The kids are alright

Have a chuckle and look at us, getting fat, going bald, forgetting yesterday's meals, stopped cold by visions of a simpler time which never really existed, coming to inhabit a fictional world as the sensed world retreats, needing ever more spice on the tongue, lost to subtlety, caricatures returning to the scene of the crime, trying to solve an eventually insoluble mystery. Of course it's a crime the way we live here, glued to the second life, the made-up life, engaged in the narrative of buying and selling, of arrival and departure, of youth and age, caught up in the funhouse gossip, reading books. Bah. Effin fantasies.

The boy under the bed with his crayons. The dog outside the window barking. Moonlight sneaking around the backyard amid the scary shapes of trees and bushes. Listening to the wind. The boy with his crayons imagines it all.

Mateusz and me chewing the fat last night at some Italian joint on the eastside, Montepulciano and Sangiovese. You reach a certain age, you know your grapes. Sweet deep ruby red. You reach a certain age, you take it on faith that the kids are alright -- they've got their own lives now. The smells from the kitchen, the noise at the bar. Outside a nasty November evening grabs hold of the scaffolded city. All part of our lives, too. We talk about business and acquaintances, about adaptation and acceptance. We talk about books -- always about books -- and laugh at the faultiness of memory. Whose fault is it that yesterday's meal is less present to us than the sugary cookies of childhood? We're not computers, we're humans. When we make analogies, they're imprecise. Sure, the metaphors may be faulty, but they're suggestive. We live in a world of almost. Maybe. Perhaps. I think so.

Mateusz has no axe to grind, he knows that this is the best possible life, to be drinking wine in friendship on his way to dinner with the woman whose familiar love sustains him, in a dirty city filled with daily miracles, on a wobbly planet that may be headed toward extinction some day but still brings us deep pleasure and will for the rest of our lives. Amazingly, we got a cab right away and headed down Lex. I thought to myself, salt's still got its saltiness. We're alright too.