Play It as It Lays

by Joan Didion

From my mother I inherited my looks and a tendency to migraine. From my father I inherited an optimism which did not leave me until recently.

Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake. As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.