NOLA Notes

We flew to Austin last night, CS, Sun and I. I intended to write about Sun’s first flight (it went very well), and the food I prepared and froze for her (it stayed frozen until we could get it in the refrigerator at the hotel), and the case of dried formula that exploded in my suitcase (quite the mess but clean now), and about how yet another blogger who planned to meet Sun and me got sick.

But now I don’t feel like writing about any of that. I just finished reading James Salter’s “Light Years” and want to go for a walk and feel the sun on my skin. This is the story of a marriage that falls apart. They had a perfect marriage and it just fell apart. The perfect home, children, friends, spouses. The perfect life. Then it fell apart and sadness ensued.

Salter’s writing is so strong. I want to re-read this book already just to read his punctuation. This was a borrowed book of Pete‘s, and I am sorry that it will be returned with many pages dog-eared. It took all my willpower not to underline passages. Like these two about children:

Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; this is an idea we cannot accept.

Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other, that sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.

You know what? I am going to go for that walk in the sun. With my Sun. And bask in the warmth of both.