Point of View: No Time for Commas

On the eve of my father’s birthday my son arrived with two daughters exceedingly lively and between Pepperoni’s and Sam’s we sported free at the edge of the sea.

Their energy is gale-force a shock to the system and if your pulse tends to run slower you will be shaken up. No time for commas.

“That was ‘Ode to Joy’ you just played Zora . . . ? No? ‘Ode to a Rather Pleasant Feeling’ then?”

We sip tea as instructed from cups they’ve somehow brought down without incident from a dresser twice their height and Maya plays Etude in B minor — a major achievement I think. It’s great to know that the Lighthouse is to give her a grand piano.

Then hip-hop. Zora leading the way one hand shading her mouth the other flung out then elbows and legs alternately flying.

On to the General Store and Ping-Pong and then to the sea — Cebra Maya Zora and me.

Where I read that Maia was Atlas’s daughter and of Tithonus whose mother in asking for immortality from Zeus forgot to ask at the same time for perpetual youth as in Endymion’s case thus rendering him daily older grayer more shrunken and shrill till he became a cicada.

It would be fun to live long enough to see my granddaughters metamorphose.

Then they were gone — by way of a conga line that Zora led to the car from Sam’s — and then the commas, yes, the commas, began asking if they could not come back in.