So there came that day, and on that day I was really and truly both twenty, and twelve.

On that day, I cried tears of rage. They fell hot and they fell fast. I couldn’t stop them.

She gazed upon the dewy droplets and laughed, precisely because it was so ridiculous that a grown man should weep over something so trivial and so foolish. Over a father or over another father.

But I was not grown.

Neither was I a man.

I was twelve even though I was twenty, and so I cried the ridiculous tears.

It was all explicable, in those terms, and I see that now, and I don’t really blame her.

Not for the laugh at all events と in any event と at any rate と anyway and so apology for it is neither here

nor there

I don’t know what to do with it; I don’t know what good sorry could do, for you or me or any of us.

Three more years it took me after the sobbing to only begin all over at the beginning to figure it all out for myself. I was seen by the blessed dwarf and his blessed nursewife whose name was Marie.

Two more years more, and then a graduation I haven’t finished paying off four decades later.

By then, the other shard of shattered family had a fully formed (reformed) new identity and belief structure and respectable name to latch onto firmly, and plane tickets, for Portland, for the Alps, for Iceland and Greece.

By then, I had … well I had what they used to call a walk-up apartment, and a downy beard to match. I had a radio show and the exact right kind of dirty magazines under the futon mattress which laid just as dirty, on the floor of the walk-up apartment, and I upon it, and them.

I had a walk upon the floodwall, which I still possess, but I was young and pretty, and so I had a harbor too, since vanished into the northering depths of the Columbia. Roll on.

With the salmon. They sleeps, them gig harbors, with the fishes, just like Luca Brazzi.

I had a gig and got another.

I became the bibliographic instruction specialist and then the webmaster and then the professor (and how could a granddaughter have never known that, about her uncle?–it’s a wonder to me). Then and then and then in a bad forced deal in a compound driveway, I traded that for becoming the anarchist.

I voted the right way for the first and last time in my life and I think I was trying to save something, something familial, by doing it. But four years later I was up to my old new tricks again and something about them prestidigitations surprised even me and

I started finally to awaken

To the truth of the twelve and the twenty …

Reeeeegrets?

I’ve had a few.

But then again

Chief among them not listening to Pat Boone when I had the chance.

It’s a solace, knowing that even if I had listened all those eons ago, I wouldn’t have had what it took, to understand.

I feel like I have it now.

I feel like I’m right about it.

That being right all the time has never done you (or me or any of us) any good.

That I don’t know much about much really, except that in the words of the philosopher-king Rumsfeld, there are both, and ever, known unknowns and the unknown kind also and always

In our godly America where men slept on newspapers back when those were still a thing (back in Pat’s day).

And later, futons too.