Talk about tomatoes...

A memoir of Alan Edwards 1950 - 2008

Why tomatoes - you might well ask. Well, I'd have to go back a bit. Alan Edwards. We first meet at the entrance to the Red Bar in Aberdeen University's student union. Here's how it happens: I am standing on the steps that lead down into the Red Bar. Red leatherette booths line the wall that stretches the length of the bar. It's a Thursday night. The bar is mobbed. I'm standing on the second step. I'm looking for my friends. The steps are crowded.

I hear a voice behind me: "Are you going in or are you just going to stand there surveying the view?" I turn and I see this skinny chap - his eyebrows raised almost to the tight curls on his head. He's wearing a black velvet jacket that accentuates his shoulders and he has a scarf wrapped tight around his neck and hanging low. He has Art Garfunkel hair. I mutter, "Hmph," and move out of the way.

I do find my friends, Susan and Doris at the far end of the bar. We're thrilled to see each other. We get chatting and the night is looking good.

A bit later, I'm coming back into the bar. I'm on the top step and Alan is standing on the second step talking with Gordon Burns. He's not exactly in my way, but I can't resist taking the opportunity. I speak in a clear voice: "Are you going in here or are you just standing here surveying the view..." Alan turns round and says something droll that I can't remember now - and the conversation takes off from there...

Doris, Alan's wife, reminded me the other day that I came over to her and Susan and said I'd just met this hunky guy.

Alan lives in a flat on Great King Street with Gordon Burns who also has curly hair. Gordon is a bit taller but equally skinny and equally hunky. I remember sitting with Alan and Gordon Burns on the top deck of a double decker bus. We were on our way back from seeing the movie "A Clockwork Orange." We had been sitting on the long red seat - right up at the front where you can see where the bus is going. I remember Gordon getting up first for our stop. The three of us went down the winding bus stairs.

I was humming the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth. I'd never heard it before seeing Clockwork Orange.

Alan and I date. He plays me his new Lou Reed album and lots of Velvet Underground. He tells me my eyebrows are beautiful. He walks home late at night and throws snowballs at the statue of General Gordon in Golden Square.

After three months, Alan says it's over. I don't do too well in response to this news. I spend three days in bed in the flat I share with Mairie and Allison in North Silver Street. When I'm not in bed I spend my time writing a long, sad poem - and asking my friends what they think of it. Secretly, I believe it is brilliant - and it somehow makes me feel better. After a week of my decline, a nerdy and goodhearted chap called Stephen comes knocking at the door. It's Thursday evening. He's looking for Mairie. I say she's not here. He suggests I go down to the red bar with him. I don't want to go. Stephen insists. (This is how I know he has a good heart.) I say, "OK, I suppose I can." I go into the bedroom, throw off my pink candlewick dressing gown, and jump into jeans and a shirt. I come back out. We go to the red bar. It is Thursday night, after all. We meet up with Mairie and I never look back.

Then Gordon dates my friend Susan. That lasts into the following year. They seem to make a happy pair. Susan writes me goofy, humorous letters from London during the Summer.

In the fall I date another chap. We are all back in Aberdeen. Before Xmas Susan dates the other chap. It happens one weekend when I feel reluctant to get on the train home to visit my folks. My gut is talking to me. For once I listen. I get off the train at Stonehaven and return to Aberdeen. I go home after all the next morning - having only slightly delayed the inevitable.

By this time Doris and I are living in a flat in Nellfield Place. I remember I bought a small can of enamel paint and I paint the stove teal blue. I am living in the kitchen is why. I paint the walls white and cut the legs off the ancient dining table and paint it white. The kitchen is also the access way through to the flat's only bathroom. After I leave the flat, my Dad gets a letter from the landlord complaining about my "improvements." I don't hear about that till many years later.

So... where was I? Where am I?

OK, so Susan has a her fling with this other chap, thus ending her relationship with the delightful Gordon. The fling of course doesn't last, but...

Here's where Alan comes back into my life again. Alan and Susan start dating. I start dating a friend of Alan's. Later I learn that this fellow is already dating another very nice girl who deserves a much better boyfriend. We drive up to a house outside of Tain in a rickety green car. I leave early and bus and train it back to Aberdeen - my statement of ambivalence about dating a two-timer.

Years roll by. Susan has been my best friend since high school - no we've been friends since we were seven years old. That's another story. Susan is at least as skinny as Alan and Gordon. She has blue eyes and a way of listening that makes me feel understood. When I feel heartbroken, I go to Susan. I tell her my story. She listens and I feel redeemed. 'I might be unlucky in love,' I think, 'but I have a friend who cares about me.'

When Susan and I are in our fourth year at Aberdeen University, she and Alan begin to live together in Aberdeen. Alan paints pictures. Susan studies.

It's wintertime. The night is dark and the wind blows in from the North Sea. I don't care. My heart feels broken. Again. My body feels like it is splitting in two and I need to speak to a friend. I catch a bus along to the north end of King Street. It's a long street. Susan and Alan live in a one-room flat at the top of a short stairway.

When I come in, Alan is painting an abstract picture. The picture is full of curves that suggest the human form. Susan is sometimes reading and sometimes studying Alan's painting. She seems quiet tonight.

I feel nonplussed. I don't want to launch into my story. Alan is there and also, Susan doesn't seem receptive. So, I sit with them. I watch the painting. I'm not interested in the painting, but it's the only thing to do. After a bit, Susan goes and makes a plate of tomato sandwiches. She puts it on the carpet. Alan is sitting on the carpet waving paintbrushes around. Susan lies on the bed (mattress on the floor). I sit with my butt on the bed and my legs crossed on the carpet. At least I am not alone, I think. I reach for a sandwich. It's white bread, butter, and tomatoes with salt and pepper.

"Wow...This tastes like the sandwiches I had when I was a little girl," I say.

Alan says, "That's right, tomatoes don't taste like they used to. I wonder why that is."

"Is it me that's changed or is it the tomatoes?" I make a face.

"People don't give enough thought to the common tomato," Alan says, holding the paintbrush up like a baton. His seriousness is droll and piquant. I find myself happily launching into a discussion of the history, merits, and flaws of the modern tomato and oh, by the way how about those bread butter and banana sandwiches too.

Alan's gift differs from Susan's and it feels more grownup somehow. I don't feel that I need someone to make me feel understood. Instead, I feel that it's worth talking about any old thing that comes up, that life is, after all, jolly interesting....

Alan and Susan's relationship doesn't make it either. When Susan kills herself three years after their break up, Alan and I share a sense of devastation. Susan's death is a karmic jolt that affects the lives of many of her friends. After her death, it seems we each take our lives more seriously. We get it that life is real. It has a bite.

I move to America and marry the man who will be my daughter's father.

Alan marries Doris, of course, and eats white bread sandwiches quite a lot.

Doris is Alan's rock - not the Everest kind of rock that you stand on top of and say you have conquered the world. No, Doris is more the kind of rock in Alan's life that he clings to because her life energy runs through him when he holds on good.

Alan and I keep up our friendship across the years, the way you do when you live in different countries and you marry and have children.

Alan and Doris's children amaze me. I see Alan and Doris so clearly in each of their faces. I see their faces and I get it that Alan and Doris are home free.

When I come home to Scotland, I come home to my family and I come home to my old friends. It means a lot to me to meet Doris and Alan. I feel the same effervescence when I talk to Doris today that I feel those many years ago when I tell her in the Red Bar that I just met this hunky guy.

And Alan - when Alan and I start emailing each other, he tells me he believes there can be a sincere affection between platonic friends. I believe that too and I make every effort to keep innuendo out of our emails. Alan responds by signing himself, Mr. Bates, and McTavish, and calling me LogLady after the log lady in the David Lynch tv show, Twin Peaks. I made the mistake of telling Alan I thought she was the best character in the show. She had an interest in life. She collected logs.

The last time I come to Scotland, Alan gives me a painting that he did when I was 26 years old. Here's how he paints the picture. He sets me up in the pose in the living room of his Edinburgh flat. He shines a bright light on me. I'm wearing a wool dress with a silk scarf draped over my shoulders. He asks me to put my left arm behind my head. And he takes a photograph - a slide in fact. That's the end of my modeling. Alan projects the slide onto the canvas and paints in the rest of the picture based on the lines in the photograph.

Alan drives me to St. Andrews bus station in a lovely small red British car.

"That's when I lost interest in painting," he says. "It was when I was working on that painting that I began to see the possibilities in photography." He goes on to talk about an old fishing friend of his - a man who wins an award for catching a famous fish. When the man makes his acceptance speech he speaks of ordinary things like the weather and how his car stalled when he drove into the glen.

"There's a podcast of his speech," Alan says. "I don't know if it's still up. It's in the way he talks." Alan can't seem to find a way to describe what it means to him. I understand that he loves the simple humanity of this man. I ask if they still go fishing.

"No," Alan says. "He died last year. When I go fishing, I remember him. He had a nice wife."

When we walk into the bright lit station, a few people are standing waiting for my bus. I'm carrying the painting and its stretchers wrapped up in a mailing tube.

I remember the awkwardness of packing it. Doris and Alan standing in the dining room. Alan trying to find the right mailing tube, asking me: "Will you have room for this in your suitcase?" Alan measures the painting. I strain to remember the length of my suitcase. Alan says: "I didn't varnish it. I remember there was a reason for it. I used a different kind of paint at the end. I wouldn't varnish it if I were you." "I don't want to put you to a lot of trouble," I say. Doris smiles a wide smile. She says: "It's all part of the fun." In the background, the television is turned up a little louder because Ian Rankin, Scottish mystery author is giving an interview...

The bus to Dunfermline is delayed and Alan waits till it seems clear that a bus is coming.

This isn't the last time we speak, but it feels like a true good goodbye. I wish I could tell you what we said. I seem to think Alan might have said, "Well, I'll be off, then." And then again, he might have said, "Look after yourself." And I might have said, "You too. I'm glad to see you and Doris." And Alan might have said something like, "Well, I'll do my best." And we hug and we look at each other.

It's the look that I remember. The real goodbye look of a friend when you know you might not see each other again. For just a second, I see the man who sits next to me on the sofa in North Silver Street and tells me, "I think men like being with women because they want to have someone to care for." I see the man who talks about tomatoes with the same seriousness as international politics. I see the man whose eyes look out of the faces of Doris's children. I see my friend. I think of all the times we won't spend together in the pub, because I live in another country...

I say, "Cheerio."

Alan says, "Cheerio, then." And walks to the station door.

I start talking to another lady who is waiting for the Dunfermline bus. It feels like it's a late night.

Cody

December Berries

The day after the snow

The day after a big snowfall, I noticed flocks of birds flying around. Every few minutes they flew from tree to roof to tree. They settled in a tree until the branches were busy with thrushes and finches. Then with one accord they lifted off the branches and flew to another roost. My yard attracted them, I suspect, because my trees still had berries on the branches. I tried to snap shots of them all sitting on the tree branches, but it turns out this shot is my favorite.