Landing

The path to salvation is paved with pre-made, frozen lunches.  Right?  With thriftiness.  With thinking ahead.  It took a long time for me to recognize these notions as middle class mantras.  You repeat them enough, you realize they are nonsense.  There is no protection from the future.

I suspect that if I copy enough vocabulary lists ahead of time, then at some future moment, I will be less tired, and notice being less tired, and it will be wonderful.  I will be so pleased to be less tired!

Or maybe it can be wonderful to make the copies, right then.  (If the machine works.)  I can run into colleagues and make jokes with them.  I can see kids sitting around in the library arguing about who said what on facebook and what it means.  I can look out the windows above the copier and see the garden and the kids picking vegetables, or I can sneak out the US Weekly from behind the librarian’s desk and look at photos of famous people in beautiful clothes.

Nah.  If I could absorb enough sunshine and gulp eighty degree air, perhaps it would never be winter.  I’ve always felt autumn was winter approaching like the grim reaper, and the last two years my autumns have been pretty awful.  One winter I was dumped, and the other, I was awfully sick.  It didn’t help my dread of winter.  The first leaves are falling off our ash tree.  Just a few are yellow, even though it’s still hot enough to float in the pool.

Today the lesson was Moses, floating downstream in his basket.  What could you do?  Put your baby in a basket and let him go.  Where would he end up?  Back in his mother’s arms?  No way.  Too coincidental.  Probably drowned, his throat slit the way the Pharaoh ordered, or eaten by animals.

Or would he end up in a palace, learning the skills of leadership from the best?  Would he become a reluctant hero?  If you let the future go its way, might it find an even happier path than you intended, or will you be happier for being dumbly optimistic until the moment your throat gets slit?  What if you end up in the arms of a princess?  In the end, water wasn’t so scary to Moses.  He parted the sea.