Knees and Pluto and Pascal

Scientists react to images from Pluto

I flipped through my emails early this morning, the ritual of deletion and clicks. I read a horrifying beginning of an article about Tinder in this month's Vanity Fair -- was relieved when I couldn't go further as a non-subscriber. I scrolled through a few tweets about last night's Republican "debate" and resolved, again, to not pay attention to anything having to do with those men and women -- did you hear me say ANYTHING? -- until September of 2016. I read somewhere that this is how they do it in France, so barring any demands to re-read Proust, I'm French for a year. Little threads of despair, hovering. My knee hurts, and I bet it's osteoarthritis, and I bet it's because I haven't exercised enough -- well, let's be honest -- my entire life. There's also the age factor and the curious, horrible way things happen when you get older -- not gradually, but all       of          a              sudden. Hairs sprouting from chins, a big toe that crackles, jowls and a front tooth that appears to be hearkening back to pre-orthodontia buck tooth days. Then I saw that photo, and tears streamed down my face (there's no original way to write that) because, really, we're all just hanging out here for a short time and the universe is vast and unknowable. As my compatriot Blaise Pascal said in the 17th century (remember I'm French for a year), vous admirez toujours ce que vous ne comprenez vraiment pas.*













*You always admire what you really don't understand.

Whispering Pines

Do you know that song, a Richard Manuel/The Band plaintive cry? If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream --

I hear that song in my head today as I scurry about, mailing packages, filling out forms, going to the grocery store, diapering and dressing Sophie, fixing her hair and putting her in the backyard swing where she'll sit just for a minute, while I write, I said, and I gave her, it, the swing, a shove, told the dog to stop barking and ran up the back steps into my room, inside my room, my lonely room, there is no in-between. What else comes to me but songs from other lives, that other life, that I penned in small spiral notebooks, in tinier script, even a poem in French that I picked out of a stack the other day, opened and read, remembered.

Pour la premiere fois
j'ai vu la Saturne
et je pense a toi
deux lunes autour d'une
lumiere brilliante.

I spent two weeks hiking in the wilderness of the Adirondacks one summer between my junior and senior years. I had Pascal in my head, read St. Augustine on a bus with a big girl named Cheryl, wrote character notes about moon-faced women and boys tripping on LSD, camp lantern lighting the page. Our instructor was bald and stooped, a leprauchan who knew the names of all the trees and plants, the rocky paths, the peaks. I came back thin, so thin, from twenty mile hikes, seventy, eighty miles in, a sixty-five pound backpack wrapped on my already small frame. I wore a blue cashmere sweater with cables, thin in spots, and when we climbed down and dispersed, I spent the night alone in a hotel room in Syracuse. I shaved my legs in a porcelain tub and sank, deep, into hot water. I ordered steak and a potato, had it delivered to my room and devoured it like a beast. The next day I flew back to school, was met at the airport, I think, by a boy, but I can't be sure. I can feel you standing there, but I don't see you anywhere -- I will wait until it all goes 'round -- With you in sight, the lost are found --