April 1


I don’t get up early enough often enough to write down the things that matter before the workday begins and the ordinary flotsam floats in and I am besieged by thoughts of who did I have to contact today to keep the ball rolling on that project we had with the lcd or the power supply or the capacitors. Today I got up early enough though and spent the hour or two before my wife came into the office and disturbed the smooth surface of the pond of silence I was wading in and I decided then and there I better get writing or it would definitely be too late. I just got off reading Joe Weil’s blog on my space and realized there really are people who write good poetry who have faith or hang onto the thread of faith and still manage to come up with some really great stuff and for an instant I kind of wanted to be like him, honest as the day is long, and then I realized that faith is different things to different people, like my wife has faith and always took the kids to church and for a while I went with them and in the church found a certain kind of solace that took me back to my childhood when I was a Methodist before my father slapped me across the face for telling my mother I wasn’t going to go to church anymore, it was the first and only time I can remember him hitting me, he wasn’t a violent man, but he was a declared agnostic, a convert from being a non-practicing Jew, going back to the time in Budapest when his parents didn’t go to temple much, either, and that was it for me, until I met Margot and we started going together some Sundays when I joined her at first mostly because I loved the smell of Orthodoxy, the ceremony, the incense, the church, the references to an inner life I didn’t understand and/or didn’t deserve or didn’t have but it still made me tear up when the priest chanted in Greek and looked at me as if I just had a few more steps to take before joining the rest of the faithful. So this a.m. I got a taste of that before the sun came up and you know, Joe, that meant a lot. But now I’m faced with how much of the truth can I handle?