Still alive

I took an Imitrex at 6 this morning, hoping it would dim the pounding in my brain, and it served me well enough that I could meet MartinDawe and his lovely Irish wife for coffee. How astonishing and unlikely, us meeting in Portland after years of following each other’s journals, talking with laughter and admiration of Marknlizzie and all the blippers we both follow--that feeling of connection we have when we check in with people daily, peer over their shoulders, grieve their losses with them, celebrate their passages and birthdays. We are so happy Blipfuture worked and our community will continue. There is something inexplicably tender about the connections we form here, the depth of them, the richness.

I left Martin and Anne, and I drove through blasting heat to the extreme other end of Portland to collect Bella from school. She was understanding when I had to lie down for half an hour, entertained herself on Youtube. Then I kept my promise. Protected by straw hats, we set out to find ice cream and a shady park for her to play in. She rounded up a couple of little girls and the three of them spent two hours racing after each other, shrieking with delight as I parked my tired old bones and dizzy head on a bench, surprised to find I am still here, near the children, their sleek muscular bodies moving through hot winds as easily as a shoal of fish in water.

Here are Bella and I, reflected in a dirty shop window, our shadows joined and hot sun bouncing off us. 

Still alive, on the shore of everything he’s ever known, an old man stands at a window overlooking a sea of grass. He is wearing the faded pajamas of dreams, in one of which a dear uncle, forty years dead, lay dying all over again, his ivory fingers pinching feathers of light from his bedsheet. But here there is more light than anyone could hope to gather, a wrinkled sheet of dazzle, and thousands and thousands of minutes washing to shore. --Ted Kooser, The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book.

Still alive on the shore of everything I’ve ever known. Still alive, really? Why me? I bask in the mystery. Still here, somehow chosen to continue. Still having difficulty sitting in front of a screen while its flickering light pierces my eyes with long white hot needles.