Meditations

I grabbed Meditations From A Moveable Chair by Andre Dubus and stepped out to sit on our front stoop to read. It was dusk. Neighborhood boys raced their bicycles up and down the street, a couple of faces I recognized, a few more I did not. The movement of the clouds was barely there, like an old man’s chest rising and falling as he sleeps alone in a nursing home. The couple across the street emerged from their house, noticed me, waved, and kept on walking. He put his arm around her waist and she returned the favor, they eyeballed one another and laughed.

Dubus was telling me how he used to live next to Kurt Vonnegut back in 1966 and how one time the two of them were dispatched to retrieve Ralph Ellison from the airport and how they stopped at a bar and ordered whiskey martinis and talked jazz and books. 1966. It would be another year before my mother gave birth to me. Sometimes I wish I’d been born earlier and could’ve talked books and jazz with Vonnegut and Dubus. But then I might’ve been sent to Vietnam and never come home, or come home detached, having been immersed in that torrent of horror.

My youngest daughter stepped outside and grabbed her bike. She would ride but avoid the boys because some of them she did not recognize. It was almost dark so I told her not to ride too far, and that I would sit by the curb to watch for her return. Had I not been born when I was there would have been no sentinel to wait for my little girl to come home, or at least it would not have been me. She rode away, but after a little while I saw her pink helmet flicker in the shadows as she raced closer and closer back home, back to the grace of her life of which I am a debtor. My dreams of jazz and books were swallowed by the night. Like Christ, my little girl was born in the fullness of time, as was Dubus and Vonnegut, and me.