I really must start writing them down

... short conversations with perfect strangers, I've been having more of since the cancer took ms away. Few have been as wonderful as this one with a thin serious woman in her late forties or so.


ME: {noticing Perfect Stranger noticing me spinning around a load bearing pillar by the 7th floor elevator while hanging onto it as if for dear life} Have you ever had to grab onto something to prevent yourself from just floating away?
PS {very seriously}: Yes.
ME: I hate that!
PS {a little sadly}: I know.

Chaperons

The notion of the oblivious chaperon occurs to me. It seems an ideal arrangement, the duties of that functionary being carried by the expedient of her presence only and not by the scandalous knowledge, real or imagined, of the sins of her charge.

Walking in the Snow

Had a half hour to kill after a swim and delivering some posters to HCP where I just missed Mass. So I walked in the snow, so quiet, muffled traffic sounds all about like a small sad Christmas party two doors down just winding to a close. Thoughts filled with LAFS and things she said.

Doh! What is becoming of this--some kind of Dear Diary affair?!!

No, but I don't want you to forget the walk so warm, and the deepening crystalline snow flakes sharp enough to know to be gentle, and a strange hyphen in a wonderful name.

Fantastic

My favorite use of the word fantastic, meaning of the stuff of fantasy, the word fantasy meaning hallucination is Charlie Brown's in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Used without irony, it is more akin to horrific than to wonderful or grand. I try always to use the word in that negative fashion, when I use it.

Sometime, though, it's impossible.

Fantastic!

{sigh!} fantastic.

Good for some LAFS

I believe in love at first sight. I believe it's something real. When we are young and foolish we believe it to be the same as love, and when we are young and cynical we dismiss it as lust, but when we reach a certain age we understand it's neither. It has more in common with love because it entails an orientation to love and with it a desire, however rash or reckless, to carry out that love. It has nothing in common with lust except that they accompany one another often enough to make the confusion forgivable among the pitiably jaded.

When you've a foolish heart.

When you've a foolish heart,
I think it can be taught to be constant;
but not the other way around.