Hobson's choice

 Hobson’s choice 

Roz said, “You write your sister to ask how your mother is, but you never write about her in your thing.”
     “My mother.” “Yes.” “In the blog.” “Yes. You never talk about her, except maybe in your sleep.”

“She went off the rails,” Uncle Albert said.
     “No,” I said. “I don’t think she did. She disappeared for a week or two, a while – when Moira ... ”
     “Snuffed herself,” Uncle Albert said, and Roz said, “Albert!” But he kept going. “And where were you?” he said. The $64 question everyone was asking at the time.

I was in Switzerland then, unless I’d already left. I had taken three months off to study at what Uncle Albert always mockingly calls “the cheese place,” la Brie.* I stayed a day and a half. The air was so diminished I couldn’t breathe, though the oxygen was not thinned out by the altitude, which is, at around 1600 feet, not much higher than where we live now; it was crowded out by a combination of fey joy, brittle self-satisfaction, and words, words, words: evidentialism, presuppositionalism, dooyeweerd, rushdoony, the last two Dutch, I think. To me incomprehensible, all of them.

So I went to Bern to see the bear pits, and then I went to Nice to see the sea and, as I had time, to move it ashore with a teaspoon.
     The rest of the time, most of it, I sat on my balcony, big enough for one wooden chair, and leaning back on two legs of it, I smoked Gauloises, and tried to read Sartre in French. Not any of the philosophy – I knew I couldn’t do that – just La Nausée. After three weeks of that, leaving the book on the balcony, I took the train to Paris and flew home.
     To find Moira was dead. Mom was still in a state of shock, and Hannah and Aunt Martha were hopping mad at all of us, at Moira, at Mom, and, especially, at me. 

And none of us ever recovered. Because you don’t.
     One day you may wake up realizing that sadness can be as foolish and shallow as happiness. But just as soon you realize the reverse is as true. What depth is there in happiness, or wisdom for that matter?
     “It’s not a Hobson’s choice though,” Roz contends, “if there is something – if there are some things – in between.” It isn’t either the unbreathable, thin air of smug I’m-in-the-stratosphere-of-salvation bliss or the choking swamp gas stench of the no-I’m-stuck-in the slough of despond.
     Or so Roz says.
                                                                          02.21.22  

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* The reference is to the region the cheese comes from. The cheese itself, Uncle Albert always hastens to correct me when I get it wrong, is masculine, le Brie.