Thursday







I’m reading about him now, watching old videos on You-Tube, listening to great music, remembering the awe, the way the world was so open then, and everything bigger, more possible, more new.

I heard last night, in the early hours. He was just fifty-six, impossibly young. Now, smelling toast and coffee, noting that I still beat on, I wonder about him, the him walking away from it, the him returning, the him in suit and dickie-bow, the him in jeans and black T, the older him, the deeper, richer him, the cancered him, the man but the man containing all those other men.

It was so damned cute that little computer, and it talked. It loved its Dad, how could it not?

My son sits in the front room. The television rattles, he has a lap-top on his thigh, a phone blipping tweets, something or other playing in one ear. A hundred miles away a man with a beard talks to him about Business and Finance and my son pretends to listen. This is called being at University. How long is three years, and where will it be? My son just eats it up. He expects this and he expects the next thing; there will always be things and next things and better things. This is how the world is.
For my son.




This morning, because it's morning, because the sun is up, he can slide into a small blue car, be at his shiny gymnasium in minutes, sharpen up, thicken. He already has, no doubt with that something or other in his ear, with messages flying, sticking, accumulating. His life comes dripping in, dropping in. Rise, light up say nothing, just wait. Things will always come.

I am trying to remember when it was the active way. First, survive. We ate fish, we ate meat. We hid from the rain. We held heavy books. We wrote things down. There were mothers and fathers and dark corners and pain.


But for those after us, like my son, things will always come. There is no need for an emergency kit. They will turn up the volume for that something in their ear, the song overwhelming. There will be nothing to worry about. They have seen it all before, heard it all before. And tomorrow, if nothing intervenes, we will repeat.