Well, to put it another way, I am listening to "Aura" for the 40th time today having not listened to it once in over 2 years.

I do not like this CD, but am lazy to change it, and limited by the dearth of CDs I brought down from New York.

But who cares of Miles Davis?

On Friday I experienced and for once understood the expression "heartbroken." On Friday, in a card shop, while a judge on a television rattled off results of "independent" tests which "revealed" that no hard evidence linked James Earl Ray to the bullet which killed martin Luther King, I was browsing the "With Sympathy" and "In Sorrow" cards.

I was looking for the right card to send to my father, for the right card to send to my aunt Lou and cousin Chris on the occasion of the death of my Uncle George.

He died Monday of pneumonia, having been told less than 48 hours earlier that he had 2 or 3 weeks to live, that cancer had spread through his liver and lungs and God knows where else.

George is the man who opened his house to me in early May after I moved to Atlanta. He is the Uncle with whom I laughed and with whom I shared secrets and told things I don't remember ever telling any family.

He and my father were born identical twins. Talking with George, and sitting with him at the pub over by Emory University, I could talk and we could laugh and I could think "Well, you're not my dad, but you look like him, and I'll take that. We can talk and laugh and I can pretend you're really mine, and I am really yours."

And that is what I did. In the early weeks of living here, I so looked forward to coming home and going out with him, telling him about the Internet, about my new job, about anything; I wanted so much to talk to him that I made up stuff. Exaggerations and near-falsehoods. But nothing too outrageous, and no lies that were not easily detectable.

He had such a wonderful smile. In the company of so many friends at that pub it was impossible not to feel how happy he was with his life. How content to drop in to the pub every night and see his son Chris after he got off of work, and talk nonsense with the bartenders and waiters.

In 1981, when my dad left the family, I did not know what it meant. But one thing I remember thinking was "Guess I'll never see George and Lou again. Or Dean and Chris." And for the most part, this has been true. I did not know them at all while growing up, so their absence is of the same stuff as the other voids.

I saw George and Dean in 1990, sometime after I graduated from college. We spent an evening on the porch of my dad's apartment in Daytona Beach. We spent the night laughing and drinking beer and laughing some more. It was hot summertime in Florida, and George could laugh like a wild cat. He laughed any time one of us swatted a horsefly out of the way, or any time my dad would make a funny comment. They were hysterical together. But a ghastly, guttural coughing always interrupted George's laughter, and he always looked pale and puffy, like someone who had drunk far too much in his life.

It just seemed funny, all of us together out there. Hell if it is not the funniest Goddamn thing I ever saw in my life. We laughed and laughed and laughed, our sounds filling the yard and reaching out into the streets and the trees and something inside of me was ecstatic to be among them.

But Friday, I am at a card store, reaching up and touching the tops of cards, looking for one that comes closest to what I might say to people who have no idea that I had any feelings, however vague, for this man. I reject all the religious cards. No Ecclesiastes, no Bible.

The cards and the words written on them are irrelevant, but I select them anyway. The presence of the act squashes my heart, and tears pour across my face like a hot river. Can not even read the cards, or hide from other customers the fact that something has gone wrong. I am thinking of Uncle George who died too soon, who was so happy and content with his life, and who was not done yet. I wonder why I always wait to feel the grief on the death of someone I knew or cared about. Why did I not feel this earlier? Why could it not wait? I feel myself making excuses for the rest of my day, taking the afternoon off of work, or just doing nothing.

But I do none of that. I go to the corner of the card shop, where I know there is a coffee machine, and I hide there. Slowly I select a Styrofoam cup. Slowly I pour coffee and measure out spoonfuls of non-dairy creamer and sugar and wait for the tears and the shaking to stop so I can face the cashier, then leave the place and drink my coffee and end this sudden moment of remembrance, leave this unlikely shrine.

What else is there to say? There should be cards that simply say "There are no words now." There are none.

• June 29, 1997 - Noise
• June 22, 1997 - Wandering
• June 16, 1997 - Makin' Whoopie