2012
Whole Foods—such is life in this late age, Whole Foods is the subject of sentences—confronted me with the Gordon Lightfoot recording of “If You Could Read My Mind,” which I’d only known from the radio covers of my childhood and remembered for the pitch-perfect oddness of “ghost from a wishing well.” Anyhow that is cleared up and I have recognized it as a pulverizing song about the end of a marriage. My marriage, thank God, is not ending. These possessions, or relations, whatever they are, are such absolute values that they can very, very easily pull you into the community of suffering when invoked. Dead-kid jokes aren’t funny, tongue-clucking news stories are ice down the spine. All that.
R. goes to a beautiful daycare on the money-cushioned university campus, which I suppose will inflate its grounds and turn into an island on the day the flood comes. It is unlike Star Trek in that babies still get colds and bring them home to their parents, so I took some Tylenol and lay down in the dark, at which point hired laborers came into our yard with a leaf blower. I muttered grumpy half-thoughts into the pillow, what the hell is wrong with a rake, really, this is why we have oil wars and our elected officials swearing on the Bible that a carbon tax would implode the economy, so that leaves can get blown around to no end... then I got up and went out back and found the yard beautifully cleared of weeds. I’ve barely stepped out there in months. I’ve ignored a lot of things. I don’t listen to music without special effort. Once every two months I log into Facebook or Twitter and discover strata of messages meant for me.
Resolving has for me never amounted to much: you are what you are, and the range of variance is only to what extent you are aware of it. Perfect knowledge would presumably add up to perfect silence, and nothing documented ever again. That I don’t have.
