Beach chair sits firm at the water's edge

Gulls swoop and sigh, slicing the moisture

               bloated air

Heightened scents of sand, salt and sunscreen.

Children knead sand into castles...

I was reading the obituary page the day I met my husband. It’s a little odd, I’ll admit. Morbid curiosity I guess. My future husband, a tax specialist with eye-lashes most women would die for, joked that the obits were a great way to find a new job. Glancing over my shoulder, sipping from his medium hazelnut, he said, “Hey, I hear there’s a new opening in the shipping department at Sears…”

Sometimes I see names of people I know, or at least think I know. Mostly, though, they are complete strangers. Ever since that first meeting, we’ve read them together.

The crickets outside

The window were gone

And when I heard the sound

Of the hissing in my ears

I imagined 15 doctors

Escorting me to hell...

This faulty rhythm cycles through my body

I have staggered with it always

When I was an unnumbered child

It was the tick-tock of the clock

That reminded me with each notch of noise

How awake I was through passing increments...

I discarded my sanity like

a dream from the night before.

Slime-topped minutes dripped

from a sundial...

There's a tensile edge to us;

alloy lightweight

extra strong accessories to our limbs that would

otherwise collapse

with intermittent jestful ease, to leave us looking drunk

When I consider my lifetime of reading, I know I must look at it through a skewed lens due to my particular mix of learning disabilities. My Cerebral Palsy prevents me from writing legibly, while ADD affects my reading speed and comprehension. It is, however, a reading life worth examining.

The literature on reading disabilities is thorough and vast, and probably will do nicely without my musings. Despite this, my reading and comprehension skills do play a role in the story, and provide a couple of interesting ironies.

It was at 14:45 precisely, on a suitably wet, windy and forlorn Tuesday that Red Kowalski became aware that his attempt to get through the day unscathed had failed catastrophically. His life wasn’t great in general. He was a social worker and lived in a horrid place. Considering this was meant to be a “luxury apartment,” the view wasn’t so great, nor the apartment that luxurious. Let’s face it--his landlord was so bloody devious, that if the apartment had developed a leaky roof in the bathroom prior to his moving in, it would have been advertised as having been fitted with a power shower. Make no bones about it; the flat was terrible, and his neighbours worse.

I saw the touring cast version of Rent at the Colonial in Boston last night. It was a birthday gift to me from my lovely partner. We were 3rd row, center and I swear I felt some Anthony Rapp spit hit my forehead. He was hamming it up for the audience, while Adam Pascal was kind of droopy.

As I sat in the third row, attired in work clothes and fiddling with my hesitant pup, I couldn't help but reflect on the 19 year old girl who sat in a velvet dress in the Neiderlander with friends on either side, freshly inundated into her first semester of college and besotted with New York City.