From you I learned to be a believer.
Right now I'm sitting in a mall café surrounded by concrete walls lit blandly by the skylights above my head —
— An old woman who has lost her hair walking past with a grocery bag suspended from her arm —
— A young lady with intelligent eyes selling mattresses on the mall walkway to my left —
— Two men in their fifties speaking English over a flattened stack of architectural drawings.
We're all easy targets. I prefer everything to anything’s demise. The consequences of extinction are astonishing. Who knows what I don’t know we need?
A young man talks on the mall’s public telephone. His girlfriend pushes on the mattress three steps from him and looks at him and smiles privately and raises her eyebrows. He laughs into the phone and stops talking to kiss her openly on the mouth.
Coal-eyed little girl drops her balloon down the stairs, and calls out, pointing while she looks over her shoulder, —¡Mami, globo!
Always behind us that undiminished continent upon which we've constructed the nation of our lives, motherhood.
Thank you, too, for that choice. I think it worked out much better than not. All of us —me, especially— must allow that your marriage to my mother was not a failure. It is finished yet continuous. You did beautifully! You succeeded; now you succeed anew.
That is your achievement: your mistakes aren’t so special; but your triumphs, your successes, have been, are.
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