DEAN BLAIR'S LEMON-LAVENDER SCONES

1½ cups flour

½ tablespoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ cup brown sugar

½ teaspoon salt

¼pound cold unsalted butter, cubed

1 tablespoon lavender flowers

Zest from one lemon

½ cup buttermilk

1 small egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt. Add the cubed butter, lavender, and lemon zest. In a separate bowl combine the buttermilk, egg, and vanilla and whip with a fork. Create a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the buttermilk mixture. Combine with a rubber spatula until just moistened. Transfer to a cookie sheet and form the dough into a wheel roughly 9 inches in diameter and ¾ inch thick. Score it into eight pie slices and top with brown sugar. Bake for about 25 to 30 minutes.

(a postcard from 1986)

Somewhere a man's hollering about devils and demons. From some other hospital room he's bellowing and screaming about how the niggers and fags are out to get him. You can hear him all over the third floor when he screams, "Get away from me, you cunt!" And his shouting just goes on and on.

This is Emanuel Hospital, the big medical complex at the east end of the Fremont Bridge. I'm here as a volunteer for a charity hospice. My job is to take people places, mostly relatives of dying people. Mostly, I drive visiting mothers from their motel to the hospital. After their son or daughter is dead, I might drive them to the airport for their flight home.

Today we're waiting for a man to die of AIDS while his mother sits beside his bed, holding his hand and singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," again and again. It was his favorite song when he was a boy, she says. Now he's just bones and body hair, curled on his side under a thin knit blanket. A pump injects him with morphine every few seconds. His face has the slack look, yellow and dried, that means this is our last trip to the hospital.

The Mom is from Minnesota—I think. Maybe Montana. It's been my experience that nobody dies like in the movies. No matter how sick they look, they're waiting for you to leave. Around midnight, when I finally take his mom back to her Travelodge on E Burnside Street, when he's alt alone, then her son will die.

For now she sings "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," over and over until it doesn't make any sense. Until the words turn into a mantra. A bird's song. Just sounds without meaning. I look at my watch.

It's then the yelling starts. The rant about spies and niggers and fags and cunts. It's a man's voice, huge and hoarse, shouting from some room nearby.