Monday, Blessed Monday

O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! I have found my treasure and I am grateful. Grateful, I say. It doesn't matter really to whom; maybe it's to the spirit of Lewis Carroll-or, more likely, my Mom. But the treasure reappeared, and I believe I had help. Can't convince me otherwise-because I won't listen.

Did You Do This?

Did you ever lose a treasure? Not in a disaster, a flood or a fire, but just on a regular Saturday evening? Something like a diamond chip and gold cross that your father gave your mother for her high school graduation in 1938? And now she's been dead for a year and a half and you've worn that cross every day since she died-not because it was a cross but because it was hers and it became your talisman? Something she had given you for your Juilliard graduation, but took back years later because she was afraid, when your drinking was bad, that you'd lose it? And now you have? Have you ever lost something like that? Felt so bereft, that at the moment you're not sure you'll be the same woman from now on that you were only a few hours ago? Wouldn't you keep looking, even though you feel that it's gone from your neck, wrist, finger, wherever your treasure had its home? Wouldn't you be unable to stop and examine each sparkle or flash of gold that you see out of the corner of your eye? Sometimes in ridiculously unlikely places? Impossible places? Or maybe your treasure was a paper, or a picture, and you are doomed to scan all the paper, picture fragments you spot? In spite of yourself? Did you feel guilty? Even though, of course, it isn't really proof of your carelessness, lack of discipline, lack of feeling? Then, at some point, did you think, maybe the priceless object will continue to have a life, will have meaning you can't imagine, to its finder? Did you find some small comfort in this thought? I wonder, did you?