Make me a star chart and give me credit for climbing out of bed, taking a shower, and getting overwhelmed before noon.
I'm sick with something happening to the country. No longer well enough to pretend that it isn't or that time will correct our course.
All the voices in me are shouting, whispering, weeping, laughing different things.
Settle down and take the next step forward.
Instead, I decide to read a few pages in the book I am reading about a young man riding his bicycle to Patagonia from Oregon. I get through a paragraph about his father brooding at Christmas and am distracted.
I associated his with the Kennedy tragedies. That's how my grandmother spoke of - and endlessly wept for - him.
Like them, he was bright, charismatic, handsome, and Irish. He also died young - tragically, senselessly. And I was that brave boy in the Life Magazine photograph saluting the motorcade from the street corner.
I step backward, out of his reach, reflexively after he slapped my face. Why he did so, I can't be sure.
It was like being attacked by a friendly dog. The sudden ferocity in his face. What's wrong with me?
Distractedly I play a song on my computer, now, in the present. And though it's not exactly the same - its tempo is slow, there's a horn and no human voices. It brought me to that ritual space. Lilac scent, candles, the heavy rhythm of my heart. You.
And then I jumped right back into that feeling of the world being lost and the matters at hand.
I'm sick with something happening to the country. No longer well enough to pretend that it isn't or that time will correct our course.
All the voices in me are shouting, whispering, weeping, laughing different things.
Settle down and take the next step forward.
Instead, I decide to read a few pages in the book I am reading about a young man riding his bicycle to Patagonia from Oregon. I get through a paragraph about his father brooding at Christmas and am distracted.
I associated his with the Kennedy tragedies. That's how my grandmother spoke of - and endlessly wept for - him.
Like them, he was bright, charismatic, handsome, and Irish. He also died young - tragically, senselessly. And I was that brave boy in the Life Magazine photograph saluting the motorcade from the street corner.
I step backward, out of his reach, reflexively after he slapped my face. Why he did so, I can't be sure.
It was like being attacked by a friendly dog. The sudden ferocity in his face. What's wrong with me?
Distractedly I play a song on my computer, now, in the present. And though it's not exactly the same - its tempo is slow, there's a horn and no human voices. It brought me to that ritual space. Lilac scent, candles, the heavy rhythm of my heart. You.
And then I jumped right back into that feeling of the world being lost and the matters at hand.
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