A Situation

Dear Kate,

Last night I had a melatonin dream, deep and long as promised, in it my father, like Job's servants, called to report disasters happening to my home.

It was about rain, blessing from heaven, doing damage to my earthly abode, enough to collapse the staircase connecting the two.

I handled it like a man, remotely, don't know why I was somewhere else when the news broke, making phone calls to see where to settle my family so that I can go home and face the dread alone.  ("How's the Wi-Fi at your place?" I remember asking my brother in Richmond, "because my kids really need that...for school and such, you know...")  I can try to face my own helplessness, but that of others, by the very definition, they couldn't help but couldn't be helped.  I can deal with the silence of God but not the whining of Man.

Situated I was in a mere situation, like we all are, all the time, and there was no time to Google the next best course of action.  For every good choice I make there will be countless, unforeseen bad consequences; I a priest handing out the sacrament to unrepentant hearts.  I touched the staircase, crooked, twisted out of shape, like a spiral up which I could only see so far.  Things are meant to break apart, I said to myself.

And why not?  Maybe I did something bad, like Job's friends suggested, insisted, to my own household not least, and the deluge is here to wash away my sins, giving me a fresh chance to try again.  Same reason why we burn things from the past, chuck things away, to be a light traveler, on an exodus to leave the tyranny behind, erasing it from the history book as it has once attempted on us.  All pyramids should be leveled, burned to the ground.

So that we can build new ones.  ("Welcome home, my children.  Daddy dealt with the situation and now it is over.")

Yours, Alex