When something's broken

fix it, if you can.

My father might have taught me that, or my mother. They both knew how to fix things. They also knew when to find someone else to fix what they couldn't.

This morning, my oven wouldn't self-clean -- it beeped insistently and told me F2. I looked it up online, thinking I might be able to fix it. Overheating, scarily so. I threw the breaker switches and called a professional.

Later, irritated by the wobbling bedside table my father made for me at least thirty years ago, I determined to fix it, grabbed the Phillips head, and flipped the table upside down. But when I saw the X marks (always a fat pencil, always drawn, never rubbed out) and the punched initials (why twice, I wonder), I hesitated and reached for a camera.

I couldn't fix the wobbles -- either the one setting the table off balance, or the one sin me caused by father's Xs, reminding me of his shop, tools, hands, marks.

I worked on one thing and something else resulted.

There's nothing more to say.

Once

Outside the bookstore today, several students embraced one another, talking over each other with joy: another year begins.

Once, I was lucky like those kids.

I too had a college family, perhaps more important even than my blood relatives. Comrades in theatre, faculty and peers, we created something beautiful, pleasurable, not just from the written word on a stage, but from and in each other.

A fourth college chum died today. She, and they, will burn bright always in memory.

All That Glitters

The Paradise Gardens mirror house dizzies, inside and out. Reflections of reflections and windows on the gardens outside tumble and turn in a kaleidoscope of impressions and memories: a newer friend just beyond holding a bob-tailed orange cat, striped like my first kitten; displayed art in the new addition from a collection owned by friends of a an older friend; and so many visions of friends dead and lost to time and space, all of whom experienced Rev. Howard Finster with me some thirty years ago.

I did not expect the returning beauty of an environment I have long loved.

Nor did I expect the cathartic smack of nostalgia: a million pieces all in one.