Duly masked, I held my rubber-gloved hands up on entering through The Star’s side door a while ago, startling Russell Bennett at first, until he, not having seen me inside the office in more than a month, was able to make positive identification.
We took up where we’d left off. “Gronk’s going to play with Brady,” I said.
He knew. And would I be watching the N.F.L. draft that night? he asked, with a commiserating look. I might, “but the first two episodes of the Michael Jordan documentary were wonderful — his soaring and swirling through the air is just the tonic we need. Somebody, I think, likened him to God, or likened God to him, I’m not sure which.”
One does want to remain active and positive — well, not that way, but insofar as your outlook is concerned. It is a charnel house, yes, but, as Monty Python said, you should always look on the bright side of life.
The trees will live on, their roots intertwining and their limbs reaching toward the light. Now that’s good news. And it’s interesting to know that they, like us, feel, transpire, nurture, compete, and also help one another.
Beginning to breathe in and out again, they bear watching, as does Michael Jordan.
We talked with a potential financial adviser by phone one recent morning, he in Charlotte and we here, and were told that the resultant plan was positing a life span of 100, which I thought was a little on the rosy side given what’s been going on.
An uncle of mine lived to 103, and, even more important, was compos till the end. Interestingly, he had always been, my mother said, the worst hypochondriac. Being more sanguine, perhaps I ought to worry.
As an antidote to anxiety, a high school classmate who lives in Boise, Idaho, has been prescribing classical music he likes, and they’ve been great. Mary, while busy at the ironing board, was so taken with Helene Grimaud’s pianism in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 one day that she jumped a foot when, without the usual trumpet fanfare, I appeared at her side. She said I had snuck up on her “like an Indian,” which cheered me.
It was strange that she should jump, though, there only being two of us here, and O’en, of course. But, come to think of it, there are many — her mother, her father, her brother, my mother, my father, my stepfather, my stepmother, our aunts, our children, cousins . . . the list could go on and on. In sum, she and I are no less than a chorale of voices past and present, voices that often allay our anxiety, that often make us laugh, and that lessen the six-foot distance between us and life.