A Well Run Life

I am a slow learner.

Impatience and haste have cost me a lot.

But, against all my instincts, I have decided against rushing to any conclusions.

Things break apart – I rack ’em up– and start again.

The artist has an audience.

In that relationship, a person can delight, antagonize, soothe or jolt another.

There you will find a moment of some consequence between two people.

It is a beautiful thing.

My mom is a successful and brilliant poet.

Before other people wrote blurbs on the back of her books and gave her awards and spent money to own her writing, she woke at 4:30 in the morning, sat at the kitchen table and wrote – every day – before kids, work and a million other demands would claim her attention.

Alas, I grew up in a family of smokers.

Not the modern variety of cat burglar-ing smokers hiding from us,

trying to find a place to smoke

that doesn’t require wearing a yellow vest asking people not to run them over.

No.

I grew up among Olympians of smoking,

and holidays were game days.

When I was very young, I didn’t like onions.

I think it was that my taste buds were still so new.

Everything tasted so precisely, vibrantly, purely what it was.

I now like jalapenos on everything.

Once, when the family was broke – we bought that muffin dough that comes in an exploding can was on sale: 1 can for a dime.

We bought some sort of pig rind that the butcher essentially gave to us.

We rendered the fat – fried that cheap dough into doughnuts.

It was a triumph.