Why can’t some keep this straight. The  phones are still ringing . It has been decades, chapters, oceans ago. I have entered and   exited silently without notice. Still the phone  will ring at  half light, startle birds, like an ambulance, and it’s off to triage, snagging the sleeve of my  eve, night, morning it is the same. I answer. It is KabaNdaga. Demanding something. Is he for real?  "What? Did somebody die?" I hear some bastardization of French/bush tongue she speak. I am asking but physical death is not what alarms me. "No. Nobody die, what.. you drunk?" Hmm amusing.. he doesn’t like what I am saying but it is making sense to me. All these years go by and someone who I never speak with except during funeral time or something of this magnitude is calling… On an on and on and on… from Paris to Angola, Uganda and Liberia as If I want to hear it all.   Ah-gain.  But now that he has mentioned ‘drunk’. I am wondering if that dark brew in the cobalt mug is Guinness or Sidamo. I know which but I am meandering, strolling the rim of his web. The conversation already has me out of my skin and I am floating in the fragrant floral notes of the Sidamo.  Green beans, ports, harbors, boarders, exits.    He wants to be played with, but be taken seriously at the same time. Wishes he was in Paris getting ready to go to the States and visa-a-versa, just to be able to say so.  I don’t like his games. I will not play. He has no idea how badly he is in need of a compass now. "Yes, come jump in the rabbit hole."  He’s been out of my loop for way too long. He is wanting INS stuff, some kind of something, post911 crap. He’s way behind the times. I cuss him. I will speak with Iris about this. He has made her think something other than what he really wanted, got one of my land lines. For a moment. I allowed it. Yes, Caller id. identify yourself. She tells me later his message came by way of Kinshasa and she pitied him. He almost told a truth. But that is devil talk, and the worst, "half truth, half lie"..  A coyote’s ass if you ask me. Thunder in the sky, Lee Perry and Neil are drowning out his words. I know, this is too much for him. Hadn’t he heard from my last husband what a red savage I was. Full of obeah, an awful breed. He loved it. Before he ever even kissed me he took my skinning knife to the Cutlass Man and had it sharpened for me, even branded his name on the handle, prophesying his own fate. I am telling ‘Kaba Da’ that, “..this  is sloppy.” and, “don’t you know this by now?" Kazi,  Pierre Tesh and his wife, Iris,  Cutter See, and Chariot and Associates all get calls now, I’m sure. Jesus Wept. I  am trying to write, it is days later and I am  making our Sunday jambalaya and weaving the sweet peas onto their supports and harvesting  Meyer lemons, pressing out the Skullcap, Mellisa, Vervain, Passion Flower, Kava- name your nervine.  Phone is ringing again, it is Tess, who I  throws pots with two days out of the week. I tell her I am busy, she is asking about all this, and is not comprehending, I read to her some of what I wrote on, "Loose the Passport". She said it was, "too much," But Greta out at Zuza’s, yes the Lodge where AL Capone had his hide out,  she loves it. But then again she is a woman of tragedy and loss. Rumors follower her and she is dying of all the cancers that you have ever been afraid of. Afraid to even speak of. They keep telling her she will die soon. My knee doctor loves it too, is dying also of cancer as well. Greta does not think it is all, "too much," Like I said, she is a woman who people whisper about and are afraid if she catches them at it she will wink or spit at them or reveal something they thought hidden about themselves  right there  at the open market. So they try to be quite, and speak of her  in hushed, heated whispers, "…  race cars, charred meat, incest…. olives groves.. torn the kitchen apart with a hatchet…days and days she lives on only sea breeze and merlot." We are all still laughing  when we remember how that great big man from the great big city left a great big critique for Greta. "Greta, your Food Sucks!!" So lovely. He had called himself a, "… Connoisseur ".  She took it to a silk screen shop and we all had pretty black tee-shirts with that big shot’s signature on our chest, wore it while we turned over the pork chops in the fireplace, poking them with that prong. Too much? I don’t think so, in light of everyone dying.