Term

I am dri­ving and I stop my car because the curve of some­thing slipped into and out of the edge of my mind. This curve…

I stop and watch geese using the shal­lows for touch and go land­ings; the young Navy pilots at the airstrip near my house grow­ing up. Geese and the pilots and the Viet Nam war that was only half way done when I was born. Every­thing in my ear­li­est mem­o­ries had that war as its set. I was nowhere near it, but the tides in my life were affected as sure as the tides in Cal­i­for­nia feel the tsunami in Japan. Those tsunami tides push a lit­tle harder, draw a lit­tle deeper. Inces­sant, seem­ingly, but then they do end. The end­ing is imper­cep­ti­ble, but the effect lasts, ubiq­ui­tous as air or water.

My son is round­ing the bend, com­ing, and soon. The world is in the midst of another twenty year or more war. The set. The tides roll in and out. He will soon, in one gulp, go from breath­ing water to breath­ing air. In that breath, all that the world is will rush in…greetings and may­hem both. We, Rose, Aidan, me, our lit­tle fam­ily, will add our love to the oceans of every­thing else. There is no beat­ing back the per­va­sive grey of this war or the next one. It is part of (t)his world. No need to push against the air. Just breathe and breathe and breathe.