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I became quite chummy with Robin Meade, the...
11:20 PM, Tuesday, May 4, 2010
.. Link
I became quite
chummy with Robin Meade, the young woman who
anchors Headline News from six to ten AMBoring
routine, right? But the surface events of a
country laboring under a dictatorship can appear
boring, too - dictators like boring, dictators
love boring - even as great changes are
approaching beneath the surface
A hurt body and mind aren't just like a
dictatorship; they are a dictatorshipThere is no
tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as
confusionThat my mind had been as badly hurt as
my body was a thing I only came to realize once I
was alone and all other voices dropped awayThe
fact that I had tried to choke my wife of twentyfive
years for doing no more than trying to wipe
100
the sweat off my forehead after I told her to
leave the room was the very least of itThe fact
that we hadn't made love a single time in the
months between the accident and the separation,
didn't chanel jewelry even try, wasn't at the heart of it, either,
although I thought it was suggestive of the larger
problemEven the sudden and distressing bursts of
anger weren't at the heart of the matter
That heart was a kind of pulling-awayI don't
know how else to describe itMy wife had come to
seem like someoneMost of the people in
my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing
was that I didn't much careIn the beginning I
had tried to tell myself that the otherness I felt
when I thought about my wife and my life was
probably natural enough in a man who sometimes
couldn't even remember the name of that thing you
pulled up to close your pants - the zoomer, the
zimmer, the zippity-doo-dahI told myself it
would pass, and when it didn't and Pam told me she
wanted a divorce, what followed my anger was
reliefBecause now that other feeling was okay to
have, at least toward herNow she really was
101
otherShe'd taken cartier santos demoiselle off the Freemantle uniform and
quit the team
During my first weeks on Duma, that sense of
otherness allowed me to prevaricate easily and
fluentlyI answered letters and e-mails from
people like Tom Riley, Kathi Green, and William
Bozeman III - the immortal Bozie - with short
jottings (I'm fine, the weather's fine, the bones
are mending) that bore little resemblance to my
actual lifeAnd when their communications first
slowed and then stopped, I wasn't sorry
Only Ilse still seemed to be on my teamOnly Ilse
refused to turn in her uniformI never got that
other feeling about herIlse was still on my side
of the glass window, always reaching outIf I
didn't e-mail her every day, she calledIf I
didn't call her once every third day, she called
meAnd to her I didn't lie about my plans to fish
in the Gulf or check out the EvergladesTo Ilse I
told the truth, or as much of it as I could
without sounding chanel replica handbags cheap crazy
I told her, for instance, about my morning walks
along the beach, and that I was walking a little
farther each day, but not about the Numbers Game,
102
because it sounded too sillyor maybe
obsessive-compulsive is the term I actually want
Just thirty-eight steps from Big Pink on that
first morningOn my second one I helped myself to
another huge glass of orange juice and then walked
south along the beach againThis time I walked
forty-five steps, which was a long distance for me
to totter crutchless in those daysI managed by
telling myself it was really only nineThat
sleight-of-mind is the basis of the Numbers Game
You walk one step, then two steps, then three,
then four, rolling your mental odometer back to
zero each time until you reach nineAnd when you
add the numbers one through nine together, you
come out with forty-fiveIf that strikes you as
nuts, I won't argue
The third morning I coaxed hermes birkin 35cm myself into walking ten
steps from Big Pink sans crutch, which is really
fifty-five, or about ninety yards, round-tripA
week later and I was up to seventeenand when
you add all those numbers, you come out with a
hundred and fifty-threeI'd get to the end of
that distance, look back at my house, and marvel
at how far away it lookedI'd also sag a little
103
at the thought of having to walk all the way back
again
You can do it, I'd tell myselfJust
seventeen steps, is all
That's what I'd tell myself, but I didn't tell
Ilse
A little farther each day, stamping out footprints
behind meBy the time Santa Claus showed up at
the Beneva Road Mall, where Jack Cantori sometimes
took me shopping, I realized an amazing thing: all
my southbound footprints were clearThe right
sneaker-print didn't start to drag and blur until
I was on my way back
Exercise becomes addictive, and rainy days didn't
put a stop to latest louis vuitton shoulder bag mine
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