The fog on the hill and the loved song in your earbuds: you don’t have to make a poem out of that all the time. Not even most of the time. You figured out a while ago that crying in the bathroom wasn’t much help. It won’t save the Great Barrier Reef, it didn’t reinstate the people who jumped off the Twin Towers.... There was an unusually good (for the genre) op-ed a while back about raising a child with Tay-Sachs: you love them madly because inside two years they will go, horribly. What then? I would slam the kitchen counter, but it would wake up my daughter. The train is the train, the hours are the hours. You might as well rake them in; it’s not like you’ll see yourself walk into heaven. But the vinegar of sympathy soaks everything, and you start assembling the eulogy. He meant well. He liked the fog on the hill.
