll be here for hours. Just one more curve on my…

  • The Last Known Hurdle

    The other day I went to a Ray LaMontagne concert and I had a wonderful time, but I also shed a few tears. This folk rock musician has a smoky voice that moves me to my very core, but that’s not why I got emotional. This event was a very significant hurdle in my grieving…

  • Sneaky Grief

    I really thought I was doing fine. I had stopped the daily crying thing. I’d go longer and longer periods without thinking about him. I’d even look heavenward and do some joking quips now and then, and smile. The outside observer would assume I was coping well. I was doing all the things I needed…

  • The Dead Letter Office

    How’s this for bureaucracy? Yesterday my late boyfriend received a letter from an agency informing him that his case was closed because he was deceased. I’ll just let you absorb that for a second. When I opened the letter my first thought was, “I wonder if they’re expecting a response.” So what follows is the…

  • Yearnings

    For the past 6 months I’ve had a lobster craving that is practically driving me out of my mind. And the sad part is that I’ll just have to live with that, because mine is not a lobster existence. On my budget, even fake crab is a luxury that I rarely get to indulge. Knowing…

  • Pattern Recognition

    Evolution sometimes has an interesting sense of humor. We have evolved to be good at pattern recognition. It’s important to be able to pick out that tiger lurking in the underbrush or that poisonous snake amongst the leaves. And it’s always a good idea to be able to tell your friends apart from your enemies.…