Wondersilly

You know when you're just going along with your life, and your sink has some dishes in it but not too many and there's a few clusters of dog hair on the floor and there's some kids in the pool or teenagers playing ping pong and summer is almost here. And you think hey you know, sure, I have an hour before I have to be somewhere, I might as well go out on a ride with my friend and her horse.

So you're just in the middle of a very spread out and intricate life and then you walk your horse over a palm frond that you know he's scared of and suddenly your life is a circus rodeo ride, as he explodes from fear as the frond bounces up to eat him there's leaping and twisting and you're flying and the cement catches you with its vast hard hand on your back.

Then there's a lady with a chihuahua and people are around and there's a fireman and an ambulance and your fake son is in the ambulance and I say "I don't need to go to the hospital" and the fireman laughs well actually we're going though. Then I'm in the siren and I've never been in the siren before. And Bruce is telling me he has been in here twice, for snowboarding, once awake and once blacked out. I think being alive and talking in an ambulance is then maybe a good place to be.

Then we're in this freezing room and I can only see the lights above and both my sons are there, the blonde and the brunette, and the only time I cry is when they transfer me onto a board directly onto my shredded back to take pictures in a tube and I hope the c scan can capture my tears of fury and resignation, and oh pain.

Then the doctor pauses before telling me what the xrays say, and I've seen enough tv shows to know this is moment that changes your life. And then his words bubble out sort of patiently, that there are about 400 fractures (okay, 6) but that there is no surgery required and thank you, he says, looking at me with calm grey eyes, for wearing a helmet. You made my job easier.

Then he's saying I'm getting a room and I'm like what wait no I'm not staying and then I'm going to that room but before that the chaplain comes in and I think uh oh wait I'm not actually dying but then he says they treat the whole person here which is good because I'm really only 10% body, the rest is loose spirit. I tell him I have no religion, just poetry and nature. He says that is a valuable religion too. And since I am on painkillers I say "Kevin, you should come to our house. You would fit right in."

Then my niece and double niece are there, and the kids and Barry and Bruce is eating two burritos at the same time because one is not enough when you have a serious wondersilly appetite for life. And I had been feeling lonely but I am sorry that I called them all here to this weird place where I'm in a bed but not having a baby and we're all together and even though there is pain it will be temporary.

In a way, the stopping of life is the unleashing of life. Life doesn't just stop with semi-tragedy, it just goes a way that you weren't agendaing. Then your regular life looks SO SO good from  here, your regular walking down the street with the sun on you hair, even slogging to a school you don't want to teach at really- that is looking like the most peaceful, most beautiful thing ever.

So my kids sit with me in this temporary spot where the bed puffs up and nobody knows us because we are just passing through on the ticket of pain, and there is food here too and windows and a brownie my mom brought and Nathan brought flowers because his dad taught him to love women gently, and it doesn't really matter where we are.

We are here.