What Do You Think You're Doing?

If someone asked me what I thought I was doing with my life I'd say I was just always trying to tell what I saw. I'd explain that my mind produces figurative language the way iron produces rust.If we were talking about the column I’ve been producing all these years I think I'd say all I was trying to do there is connect the increasingly few people who read the paper with the increasingly many who don’t, either because they can’t afford to buy the paper or they’re too young to read, or too old and their eyes hurt, or they don’t speak our language.I grew up feeling like an outsider in the resolutely married, resolutely conforming America of old and I remember how awkward that was. I began gravitating early toward other left-out-seeming ones and there I found a home. Maybe I sound like a phony saying this since in some ways I’m about as mainstream as you can get: married forever, a mother and now a grandmother too, a person still happy to be driving the fourth incarnation of that original Dodge minivan, a vehicle so awesomely roomy I could carry my own own coffin in  it) but still: I’m uncomfortable with any organization based on principles of exclusion. And I can’t wait til someone takes our headphones away from us and makes us all go to work in the same big People Mover.I used to be a teacher and I still just want to make it a good class for the ones who show up. I also love making people laugh which is goes back to my being the baby of the family and thus the designated ray-of-sunshine.Also and finally I feel how Time is so quickly passing every day, every minute, every second. This morning I was lying on my back with my head hanging off the bed and saw what you see in this picture. It’s all here somehow: the lampshades I dye to make my world rosy, the ticking clock, all those CD’s now made archaic by newer technologies .. And also  the picture of the mild handsome man who was David’s father until he died at 45 in long-ago 1960.  Even the blooming late-spring day outside is here. They are all here. They are all fleeing. So why NOT bring yourself a smile by noting how you can see the very underpants of those little birds when they fly up over our heads?  It's a sweet notion that birds wear little white undies like the rest of us, and it invokes how young we all are how young this little blue planet is in the grand scheme of things.