After Salvador kills you, all the earth falls silent. The birds nestle their young and quiet them, our dogs tuck their tails and hide beneath furniture, the winds collapse to the ground. Waves cease their rumbling. Currents sink into the depths. All the seas become as an open and sightless eye.
Do you remember when we convinced you to streak around the house? Of course you do; you bring it up every time I introduce you to someone. I remember your slender ass glimpsed through a succession of windows, the white soles of your running feet, your pistoning arms, your screeches when you regained our front porch to discover we’d locked the door.
None of my raised-bed boxes are even, nor my hand-tied trellises straight. I get too close to a thing, to where I can’t see its crookedness. Aside from human beings, you need to step back aways to see the crookedness in a thing. I wish I were a step-back person. Crookedness in a trellis you can fix before too many ties go in. But crookedness in man? What’s the point of seeing it?
You might be wondering how I can be so confident that our children will be happy to let recitals drift into oblivion. How do I know? Because I have been to scores of recitals and exhibitions, for music, for dance, even Lego robotics. The only people who are more obviously, thoroughly miserable than the adults are the children.
There is a liturgy of suffering that engrains my bones. The seasons of this life inhabit me. When I was young, what I first learned were the literal seasons: Spring brings hope, summer joy, fall coziness, winter magic. But life has shown me seasons within the seasons. Each loss returns to me in its appointed time…
First, stop waiting for someone else to do it. If, one day, someone does come with the power to heal this monstrous gash, you’ll be asked what you did while you waited. You’ll be asked what you think your purpose here is. You’ll be asked who the hell you think you are.
I have a few rules that I try to follow as a literary citizen: 1) If I want to read a book by a living author, I buy it new. 2) If at all possible, I buy it local. 3) If I can’t buy local, I aim to secure it from a distributor who takes at least minimal care not to defraud authors by selling counterfeits of their work.
“Some guys came over while you were gone and threw rocks at your dog.” That’s what the new kid said one afternoon. He had golden hair and a perpetual, toothy grin, and he’d announced the day we met that his dad built rockets. He’d told us he had eight unreleased Star Wars sequels at home, that his dad got hold of them because of his rocket work.
Looking back, I realize that I was hungry too. But like Pilate, I wasn’t yet willing to face the hunger on its own terms. To be fed by a silence and a truth that won’t fit into my billfold, nor make a clever aphorism.
The fever was on us—if we can be honest with ourselves—long before the pandemic hit. It’s a self-fueling hatred, more firestorm than virus. Something in our hearts is the propellent. We all know it, and many of us have our scapegoats.