I've Accrued A Kind Of Patience, I

I Always Do The Wrong. I Do The Wrong Thing So Much That The Times I Actually Do The Right Thing Stand Out So Brightly In My Memory That I Forget I Always Do The Wrong Thing.

But Family Life Sometimes Had A Vortex, Like Weather. It Could Be Like A Tornado In A Quiet Zigzag: Get Close Enough And You Might See Within It A Spinning Eighteen-wheeler And A Woman.

Writing Is Both The Excursion Into And The Excursion Out Of One's Life. That Is The Queasy Paradox Of The Artistic Life. It Is The Thing That, Like Love, Removes One Both Painfully And Deliciously From The Ordinary Shape Of Existence. It Joins Another Queasy Paradox: That Life Is An Amazing, Hilarious, Blessed Gift And That It Is Also Intolerable.

For Love To Last, You Had To Have Illusions Or Have No Illusions At All. But You Had To Stick To One Or The Other. It Was The Switching Back And Forth That Endangered Things.

An Agony. The Exit Like The Entrance - But Reserved. A Palindrome: Gut-tug.