March 16

There is a woman sitting 16 feet to my left. She's studying a thick medical text.  If I listen hard, I can hear her brain thinking.  Metatarsal, phalanges, flexor tendons.  Her mind is a cucumber pie, cantaloupe soup.  Filled with things I will never have to imagine or respond to.  I do not know how my body works beyond the basics.  Food in, poop out.  Hair growing, breasts blossomed and gone to seed.

I know I was conceived on a March night in 1961.  Perhaps it was an evening like this one.  The sky a rosy cove.  Black tree branches, stiff chisels to the silky dusk.  Maybe my dad came home especially present.  Perhaps he illustrated the new configuration of his office on a napkin, leaning in, excited. Or maybe my mom made him a pie, not rhubarb his favorite, impossible to find in the spring, but apple. Yes, apple pie with vanilla ice cream.  Maybe it had nothing to do with what they did for each other.  On that March night, a neighbor may have waved through the screen door.  Or the hydrangea thistle budded, unleashing something green into the air.

That woman 16 feet away from me is studying medicine, but life has nothing to do with what is in her book.  Life draws from the bird's darting caw.  Love is suggested by the spinning top.  By the slightest turn of the eyes. Beginning is something we redo a million times until we get it right.

If it were up to me, I would wish for the night I was made to have been like this one.  Coffee in the pot.  Mushroom soup on the stove.  A song on the hi-fi.  My mother looking at my father again for the first time. He finding her.  The sun and moon in the sky at the same time.  The first blades of grass poking up their heads.  And the sidewalk filled with people walking by.