Friday, December 7, 2012
fever dreams
Obligation trumps feeling, and I thought I'd feel better after puking, but everyone else is out sick and in a few hours so will I. Even the head honcho here told me to go home because I never take off work unless I'm almost dead. Hopefully I'll be all in one piece tomorrow and before I go anywhere.
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Yet another reason to go live as a hermit in the woods.
ReplyDelete~
There aren't any vomitoria beneath the trees. Sheesh.
ReplyDeleteWe were talking about the great things
ReplyDeletethat have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.
"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.
Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
"Great Things Have Happened" by Alden Nowlan