Sunday, bloody Sunday!

 “Have you lost interest in the living?” Axel said.

“Is your sister writing your blog now?” Uncle Albert asked, startling me. Leaning over my left shoulder, wobbling on his three legs — how could he have come there? (He seemed to have materialized, like Jeeves.) And how could he read the tiny letters on the screen I had trouble seeing myself. These (below the headline):

 Sunday, bloody Sunday!  

Dear Ted,
     How are you doing with Dr. Feight? Does he have anything to say? Anything helpful? Does he say anything about me? If he asks, tell him that when it came to it even St. George could not have slain the dragons — plural, for there were more than one — that had me. For they had me securely; I was determined in what I was doing. I regretted having to do it, but I didn’t regret doing it (if that makes sense) — at least not at the time. But I didn’t think of you at that time, or for a long time after, maybe not until you lost your job [link] running away from dragons of your own. Maybe I am overstating the case, and anyway enough of that for now. I am required, it seems, to revisit it every so often, but not to you. Sorry!
     Speaking of sorry (not really!), your friend Max took me to a fast-food seafood restaurant another evening ago, where a beautiful blue-eyed African-American boy (another war casualty, why do I meet so many?) took our order and called our names when it was ready — the fried fish and the french fries like so much air smelling salt and vinegar and the cherry Cokes like the nectar of the gods invented by small-town American adolescents, laced with crushed ice and sweeter than honey. Afterwards, we went to a baseball game that ended in a tie and there were fireworks after.
     I’m only kidding about that, but we should have; we would have maybe if we had gone for hamburgers instead of fish. As if we become what we eat, which we definitely do not where everything is spirit. But I don't think we ever did, even where we and hamburgers were both flesh and gristle, and only the hamburger buns were air.
     In any case, we didn’t go to a baseball game with fireworks or a stroll on a beach or even back to the park but our separate ways, blue-eyed Kareem back into the kitchen where they conjure the fish and chips, Mac who knows where — I have no idea where he lives — and I through a sudden lightest of showers to where I am, to sit at my kitchen table to write you.
     Then, there is a rap on the window, and it is Gretchen and the two Johns, her friend and her (lovely) cousin, wanting to know if I want to go to a movie. They are thinking about something called Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which they seem to think I’ve heard of — and I think I should have heard of it — but I haven’t. But it’s directed by John Schlesinger, who directed Midnight Cowboy, so I decide to go.
     But it is not the same. There are too many telephones ringing too loudly, too much cutting between scenes. I assume the way they, the scenes, are juxtaposed, the juxtapositions must mean something (like rhymes and half rhymes and all the different ways of rhyming — alliteration and assonance and anaphora and all — should mean in a poem; but I don’t see it: dinner with parents, charades, the enthronement of the boy/man at his bar mitzvah, the death of a dog hit by a potato truck (and mourned for 40 seconds), another phone ringing, lots of smoking. About an  hour and a half in, we see the young man — but I didn’t say this yet, did I? At the center of it is a vapid young man, played by nobody I’ve ever seen, shared by Peter Finch, as a gay Jewish doctor, and Glenda Jackson, with eyes as green as a cat’s and perfectly arched eyebrows; but you can’t figure out why either cares for him. So, when we see him at a TWA counter, presumably buying a trip to the United States, though there must have been half an hour of film to go, I left, because I was glad he was leaving, and I didn’t want to see anybody sorry he was.
    Then, when I got outside, and it was showering again, I thought that might be the point — this was not a movie without a point: that people can love other people that are not much at all; and most of us aren’t, are we? The thought didn’t make me go back into the theater, though.
     Instead, I came home again. I sat back down at my kitchen table; and I wrote this to you (among other reasons to say if you have any say in the choice of movies, make better selections). You are welcome for the long letter. Write me back when you can.
                                                                                                               Love, Moira

 “Have you lost interest in the living?” Axel said. “Is your sister writing your blog now?” Uncle Albert asked.
     “It may seem so” I said. “But what do I have to write about, hardly going out and then only to the same places I always go, seeing the same people I always see. But mostly I am sitting in with you, reading old books, or paragraphs of old books between staring out the window and wandering from room to room?”
     “I see your point,” Uncle Albert said. And he turned and wobbled silently away. Silently, on his three uneven legs, he shimmered out. 
                                                                           09.02.23