Big World, Small Thoughts

When he got out of the car this morning, his shoulders slumped under his backpack, his hair stuck up straight from the back, he muttered I didn't even have any breakfast, and I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter than my lips in a thin, determined line. Resolve. On the way to the car-wash, I listened to the Vatican reporter talk about the coming papal vote. The ballot is simple, he reported. They're encouraged to disguise their handwriting. Paul Ryan is busy trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and a baby was shot five times in a minivan while his father changed his diaper, but there was a massage chair at the car-wash and it cost one dollar for five minutes. I lay back and closed my eyes for a moment and my legs were squeezed, the nodules rolled up my back and toward my shoulders but the intrepid pain in my shoulder blade continued to radiate. Afterward, while the man finished my car, I stood in the sunshine and read Mark Doty's essay on Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman. You did well to write to me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly & so affectionately, wrote Whitman to Stoker in March of 1876. It's a big world.