February 12, 2021

Thinking of the boy to whom I showed the turtle. He was lagging behind his family, talking to himself, moving from one side of the path to the other, clearly in his own world. Though the thought hadn’t formed in my mind in exactly that way, he was me sixty years ago. I needed for him to see the first turtle after winter. Had I been that child at that moment, I would have remembered it to the end of my life as something particular, something mystical. 

Thinking of Z’s joy at being released from the bonds of matrimony and free to play the field. When I was dating in high school, I knew how to do it, what you say to a girl to get her to go out with you, what to say on a date, but there was no need behind it, no fire, so it felt like a curious cultural exercise that everyone had to learn and pass through. I wasn’t interested in girls, and accepted at first with mild skepticism the stories of passion on dates or after the Prom. Why wasn’t I feeling this? Was it a fiction everyone adhered to that the race might go on? I was actually feeling the passion, but in a direction not provided for by the culture, and it was years before I would blaze a trail for myself.