Day 117: One of Those Moments
Monday, January 1st, 2001 (62nd day off Paxil). A journal entry:
Occasionally everything falls into place. Even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. Whoever was the first to say that has earned my admiration. The poem falls into the right hands at the right moment, and it works perfectly.
I just read a poem by a friend of mine who is a well-known writer. On another day this poem would have meant nothing to me. I wouldn’t have felt it — that is, it wouldn’t have been as real to me as it is right now.
It’s a poem about him and his son walking through a graveyard where some famous writers are buried. His son has “passed beyond boredom into resignation” and would rather be doing anything else. The groundskeeper, who acts as their informal guide and happens to be French and doesn’t speak a word of English — he “would as soon being doing this as something else.” The son in the poem speaks fluent French and acts as the translator. Listening to his son and the guard speaking, recognizing a word here and there but unable to grasp anything that’s being said, “It’s as if he and the guard are old friends now, and I’m there to be humoured.”
Like I said. Perfect. Perfect because I know the feeling.
Or maybe you had to be there.