“The way to find a certain something is to find out where it’s not.”
I lose the car keys in my office. Small place, should be easy to find. Check the desk drawers. Nothing. Check my briefcase. Nope. Look in the pockets to my jacket. Look underneath the chair. Behind the door. Double check my purse. File cabinet. Garbage can. Maybe I left them by the coffepot. Maybe by my mailbox? The copier? Did I stop in the restroom? At the Starbucks?
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I lose a dvd of home movies. The silent super 8’s of us in the 60’s and 70’s. We take turns running up to the camera, smiling. I’m in an infant sister and my big sister wants me to look here, now there, and she pushes my face in any direction she wants. My parents keep filming. Nana at Christmas. She’s adjusting my brother’s collar. My son’s life is is radically different. No one is pushing his face. His grandmothers kind of like it when he’s messy. I want to show him the movies. It’s lost on him.
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On a train, headed to Prague, I dreamed REM singing “Losing My Religion.” In the dream, my friend, an artist, is writing frantically and throwing the sheets of paper at me faster than I can read them. What do I do with all this? Four years earlier, I dreamed I was about to die, falling off a cliff, and I wanted to pray and then remembered I didn’t believe in God. What do I do? The paper falls around me. I fall without an answer. I see nothing clearly in either dream.
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My neighbor walks over and I comment he’s all dressed up. He’s wearing blue jeans with a belt and his red button-down shirt is tucked in, though he does allow himself house slippers. He says today is his birthday. 82. He has lost two daughters and one great grandson. His wife calls him back inside; Bill is on the phone. “Oh, honey,” he says to me, “I gotta get this,” and he hugs me before he goes back in. He has buried two daughters and one great grandson. I wonder if I would survive it. He wonders how he has.
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