It Isn’t Fair
I wake up this morning and head out to see if the CA possibly delivered the newspaper (no) when I notice the front door is ajar. Without my husband here to lock up, I slept with my front door not just unlocked but standing open. When I go out back to scrounge up some boxes for packing, I return to find my keys dangling in the lock. So I slept with my front door ajar and the keys conveniently placed in my back door lock. And I was safe.
*
My email keeps coming and going. I have business I need to get done, emails to reply to and new ones to compose, but I can’t send out a thing. The guy at the Mac shop doesn’t know what’s gone wrong with the BellSouth account. So I add my Gmail account to the computer and just start sending emails through Gmail. Except something twists in the universe and the BellSouth account pops back up, sending out emails again. Until it stops.
*
I don’t want people wearing tennis shoes in honor of the Boston dead. I don’t want people running to work to remember the dead. I feel like the little girl in one of A.A. Milne’s books who’s so frazzled she’s bent double, jerking out her hair, utterly and totally crosswise with the world. I am worn out with such lovely, thoughtful gestures that try to make us part of the tragedy: the slow-mo clap, the dawning recognition, the building music, the ostentatious, insistent desire to show how sympathetic and caring and in-tune to other people’s feelings we are when what we are doing is everything within our power to make it about US. It isn’t.
*
I spy the little Yorkie a block away and I halt, waiting for him to make it to my corner. His owners stop so I can say hi—how could they do otherwise? Five months old, soft as a dust bunny with the cutest face I’ve seen since my own Yorkies passed into the next life. Bright and chipper, licking hello. I touch my heart and thank the woman, who never breaks a smile. The little dog bounces off while in another part of town a woman goes missing, a car alarm blasts as windows are broken, an abandoned child cries for her missing doll, a cousin boards a plane to Boston, clutching a bereavement ticket in his fist.
Marisa
Great post. It’s chilling, how many moving parts this world has. Some of them have to keep going even when others get ripped off their tracks. We just keep breathing because what else can we do? It isn’t fair….but it just is. You’re right about it not being about the US. It’s about people–individuals–and where we are missing something. We are always missing something, and that bends me double, too.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
“We are always missing something” – thanks, Marisa
Joe Hawes
One of your very best posts–a fascinating juxtaposition and a reminder about how random life is. I am glad you are safe
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Thanks – I thought it might be too random for folks to enter and feel something, but the title, I think, pulls it together. I do appreciate your reading, enjoying and commenting.