FROM THE SKY CAVE - MY TELESCOPE OF MEMORY: Recent Episodes
Cynthia Hawkins-Legorreta
At 72, I have had more incarnations that I can count. Before I moved here to New Orleans' French Quarter from The Big Apple, I was a superintendent and den mother for three pre-1900 brownstones near Gramercy Park. Before that? A massage parlor hostess. Somewhere in between? A 54 year old college freshman at Columbia University. Stay tuned!
..and then, there was that holiday meal where Mother added a practical, but most unusual ingredient..?
When my old cellphone breathed its last, my first thought was 'dammit.." Then I got still, and imagined something different.
...I will always wonder, but never know for certain: what if Earle had chosen another way to 'face the world'..what would he have been like? Still the old movie buff? Still the drinker? Still a man denying his real self... RIP my friend. You were loved.
I think of Philip often, and with a fond kind of sadness. Imagining him sitting alone, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, his cat Ninotchka curled up next to him on the sofa. Old movies were his favorite companions. The screen never judged - never talked back. He lived his own old film, on the real life screen.
Just imagine the energy Philip must have needed, to keep that false face securely in place over all the years? Maybe it was made easier to bear, the pain softened, somehow blunted by the copious amounts of vodka and cigarettes he consumed throughout his life.
Philip was indeed a remnant from a bygone time. A completely self-created man. His secret life before he came to New York could not have been more different. Yet we all accepted the person he invented; as the real Philip.
He was born Earle Lavalle Morton Drew, in late 1920's Richmond. He didn't like the name. He was also born a quadroon. He didn't like that, either. As a young man, he left his home and traveled North. Reinventing himself. With a new life, and new name. Along the way, he also became a white man.
At 72, with tales to tell of many lives lived, as I craft and invent this current one in New Orleans....