Comma Sense

"Comma Beer" (9 September 2012)
A comma is a pause.

Even a coma is a pause, a pause from a life, if not totally from living. Sometimes we move because we have in our bodies the practice of moving. One foot after the other, and neither ever allowed to hit the same spot on the earth. Forward is a movement, but not progress.

I am pausing here, taking as my companion the comma, linking my arm with its and sitting down to think. But not to say.

For the past week, for weeks, I have been doing. My time is taken up with actions, and these give me a way to spend the time. Writing enough all day at work, I hardly can manage to imagine (even imagine) writing anything while not at work. And with my daughter home for this past week, I've been working more than usual: making dinners, making a lunch or two, making breakfasts on the weekends, weeding more life out of the ground than you might even imagine was there if you had seen it with your own eyes, cleaning dishes, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the third floor, and finally cleaning my daughter's room.

My daughter's room. But maybe not quite hers anymore. She left New York today on a road trip to Los Angeles. She's moving to the other side of the country.

But that is not a story for now. That is the story for tomorrow.

For now, I can say that I have cleaned and neatened the room, opened it up, all in the service of transforming it into something that is no longer exactly my daughter's room anymore.

Though I do have a daughter. She herself continues.

For now, though, I won't. I'll pause.

Not for long. Just briefly. Just long enough to watch my daughter head down the street and turn west, almost immediately pointing herself in the direction of her new home, her husband's new home, and my home state.

Off she goes, and I pause.

For now.

Only for now.

I hope only for now, but life has a tendency of catching up with me these days.

I assume that I'm simply not as fast as I used to be.

So I pause.

ecr. l'inf.