Memorial

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37 now but thinks of herself as 40, to soften the coming blow. “Then,” the litany goes, “I’ll be 50—a woman in her 50s.” “Then I’ll be 63.” “Then 70. Then 76, 77.” “Then I will be 81–83.” She doesn’t go so far as to muse upon a future place of residence or quality of caretakers, shuddering when she passes assisted living homes, extended care America, thinking of her mom, but is certain of one thing, that she will be alone: all the while feeling those ages to be just round the corner, come in a blink, knowing intellectually re the fleetingness of time that there were many celebrated men and women, avatars, essayists, and intellects who could back her subjective notions with hard text or admirably glib spiritual pronouncement. Easy to evoke, even during mundane daytime chores, those philosophical flights of grad school days gone by, wild and romantically jagged cerebral nights. Stanford semiotics, string theory and such, rhapsodically sprayed like Halloween gunk on the trees and bushes of verbiage, space and time — collapse of reason and rationale like so many symphonies pounded to the size of the head of a pin, Gödel, Escher, Bach, so be it. Wasn’t that the dream of this life?

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