Tonight They Burn Steady

The stars were so bright tonight.

The crisp autumn air, chilled by afternoon rains, is too still to permit them to twinkle. They seem like old friends... the constellations, a few stars I know by name.

I got quickly into the van... I knew I needed sleep... and drove home. Yet here I sit in bed, tapping away at this keyboard because there is too much in my head and heart to permit sleep.

Driving home I thought about my father, and the women in his life, about my son, and the panic I felt yesterday, about the woman and her children behind me getting ready for bed... a delightful evening... Sweet kisses... A large heart...

Contentment and confusion, those who need my help and those who help me, classical music and classic rock, a predawn walk in soaked shoes and chilly sheets warming slowly...

Parental frustration shook my son to his breaking point, my friends gathered around me, pressing their shoulders to he and me, pressing the cracks of our hearts closed so they could heal...

My father gasping for breath, slipping toward death, my father surrounded by women who give him their love for free, and for a price. My father stronger once again as the small jet lifted me away from Orange County, northern bound.

I am terrified and overjoyed at the size of the universe and the gaze of its creator fully upon me.

Life is wonderful and confusing and frightening and complex and simple...

I want to write about all that is happening, all that has happened, and of what I sense of the future, sliding toward me from the entropic direction of our universe, yet paradoxically already done, complete.

I am so grateful for the work I do, the charges in my care, the colleagues beside me, those who direct my labors.

I am grateful for my freedom, and I resent it too... I am free to love again, and choose again, and I resent the one who saw so little in herself she threw away what was good in her, and in me.

I wonder at the anorexic star, voracious at its final meal. I wonder at the brilliant immolation of stars and worlds and dust shining with the brilliance of a trillion stars, so far away they died long ago, long before their light reached here.

There is too much to write about... My successes and failures as a parent... my successes and failures as a person...

So... this disjointed prose will have to do... notes jotted down on a digital notepad...

The stars were so bright tonight.