Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist Page A

judge.”
    IT’S THE SIXTEENTH of September and Dean and I are back in Los Angeles. Momma Janet messed up everything in Charles’s apartment but she is gone now. Her daughter, Elizabeth, came in a van from Baton Rouge and took her away right before Dean and I left.
    I asked Dean to marry me on the flight home but he said it was too much trouble and we could just go on living together if I didn’t mind.
    â€œWe have wills and living wills and we live in Los Angeles,” he said. “We do not need a marriage ceremony out of some ancient old religious book to make our friendship safe or sacred.” He reached over and gave my arm a long, smooth, loving touch and then he put his first-class airline seat (we’d been bumped up by a gay American Airlines steward we’d met at a party in Sausalito last year) back as far as it would go and went immediately to sleep. For an insomniac he can sleep in the daytime more soundly than any human being I’ve ever seen in my life. His mother got his days and nights mixed up when he used to stay backstage while she was in Little Theatre plays in San Francisco.
    What did I learn from my trip to New Orleans? Nothing I didn’t already know except that we people are more powerful and quick on our feet than we know and can dig in and get it done if we have to. Also, everyone in the United States has too much stuff. We could survive these disasters a lot better if we all went minimalist. So there’s no point in thinking about that 1950s walnut-and-blue velvet chair in the back of that red 2006 GMC Envoy. Leave that to the insurance adjustors. I’m back in California where all I have to do is wait for an earthquake and get on the internet and tell hurricane stories to our friends.
    We saw some strange and wonderful things. We saw helicopter rescues and met television crews and watched Mother Janet ruin Charles’s damask bedspread while plotting her daughter’s divorce action to steal his property. Some people are heroes and some plot, some lie and cheat and steal, and some carry morbidly obese patients up six flights of stairs so they can be medevaced to hospitals and kept alive to eat another day.
    The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace . . .

Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
    I t was April nineteenth, the second day of our journey to Italy. There were three of us, old friends come together to spend two weeks in a villa in Tuscany. Cynthia and Mary Jane were more excited about all this than I was as they had traveled less and were less weary of the process. Stuck all day in Heathrow Airport in the middle of a terrorist scare had proven who was right about that, but, strangely enough, it was me who kept on being cheerful and hopeful. Cynthia, whose wealthy husband had paid for the villa and the first-class British Airways tickets, was the first to become despondent. She had left two small children with a nanny to have this escape and there we were, in the midst of a bomb scare and a terrorist threat.
    Nothing’s ever lost on a writer, I told myself although I’m not sure I can call myself a writer. I make documentary films for the Public Broadcasting Services. I write the scripts, not that what I write ends up being what the narrators end up saying. By the time the language police and the lawyers get finished with a script, there’s not much left. Anyway, nothing’s ever lost on me, I told myself. I’ll use this someday, whereas three women going to Tuscany to rebond has been done ad nauseam in recent years, which is probably where Cynthia and Mary Jane got the idea to begin with.
    The beginning of the trip had been perfect, a private jet to Atlanta, then a luxurious journey across the Atlantic with a British Airways hostess to steer us through customs and into the first-class lounge at Heathrow. We got in at nine