Well, not really. But one of these days someone will walk up to me while I'm buying coffee for my milk and confess to me that they did that very thing just to watch him die .... This has been going on since I was prepubescent: strangers seek me out and tell me things. You'd think after 19 years in New York where averting one's gaze is the penultimate survival strategy that it would stop. But, it didn't and it hasn't. And to this day people come to me having decided I have or am the answer to their question or I'm the one they want to tell It to and they proceed to tell me. So, I am in the supermarket the day after Thanksgiving. It seems crazy to be shopping after having spent 2 days cramming the refrigerator with all manner of great American foods -- turkeys, brussels sprouts, peas, mashed potatoes the size of salt domes, yams, pies and pies and more pies. And here I am with a-tisket a-tasket and little purple basket picking up milk (which, frankly, I don't like) and half 'n half (which I'd sell my firstborn to have). And this lady and I cross paths in front of a display of toilet paper and she says to me out of the blue, "I ain't nevah gonna get that stuff again it take a whole roll to wipe your butt." And then she marched off to find frozen green beans, I guess.
My eyes don't even widen anymore.
And how was your Thanksgiving? Mine? I let go a bit. Didn't polish the silver (hee hee). Didn't make any noises about cooking. (I made some stuffing a la hockey puck last year.) Just cleaned house, set the table, made runs to the train station and politely consumed my usual measure of "My mother wasn't...." "My sister isn't... " My wife doesn't...." that is my gruel for being the starting point of a Hasse diagram called My Family. I've survived what has been a debilitating 2 weeks as I nearly threw in the towel and quit studying math, met with a dying friend who is finished fighting, medicated myself through a head cold so I could take Exam IV, and waited for the check to clear. Things are the same but better now. I go on.
What keeps me going? Music from Mozart to Gregory Porter to Shostakovich to Drake. Friends near and far. They carry my history; they are my memory. Children being their beautiful delicious selves. Art and the need to create. Waking up in each morning to start again. Being in the presence of those who are deeply religious (not pious, but religious) and spiritual. And love. In all things love.
