The Week That Was

Years ago when teaching a class of high school seniors, I came across a poem in the New Yorker that I believed I just had to share with them, these late adolescents on the cusp of serious adulthood. In my mind it may have had something essential to do with the stuff we were reading, like Hamlet, or maybe an Ionesco play, or maybe not. I was obsessed with existential lit.

The verse seemed a harbinger of something up the road that forced me to think about something I did not want to think about; and although the kids listened intently, they most probably did not get it. But it resonated with me, and they were polite. It was one of those lessons where the students looked at you quizzically but decided to indulge your eccentricities anyway because the class was going well.

The poem talked about things falling apart and whirling out of control in a quiet way, imparting the image of a silent though treacherous domino effect. It wasn't as brutal or intense as Yeats' "The Second Coming" and had no particular imagery of beasts, much less the kind you find slouching towards Bethlehem, but rather was more understated, almost insouciant in its nihilism. It spoke of forgetting to put a coin in the meter one day while sitting in the dentist's chair and other mischances of memory in a suddenly failed orderly existence, and things spiraling downward from there. 

And that's just the kind of week it was, even though the meters no longer simply accept coins but spit out out those slippery, tiny papers that fly off your dashboard when you slam the car door.

So for today it's just sayin' hi,  See you next week or thereabouts with a more orderly set of words.