Today's writing

I think about help as I get into my aged, beloved Toyota. Help always felt like another country, too humid in climate, too touchy-feely in culture. Help required too many visas and vaccines. To go would mean never to be safe.

Turning the key brings forth the engine’s throaty cough. Toto is on the radio, singing about places a world away: I bless the rains down in Africa/Gonna take some time to do the things we never had. There is a slight rain and it mists my windshield, blurs my sight. It takes a minute to realize that it’s actually tears.

Things are so much easier as black and white. So much more palatable, easy to digest. Victims and villains, heroes and pirates. But no one fits those confines, do they? The world is a blur, one line after another getting crossed.

I shift into reverse and back down the driveway past my father’s fledgling grass and strangely alive flower bed. He was never able to bring anything to life in our family’s garden, but here he’s managed to give daisies an existence. He is not happy alone, but he is productive.