Missed a Spot!

January 6, 2009

Missed a Spot

                              

Begin again. At work, we confirm our pecking order for another year. We look again at the budget. We take one more “stab” at it. (The phrase comes from what  inexact science? . . . swordplay?. . . surgery? . . . mugging?)

On the radio: the girl-singer sings the old Nat King Cole song, “Funny how I’ve stopped loving you.” She doesn’t mean it:

Now that you're standing here,

            darling, I don't shed a tear.
This is just the rain in my eyes.

Funny, how I've stopped loving you.
And it’s funny I don't miss

            all the heaven in your kiss,
your touch. No I don't love you, not much.

She doesn’t mean it, she can’t mean it, because she's s stuck. But it is possible, to get unstuck. We fall in love, and we fall out of it. We can stop loving, I tell you, not only our lovers, our husbands, our wives but our brothers and sisters, our parents, our children.  We don’t want to admit it because it seems unnatural or unhuman.  

            Or, we don’t believe it, because whatever I tell you, it’s not really true – entirely, spotlessly clean. The habit is too strong and so much of it unconscious. Jingling the change in our pockets when we’re nervous, biting our fingernails, having a third whiskey-and-soda thinking it must be the second, lying in bed after the alarm goes off.  It’s ragged, rough, unfinished . . . like a bad shave, like Michael Finnegan’s whiskers

                        The wind blew them out,

                                    and they blew in again,

                        poor old Michael Finnegan.

                                   

Begin again

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