Wednesday, May 24, 2006

all the yesterdays...

for me are not catalogued in a neat linear calendar, but more like a jar of change: each bygone day deposited haphazardly. occasionally stirred and sometimes spent. people tell stories about times or events I was present for and they ellicit memories like books read long ago, details blurred, different eye-witness reports, filtered, dubious truths.

a strong life thread frays the weaker one when the two meet. if by chance the gods crosshatched your life line on that given gifted day perhaps you will walk tall, but at what cost to those close to you?

across the state again today in a rented blue kia rio. from the yakima valley all the way to walla walla we drove through a jungle-gym of rainbows. two triples you could see from tip to tip. one bright shard stretching straight out of the penitentiary. lyli and scarleht caught on immediately, echoing my whispered breaths of "rainbow", prefacing it with "prit-ty".

alone, my mind too scattered to track the novel's lines. i sweat, abdomen aches, arnica and cough syrup. another movie in the background, uncared for.

2 comments:

GreenDaddy said...

Time! The way we say it down here in Texas is "taaaam," taking precious time to say it. I've been thinking a lot about decay and parenting. There is a lot lost for parents, productive loss, but loss all the same. Part of me thinks the problem is the way time is constructed now, how it is "spent". But another part of me thinks that parenting is just hard and it doesn't matter what kind of society we live in.

Anonymous said...

I thought I was the only parent to a 'Lyli' Smiles. How lovely to find Lyli and Scarleht.