Aloneness and Intractability

[I wrote this last night when I was out of town at a professional conference]

Oh Momma … you always said everything was better when I was there with you. Oh Momma … how I wish I could share so many, many, many things with you now. And it’s really true. I never, ever really became … well … the kind of person you were: popular, sound of mind and character in a world that you struggled in but which you negotiated, on the whole, with far more success than I was ever able to obtain. Yes … it’s really true. I think there’s been a part of me that, all my life, hoped … hoped that something would happen, something would change, and Charles would become: OK, normal. A man of character and of prudence and of social skill and social ease. And now: for some reason at some very deep level this all seems so far, far, far beyond me. It always was, I think. But I always Hoped for something else. But since you have been gone: I guess Hope is gone for me in this world; and the Intractability of who I am and how isolated and alone I will remain till I follow you from this world has become … well … sort of impossibly changeless and irrelevant and beyond my Here and Now and any Here and Now I can imagine.

Intractability … in the Here and Now … means I really just have an endgame to play out.

Denouement.

Intractability.

What else is there?

Oh Momma … I love you and I miss you so much …

And Momma … I guess really Giving Up isn’t all that horribly painful …

Not much different from Trying is Not Trying Anymore …

No wonder that Stories and Paintings and Pictures and Travel and Travels of the Imagination … both now and in the past … have been always so appealing to the Intractable Charles …

And no wonder I can feel sad indeed but above all really really Grateful … Thankful … to you Momma … to everyone … to even be allowed to be here … for a few years …

Oh Daddy … yes … you too … how improbable everything seems now. I live today … yet if you had died in Bastogne, I had never been conceived, never born, never walked the face of this earth at all. How improbable and how full of grace your gift of life.

An Intractable Life. An Intractable Here and Now.

Yet a Gift. Sheer gift. Sheerest sheerest gift.

Thank you Momma

Thank you Daddy

Thank you all my ancestors

Thank you all

Thank you my Lord Jesus Christ

Thank you God my Father

Thank you O Mary my Mother

Thank you