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Mirtha cutting Sophie's hair this weekend

I woke this morning at 5:15, anticipating the drive to Henry's school where he "conditions" three times a week for baseball tryouts in January. I lay on my back in the cold darkness, enumerating worries. Anxious about money. Anxious about Sophie and our ability to pay for, even continue to get, the medical marijuana that is, after nineteen years, the first treatment to help her. I glanced at my phone, at a thread on the pediatric cannabis therapy group on Facebook, a thread hijacked by a woman who insists on conspiracy. Something about seeds and growing it yourself and letting the seeds out. More about mold and pesticides, rumors that it will be another year before Charlotte's Web is spun in California. I felt the thread of worry. These people are all nuts, I thought, even as I get it. Get the nuts, that is. I've climbed into bed with people who believe that 9/11 is a conspiracy, who post about Obamacare in apocalyptic terms, who don't bat an eye at yellow journalism. But I get it. People thrown together, tied by threads, spinning. We do what we have to for our children. Who am I to judge? I will only accept another drug if Jesus himself offers it to me. I lie down, fully clothed, next to men who call Obama The Anointed One -- as an epithet. Mary Magdalene would do no less.

I forgot, though, of gratitude, that groping impulse toward it.

Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true,
that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning
and plotting.  -- Regina Sara Ryan