Fussing around today, Easter Sunday, I came upon a cache of old pictures and was quickly taken back more decades than I like to think possible. I have been very fortunate in my life but also endured a spell of real bad luck, which I can first date to when I was twelve.
My sister had begun a meltdown by then which lasted the rest of her life. She died a few years ago in New York City and had been living in an utter shithole and working as an intermediary in the prostitution business. She was brilliant and stunningly good at a number of things.
If I were to try to sum up my life as I just did my sister's I have no idea what I would say. I have probably under-realized my potential but I'm pretty sure I opted not to go down that road in my late teens. Not to define myself in that way, I mean. Occasionally I think you have moments of insight.
I once saw a totally unrestrained and probably spoiled child in a grocery and thought "shit, it's me." My incredibly nice parents had been wanting a child for fifteen years when they had me and had lost a full-term, perfectly formed baby years earlier. They had adopted my sister two years before I was born.
They may not have had the heart to discipline us enough, meaning my sister and me and my brother who came along after me. More bad luck followed my sister's falling apart, in the way of sickness and death, and it all came back looking at those pictures. I'm curious about all this.
But at the same time I kind of don't care. I mean I'm curious but not looking for some revelation. I read a book by a priest years ago. He thought that the parables were the most important part of the Bible, thematically and structurally, and that the most important of these was the one about the seed and sower.
What does it say? Shit happens. Get over it. So that may be the wisdom of the Bible, succinctly, and I'm okay with it. The philosophers and physicists seem to me to agree, though more: "Shit is happening, be cool with it." Okay, I'm cool. Cool right now and at peace, thankful for all the wonderful love I got as a child.
And sorry for any bratty, grocery store behavior I had a hand in. And any ongoing bratty behavior, for those of you who know me now. It takes an enormously forgiving heart to carry on well in life, I think, firstly toward yourself, then toward life itself and the indescribable strangeness of it.
Was that a heckler? Something about my own indescribable strangeness and would I please shut up? I can take that.
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