Sad
I was so sad yesterday. In the supermarket, on the road, my eyes kept filling with tears and why? Because I hurt my ankle at dawn in the darkened driveway trying to get Uncle Ed’s wheelchair into my car? Because when I went to get him for his bloodwork he said he felt ‘bereft’ during the whole six days I was gone, causing me to feel I let him down? Because that's what we all do, let down the people we love who love us back even with our annoying habit of leaving the cabinet doors open as we cook?Maybe I’m sad because HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” ended last night and I just loved it, the way they got so much right about the year 1920. I once taught a course on the Twenties in America, so I know something about the era. The main thing I know is what that First World War did to people, which you see so clearly in the character of Jimmy Darmody: he has quite simply lost his humanity. (His hideously disfigured friend and fellow-vet Richard Harrow has the same problem only his wounds show.)How can people recover from such an experience? I heard a segment on This American Life about a child who had been in a Romanian orphanage until he was seven, literally tied in a crib with no stimulation, no human engagement... The couple who adopted him were at wit’s end by the time he was in adolescence; he was that violent. Then this adoptive mother underwent a special kind of therapy to bond her with her son the same way an infant bonds with its mother: by having the two gaze fixedly into one another’s eyes for hours at a time. It is an amazing and hopeful story.Maybe I was just sad because of my own mother's death and I shouldn’t really look on that loss as I did here yesterday. Maybe if I lie on my back now she and all my dear ones will come, the way Billy Collins says they do in this 30-second clip, pausing above us to watch til we sleep:[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3474890035450021520#]
THE DEAD by Billy Collins
The dead are always looking down on us, they say.while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heavenas they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,they think we are looking back at them,which makes them lift their oars and fall silentand wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
