CATERPILLAR AND THE FORGETFUL KINGDOM

 

My heart is longing for a four-legged friend to bring some spirit back into the house. It's not like there is a void in my heart. It's just that I miss Caterpillar all the time. It is becoming something I need to let go of, maybe. The love in my heart for Caterpillar is the same as when she was in the body. I can still talk to her. It's a matter of getting  used to the absence. A kitten is available colored like Caterpillar with yellow eyes like hers. The kitten stays in my mind. Another part of mind says I don't need to be jumping into a Caterpillar replacement right away. Birds galore, chipmunks and squirrels are regulars here every day. I've cultivated them, fed them to attract them for my visual enjoyment. I cannot bring a killer in on them. Plus, there is all that goes with a kitten. Like teaching it to stay out of the road. Plus, I am not done with the sorrow of losing Caterpillar. I'm assured the time was right for Caterpillar, the method she chose was right. It showed me she was in tune with her wild mind. Domestic mind was learned behavior like a second language. Wild mind was her first and foremost mind. I like for my cats and dogs to have access to their wild minds. Where I live gives dogs or cats access to wild mind.

 

 

 

Caterpillar's back legs gave out. She lost her spring, the only reason she could lie on the ground to watch birds and chipmunks and not snatch them. Years ago, I saw her jump straight up and swat a flying snowbird about four feet above the ground. She hit it like hitting a tennis ball overhead. She did not knock it out of the air, hit a wing. The bird's flight wobbled and caught its equilibrium in a hurry and was gone. I did not like the cats killing birds, but they ate them. That they ate the birds I took for the natural order and allowed it. When they ate the birds, the cats are not just killing for fun. They did not kill more than they cared about eating. The cats were well fed at home. They did not require many birds, just enough to keep the desire for the taste of blood satisfied. Caterpillar had not been a hunter for several years, which I was grateful for, though on account of her back legs losing their spring, which makes me sad. My feeling is that she grew weary of her back legs not working so well.

 

 

 

I would do best not to think about it. She had her reasons that were beyond reason. Intuition guided her, or so I suspect. She seemed too much like she knew what she was about. She had purpose. It was the most interesting passing of any of my pets. Some were killed, some died of age. It leaves no choice but acceptance for my part. I'm grateful to Caterpillar for saving me the agony of burying her lifeless body. That's the very hardest part. The blues I'm feeling will pass. Caterpillar's is not the only spirit in the house. There is also my own spirit that inhabits the place. I'm either fooling myself or I do indeed feel Caterpillar's spirit is still here. Not like a ghost and not like her soul, more like the spirit of her presence continues in the air. Or maybe I'm more engaged with memory rather than subtle perceptions.  I'll go on grieving, knowing simultaneously that Caterpillar, her consciousness, her soul, is doing fine. She's all right. I'm the one that's not. Can't help but think of John Crowe Ransom's poem, Janet Waking. The last two stanzas:

 

     So there was Janet

     Kneeling on the wet grass, crying her brown hen,

     (Translated far beyond the daughters of men)

     To rise and walk upon it.

 

     And weeping fast as she had breath

     Janet implored us, "Wake her from her sleep!"

     And would not be instructed in how deep

     Was the forgetful kingdom of death.

 

 

 

The forgetful kingdom of death. I will forget the spirit of Caterpillar's presence. Time erases memory. Therefore, I cling to memory and feel sorrow all the more, knowing this, too, will pass. This, the grief, the last little bit I have left of Caterpillar, the sorrow of losing her, I hold in my arms while her spirit is fresh in my memory. It has been another day of inability to shake myself into motion. Unmotivated. No motivation for anything. I like taking carrots and grain to the donkeys. Jack is braying. A car going by set him off. He is a good brayer. The spirit of the donkeys is very much here. About the time my sorrow loses its momentum, a baby donkey will enter my life. It makes me curious about Caterpillar's timing. Jenny's belly is growing huge by now. I'm wondering if she has a belly full of two of them. I won't hope or think about it. I'll just pray that Jenny's delivery be safe for all concerned.   

 

 

light and shadow on white pine bark

 

photos by tj worthington

 



CATERPILLAR REAL GONE CAT

last photo of caterpillar

 

Yesterday at about this time, late afternoon, I realized my baby Caterpillar is gone and not coming back. She'd been gone two days and nights plus a third day. I had gone out earlier, walking to every place I've found to be her favorite places, and every place in between. I knew she would not leave sight of the house, but a 360 degree circle around the house has thousands of hiding places a cat could snuggle into and never be found. I had no confidence in the search, but as two days and nights went by, not dropping in for water or catfood, confidence grew that I'd never see her again. Last time I saw her go out the door she was healthy and alert in her wild mind. The last two nights I took her to bed, she was up within a half hour and out the door to stay the night outside, return at noon to refuel, then back out the door. This was when wild mind overtook her. She came into the house to fill her tank and went back out. She had a determination in those two days that became her focus. I've always allowed Caterpillar her own mind. I don't check on her to find her when she's gone several hours. She's at home here, this is her world, the only place she's ever known. 

 

caterpillar

 

Around 4am of the second night that she left the bed to go outside, I saw her in a dream standing on the floor beside the bed where she stands to wake me when I'm sleeping. She said mao to me one time. I did not wake because I knew it was a dream. It fell into the pattern of my dreams the last few years of a place I know well with something missing or something there that is not there, only one thing. Like in a dream I walked into the house and catfood bowls were missing, everything else the same. In the dream  of her speaking to me, I saw her and heard her, taking it for a dream because it fell into the pattern of my dreams lately.  And she did not say mao a second and third time, which she always did. The evening of the first day she was gone all day and came back before dark, I recall a moment of holding her up, eye to eye. We looked into each other's eyes for a long time. I saw something in her eyes that told me she would not be with me much longer, and she knew it. I wrote it off as my sentimental imagination and fixed on the beauty in her eyes, that they did not look like old eyes, yet had a weariness behind them. I'm glad, now, for the moment. When I think of her, which is all the time, I see her eyes full of her love for me. She saw my love for her in my eyes.

 

caterpillar

 

Several times a day the last two days, I expect to see her walking in the door, then remember she will never walk through the door again. My feeling now is when she spoke to me in the dream, it was her last moment. I suspect a coyote found her, maybe a big owl, but the owl would have had to be eagle size to pick her up. If neighbor's dog had killed her, I would have found the remains. Strangely, I feel satisfied if a coyote caught her.  Like burning the body, there was no grave left for her soul to cling to once it's left the body. It feels like the natural order for the four-leggeds. I understand that once an animal goes into shock, like when a coyote grabs one, immediately it goes unconscious like the soul left the body in that moment. I suspect this is the moment Caterpillar called to me. There is no pain and it's fast. Therein lies my comfort. She saved me the sorrow of taking her to the vet and holding her while she's given a shot and goes out instantly. I did not want to go through that, but would have been happy to, to keep her to the very last possibility of her natural life.

 

caterpillar

 

She seemed like she was on a mission the last two days. She walked into the house with purpose, refueling, and walked back out. When she stopped to appeal to me while I was writing, her plaintive mao tore me up. It sounded desperate, needing my attention, a depth of desperation that gave me concern, needing so much to be held. I'd hold her awhile, she'd snuggle in and purr while I sang her song to her and told her I love her. Her need was such that it made me suspicious something was up. Looking back, I can see several signals that pointed to Caterpillar knowing it was her time. She had taken to lying out in the open near the road. I wondered why she did not hide like usual to take a nap outdoors. Today, my feeling is that she was offering herself to be found by a predator. She knows the predators around here. She used to be one of them. I had feelings I called sentiment that she was ready to go on and had chosen her way. Her attitude, what I called her wild mind, appeared to have taken over her mind. She never came down out of it but for the moments I held her. I'd put her down and out the door she went. I miss my baby so much today, I'm in a constant state of sorrow. At the same time I feel so much love for Caterpillar in my heart it wells up and trickles tears down my face. I weep and sob a little bit and pull myself together. My love for Caterpillar keeps my heart billowing in love and sorrow as one. All that's left is gratitude for eighteen years with a beautiful soul I fell in love with the day she was born.

 

these are my last 5 photos of caterpillar, 8/31/15

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

NOTHING WILL BE THE SAME

     brian kenny, flag


I'm of at least two minds about leaving this world, this dimension, whatever it may be. One is I am curious about the other side and sometimes a little alarmingly ready to have a look. On the other hand, it's not like watching a movie for 2 hours and turning the light back on. I have to leave this playground I've taken so seriously for so long, sometimes despised it, overall loved it. It makes me look out the window at the leaves of an oak sapling swaying up and down lightly, home. I think of leaving my friends and baby Vada and I feel sorrow, pre-grief maybe. I know a few of my friends will carry a deep sorrow for some time, as I have done for a few of my friends in the past. It is a great sorrow to lose people important to us, the biggest drama in life. This human existence is a puzzle without end, which makes it so interesting and keeps it interesting. Buddhism says it is a life of suffering. It's true. I see the suffering begin in a baby new to a body, bump head on a chair leg, it hurts. Much more suffering follows. We get used to it. Even if we were meditators we'd have suffering of varying degrees in our lives all the time. We have plenty of the other, joy, for balance. I say "we" when I'm not so sure it is entirely "we." I'm actually seeing it these days like joy is the nature of the soul, our innermost, or real self. All the self-centered focus locks onto suffering and sorrow, gray clouds around the soul, a foggy mountaintop.


A moment stays in my mind from half dozen years ago, opening the inside door to the library, a woman I knew on the inside was going out, she opened the door with an exaggerated welcoming gesture and said, "What have you been doing since your store closed?" I said, thinking as fast as I could to condense several months of experience into a phrase, "Getting some joy back into my life," which was literally what I was doing. Her face fell almost to the floor. She said, "I've never had joy in my life." My heart sank for her. I knew she meant it. I knew her husband, more than likely a model of her daddy; jumped from one frying pan into another. I have felt for her ever since she said that. I did not know what to say at the time. I felt a need to hug her and say, "I'm sorry for you," but didn't know her that well, the entire library staff was watching. I could have hugged her in front of them if I'd known her better, a gray-haired old hippie biker chick. One thing she gave me: she showed me I have a way of taking joy for granted, like it's easily accessed. It had never occurred to me there might be people who knew nothing of joy. So little is as it seems, I wonder why I try to assess or understand anything.


Big Mama Thornton is singing in my head, Let's go get stoned. Why the hell not! After a lifetime of taking everything seriously, I'm seeing there's nothing serious about any of it. The redbird is jumping about in the rhododendron the other side of the window. A crow calls in the trees across the road. Katydids inside my head. That's one of the nice parts of living in the midst of what we call nature. In the city, ringing in the ears can be maddening. In the country you don't notice. It's katydids, treefrogs and crickets outside singing with the ones inside, making me one with nature. I look around my world of the mountains I love thinking about leaving them and feel sorrow, a kind of pre-grief, the anticipation of grief. I have to feel it now, because there won't be any feeling it later. When the angels are leading me up the tunnel of light to music of the Bell Spur String Band, I doubt I'll be looking back and missing the mountains. So I'll miss them now, while I can appreciate them. I have songs in my head, How beautiful heaven must be, sweet home of the happy and free, fair haven of rest for the weary, and Peter Tosh singing, Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. And, farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why.


Do I sing these songs to myself to comfort myself? Probably. There are other good songs in my head that are not about the other side, like Peter Tosh's African. Don't care where you come from if you're a black man you are an African. Beautiful song of black identity, black pride, beautifully conceived and Tosh sang it well. I say I look forward to the other side, but when I really think about it, it makes me want to put on some beautiful music I love or a movie I love or read some Chinese poetry. This tells me music, drama and poetry I value most in this world, the stuff my house is full of. I have ingested so much of it into my record of experiences that it has become part of who I am, a big part. For me, living in a world of people informed/educated/led by television is like living in a foreign country with people of another language and another culture. I am a stranger to television culture in that I don't keep up with it. But the fact is, I live in television culture because everybody around me to all coasts are the children of television. Now, grandparents were born in front of the tv.


On the news, at the coffee shop, here and there, everywhere I talk with people, the ongoing paean is what's the matter with this world? Let's start at the beginning. This is television culture. It started 60 years ago and grew into this world where prison construction corporation stocks only rise. Police state looks really secure on tv: arresting niggers with attitudes and no tshirts on COPS. Like the Randy Newman song, Rednecks, keepin the niggers down. Steven Seagal arresting black guys who ask for his autograph in handcuffs. Nobody white with any power or desire for power cares that we have the most outrageous prison system on earth as long as the prison population is mostly black. For the black American man prison has become an initiation into manhood, a bootcamp that develops unbreakable bonds. Like a white man I know said to me, "I can't trust you cause you never been in prison." The black men of America have that kind of a bond in a network all over the land, the convict brotherhood. Pre-television, we were moving toward unity, toward "integration," allowing people their rights. Half a century into the time I think of as Led By Television, division has been the emphasis until we're on the verge of civil war again, this one everybody against everybody. Seen from outside television culture, Americans are going collectively crazy. And they're taking me with them, because I'm one of them; it's their culture, it's our culture, it's my culture.


While we snoozed in corporate entertainment and got fat on corporate fast food, the international corporations that keep their money free of taxes in Cayman Island banks took our government from us, our democracy, our constitution and gave us police state, systematically over a period of 30 years, on tv where all that is fake is real, and all that is real becomes fake. It's a fake belief system. During the time of the African civil wars, it was a truth that whoever held the radio station held the power. Here, it aint none of us hold no tv corporations. We don't even know the people that own them. We couldn't even get a job at their country clubs. You think they give a shit about us? :) Of course you don't. Only as long as we keep the garbage and sewage under control. The excesses of Capitalism foreseen to take it down are happening. Capitalism is undergoing what looks like rising tides due to ice melt splashing against the foundations of skyscrapers built by the economic system that melted the polar caps. Kinda like one of the movies made by the gross now, The Day After Tomorrow or 2012. I'm thinking these movies are symbolic of the self-destruction of Capitalism by greed. That's why it's called a "deadly sin," it leads only to self-destruction.


The country I grew up isn't the country I live in anymore. Probably wasn't then. It was the time of the Ugly American when I was learning about our righteous history of wars where we never tortured prisoners and we gave aid to the colonial world of po' nigras (and kept them in poverty at home). It wasn't long after high school I began to see it wasn't like it was told in school, certainly not like told in church, not like told on tv in any kind of way; a sham, a show, light flickering, pixels changing color, a vapor, a scent on the breeze for a second, illusion within illusion. I came into this body a few months after Pearl Harbor, a time of pulling Americans together into one great cheering squad. It took. A dozen years ago our government imploded the WTC towers, rallied us around terrorism, and now is imploding itself, allied as in wedded to Capitalism. They took down democracy and all our values with it, they being our corporate government, taken by quietly systematic coup under smokescreen while we were watching tv spellbound by pop culture. I'm sorry for my country. I can't say I'm sorry to be leaving it before people like me are rounded up for FEMA camps. I saw the very tail end of the Old South in Charleston, South Carolina, the tail end of the old-time ways in the mountains, and the end of democracy in America in this lifetime. It's been both joyus and sorrowful living in Prozac Nation.


*

BLUE DAY

air bellows

I believed I could handle loss better than I can. Over the last year I've seen I am not capable of quite a lot I believed I was before. I am not handling the loss of TarBaby and Jr well at all. I know better than to wallow in the pit of loss, but it happens anyway. All day today has been timeout for mourning. This morning, I had my coffee, watched the last half of a documentary about Evo Morales of Bolivia I saw the first half of last night. Talked on the phone with Carole, went back to bed and cried for an hour over TarBaby. I was not ready. It blindsided me. I can't believe he's living anymore. I can't stand wondering anymore. Two friends, perhaps equally close to me in spirit, snatched up and gone. Jean continues to swim among them in my head and heart. I drove to town just to make myself get out of the house. Bank, PO, drug store, etc. Ran into Jean's preacher daughter int he PO lobby. We hugged. She asked if I'm living in Jr's house. I said, No. She said, I thought you'd want to live closer to town? I thought: Me? Closer to town? And said, No, I want farther from town, not closer. The encounter brought Jean to the front of my mind again.

Back from town, I sat and watched INTO THE WILD, the film made by Sean Penn about the guy just graduated from Emory who went into the wild of Alaska leaving everything behind. As a film it was 10x better than I was expecting from what I'd read and heard, and expected it to be pretty good. I saw Sean Penn's artistry all the way through it. Penn is somebody I've watched over the years without really watching him. Just paid attention to things he did over time. In the time when he was married to Madonna and playing the Hollywood bad boy, I couldn't take him seriously. Then, years later I see something and it makes me pay attention. Then he's in Sam Shepherd's THIS SO-CALLED DISASTER. By the time I put the dvd in the slot to start the film, my respect for Penn was solid. What I meant above by 10x better, Penn has matured as an artist at least tenfold since I was first aware of him. He likes to play with the edge. This may have something to do with his choice to make this film, and then how he made it, following this young not necessarily rational guy going off into the extreme.

Back at home in urban Virginia, we see what his absence is doing to his mother, dad and sister, people who have lived inauthentic lives to a degree the boy went flying off into the unknown to look for something real, something authentic. Dad and mom are suffering within daily, not knowing anything about where he might be, if he might be. After a year and a half out on his adventures, daddy William Hurt breaks down in anguish and sat down in the road, acting out for me what I was feeling inside over TarBaby, not knowing, not knowing anything. The film left me ready to find a new experience to take hold of my interest and get me going. For the last 3 weeks I've felt like the lead sinker, a temperament that's holding down something that wants to be light-hearted and float. The part that bothers me most is what this is telling me about myself. I'm actually happy to see that I feel that deeply. I spent a large part of my early life clamping down on feelings. Now I allow them. Sometimes they overwhelm. I try to look at myself psychologically, like expression of neuroses that go back to no telling what. None of it clicks. Then I take a long, hard look at it, I miss TarBaby. I miss the cat that much. I remind myself this intense feeling of loss is shared by about everyone. Everybody I know and perhaps have ever known has suffered from loss at least a time or two. I've found the one's hardest to take are the ones that happen by surprise.

Going along, thinking we have a good rhythm going, then surprise happens. Lots of surprise things happen all the time. I talk with myself about attachment, but that's just part of it. It's most and foremost that TarBaby is my friend, my close friend. We had a connection of understanding I found remarkable and loved, enjoyed the person TarBaby is as I enjoy the person of someone I know, like Jr. It is a strong connection of the spirit. I'm understanding how old people feel, losing ones close to them they've known all their lives. Jr at 87 had a very few people left he's known along the way. The new faces are people he doesn't know. He became a stranger without leaving home, one of the few left of the old generation. I'm moving into that zone of losing my dear ones more and more; some by gradual degeneration, some quick. I'm inclined to believe quick is good. But I don't know.

I don't believe any more in shutting down my feelings. I do in public when it's necessary to keep the peace or avoid looking too much like the dopey fool I am. After I'd moped about all morning and early afternoon, there came a time I said, I gotta get outta this house. I need to get out and ride with the window down, listen to the Flatt & Scruggs tape that came with the car. A Jimmy Martin tape came with it too. Good music for driving anywhere in the mountains. Even better in the flatland for reminder of the mountains. I'm looking at taking off one morning on a drive someplace, leaning strongly toward the Ralph Stanley Museum. I want to see it. I want to go to the country music museum in Bristol too, maybe another trip. Now that I have a good highway car, I want to take some drives. I love driving anywhere in these mountains. It might be a good feel-good thing to do, too. There is nothing like driving on the highway several hours for the mind to ruminate without interruption (radio off) on whatever puzzles are whirling around in that infinite space. It might be a good thing for the mind to have several hours on the road to sort things out.

I have projects I want to do and no motivation to get started at anything. Mortality sits on my shoulders telling me the future is uncertain, absolutely uncertain. Always has been, but nothing like now. My friend Jim Winfield has projects too, but he gets at his. He wants to get a certain amount of things done before he drops off. And I'm of the mind, Going into what we can only see as nothingness, I can't help but want to loosen my attachments to stuff. But it's our relationships with others that make standing upright worth the bother. When it gets down to what the NT is about, I tend to see Jesus telling us how to get along with the people around us, advising that the good life is having friendly relationships with the people we know. That's heaven. They say hell is here on earth. If so, then heaven is too. It's our choice which one we want to go with. It's our own creation. In my case, I'm allowing the sorrow inevitable from loving so much, but would only love more, not less, foreseeing inevitable loss. The sorrow goes with it and that's ok. I've seen sorrow that never lets go. This is not that. This is just the blues.

SORROW

sky brooding

The sky is clear this morning after 2.5 inches of rain in two days. The highway is wet, the lawn is wet, cars are wet, the sun is out, the wind is flowing up the highway 18 wind tunnel through Whitehead, west to east. Years ago, Jr planted a couple of white pines and some other growth to the west of the house, which slows the wind down considerably where I am, outside on the cement slab porch. Out beyond the white pines, the wind is making the sycamore dance like a big-leg woman doing the bump. Isaac Hayes had a song in his disco (cocaine) period, "Juicy Fruit sure is cute / in her sexy jump suit." I think of the tree in a green jump suit, Juicy Fruit, doing the bump, a whistle hanging around her neck like a coach, blowing the whistle while she bumped with everybody around her on the dance floor.

I look at the dance of the tall grasses on the edge of the lawn, the kind that favor a bushy foxtail on a long stem. A cluster of them is moving slowly, dancing like flame, no two nanoseconds alike, them glowing, backlit by morning sun. It's the same with the sycamore dancing like flame. Of course, I'm thinking of a contained flame like in a fireplace where we can watch a fire and feel good about it. A fire out of control is something we don't think is so pretty. The wind is getting to be such that it's approaching impractical to stay outside where I'm thinking more about how cold it is than anything else. Seems like it's colder than it was a few minutes ago when it was pleasant.

I came inside because I'm not like somebody who climbs Himalayan mountains and thinks it's just starting to get good at zero. It felt warmer when I went out there when it was 57 degrees than it does now at 59.7. It's the kind of temperature that's all right for awhile, but if you're going to stay in it, need to dress for it. Green and yellow leaves fly up the highway wind tunnel alongside brightly colored motorcycles. I saw a buzzard wobbling this way and that, unable to keep it steady, like a boat on rough water, or good sense in a troubled mind.

The phone rang. Then Jr got up. He drank an ensure. At 1 in the morning he was up and peed in the wheelchair, then tried to get back into the bed. I woke from him calling me. He was on the bed from the waist up, face down, his legs hanging down, and he couldn't move. It was awkward to work with. If I remember correctly, which I don't, I believe I had to tuck one arm down to his side, and roll him over that way, pulling his legs up and over. That only partially got done. It hurt him so bad I had to stop. We agreed on something that wouldn't hurt so much, me taking him by his ribs and scooting him on his back to where his head was on the pillow, then pull the inert legs up and onto the bed. Jr moaning, "I don't know what I'd do without you." He does, but we don't talk about that anymore; the answer is to obvious to mention. He's having a difficult time, but he's not in despair.

What shape I'm in, I don't know. I find myself wiping a tear from one eye or the other, or both, from time to time during the day. Nothing in my mind I feel weepy about, that is, that I'm aware of. I do find myself in a state of constant sorrow, that male thing Ralph Stanley put his finger on. When that movie brought the song to mainstream awareness, I was struck by how men took to it in such a mass way. It's a song Ralph Stanley has to sing at every concert. About 7 years ago I went to Ziggy's in Winston-Salem to see Papa Roach, a suburban punk band that made one great album. When they played, "I know my mother loves me, but does my father really care?" a male chorus went up from the audience singing along, drowning out the band's vocalist.

The whole song was sung male chorus, by me too. I knew the words. One of those songs that's called anthemic, like it could be our national anthem except for its absence of political cliches. I thought: Wow, we men have a collective problem that's for real, depression. I tried prozac for a few years, but started missing myself. I was in a sweet mood all the time and nothing got me down, but, I told myself, this is only half of it. I want the whole deal. If my karma is such that it's created a depressive, well it's done the same to everybody else, so rather than shelve it away in a prozac high, I wanted to go back to living it. Feeling sorrow is a legitimate feeling too, not to be denied, though not to be dwelled on either.

I'm not afraid of sorrow. Some people cut out their sorrows by cutting out their joy. I don't go around with a television bright-eyed smile on my face like I'm running for election all the time. I don't want to look like I think I'm on tv. Besides, all that bright white-teeth smile says to me is somebody is trying to sell me something. Usually, it just means, like me. Maybe I lean more to the sorrow side of the scale than to the joy side. So what? Everybody has their own place on that scale, mine is mine. And bell curves don't dictate normal. Nothing dictates normal, because there's no such entity and never was meant to be. What we call normal is a certain code of conformity to adhere to, like in America we conform to want more money than you need, any way you can get it.

I feel a great deal of what I think of as legitimate sorrow in this time with Jr. I don't believe I'm ruled by it. And it doesn't feel neurotic. I see in my mind right now a woman I came face to face with at the side door to the library a few months ago. She wanted to know what I'm doing since my store went under. Like that was the only thing in my life. I didn't quite know how to answer. Did she really want to know? No. Was she ready to sit down and listen for a while? No. Then I must, again, reduce my answer to a phrase, because she was just making talk. I said, "Getting some joy back in my life."

She said, "Back in your life?" with the awe of surprised amazement. Like what kind of a life do you have where you have joy? I thought, What have I done? Wasn't it a simple answer? Her face fell and she said, "I've never had any joy in my life." Her husband came to mind and I thought, No doubt. I didn't know what to say. My impulse was to hold her and give her a meaningful hug, but that would have been too awkward. I didn't know her well enough. Her husband doesn't like me anyway, and if she told him I hugged her, I'd do well to get a bulletproof vest and carry a gun. Too much trouble. I gave her a look that said, I'm sorry for you, and let it go.