sketches

(With thanks to bob...another one of his excellent recommendations).

Sketches...as if everything could be said in a condensed form, a light brush-stroke. No, not everything, but a brief view of some segment of reality, filtered through one's own memories, the way in which a few lines of a caricature can also instantly capture some vital characteristic of a person.

It's hard to talk of death; it's hard not to talk of death. There are signs of it everywhere. Friends and colleagues with stomach ulcers, cancer, heart attacks or, as one relative recently put it, 'shocks', since he was not willing to face the reality of what had hit him-and who can blame him? The more general high blood pressure, anxiety attacks, high cholesterol of others. There it is, working its way into us, cell by grey cell. You can't stop it. The slow march, the drummer and the fool indistinguishable. The awful thought that you might not be able to take care of loved ones (not that you've done a very good job so far!).

You sit on a green wooden bench with a friend at midnight, sipping hot milky tea-desi style-and all around you see the students, young, thoughtless, swarming like bees around one another, immersed in their own world where looks are everything and frivolous chatter is a sign of being at ease with oneself. Thin, bronzed arms, lustrous black hair and baggy jeans. The thin, excited faces that they themselves will barely remember ten years from now. The casualness of it all is something you notice (notice, not judge) from the corner of your eye. None of all that matters. One shuffles up to you: "Can I steal a light?"

Later, you return home and try and put all such thoughts to bed. Wise Blood. But it can't hold your attention.

…[t]hat not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.’

—-Joan Didion