How We Do It: Part XXIX in a series***

I'm lying next to Sophie in her room. The sun is going down, and we're watching the light dim through the palm fronds that hang outside her window. They need to come down, but they'll cling there, dry and brown, rustling, until some wind makes it too much. When they fall, they crash. Husks are not supple. Sophie's seizures are elemental like that. They come, errant, and they stop. Dry palms, then clammy, then dry again. A glass mermaid hangs from a paper mâché elephant trunk, and a line-up of Japanese dolls look on. Pillows and rolled up blankets and a thick carpet cushion the fall. Bill Callahan is singing about too many birds. If you could only, if you could only, if you could only stop. If you could only, if you could only, if you could only stop your. If you could only, if you could only, if you could only stop your heart. If you could only stop your heart beat, if you could only stop your heart beat, if you could only stop your heart beat for one heart. If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart beat. Sophie and I are lying here on the purple bedspread, our arms entwined. I'll remember this, the rustling palms, the dry, small palm of her hand, mermaids floating and too many birds.

One more bird, one last bird, and another.






**inspired by Bill Callahan's Too Many Birds which you can listen to by clicking on the title

If you could only stop your heartbeat,

for one heartbeat. That's the final line of songwriter and singer Bill Callahan's Too Many Birds and one that set me to weeping in my car yesterday as I drove back home from a cake delivery. I don't know why it made me cry and I don't know how to say it but that I was who I was, who I had been, that slither of feeling when music takes you to within.

Too many birds -- one last bird -- turns around and hopes to find the place it last knew rest