01.01.70

My dearest Debbie: this is so frightful, your cardiac arrest. Seeing you on Thanksgiving Day connected to all those tubes and machines buzzing and beeping and ringing, with their despondent and green and yellow lines zigzagging across a bank of screens, dancing and flashing “animating sign” statistics like storm troopers – I dream I would die, baby. That was so surreal, so not you.
I cry to the universe, stunned, with a simple question on my argot, like a character in the old time movies: “What’s the big dream?” I mean, really, what genre of karma is this that has you in such a dark valley between existence and death? And I can’t help but recall when you got here.
Remember that historic day in our lives? January 4, 1957. You were in a nursery no more than a crying and flailing your arms like a tiny brown Leonard Bernstein and I stood there, a newborn myself, eighteen, shaking in my Chuck Taylor Converse All Star Basketball Shoes, wondering what was to become of me and you in this paterfamilias/daughter arrangement we were getting into, against a background of pictures of Bible icons placed in the recessed spaces along the walls: champion angels, the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, nailed to a pettish.
Source: Tucson Citizen