But Enough About Me
This is for the ants, the ancestors, the obsolete street car, the crumpled candy wrapper the street sweeper misses month after month. We should pause for the hickory nut rotting in the ditch, the amputees of Dayton and Fort Wayne, the widows of the 23rd Airborne Division, the shrew left for dead by the pure white cat outside the office door. Citizens, let us revere that which does not budge from one childhood to the next, i.e. the Dairy Bar, her chocolate frappes, her tawny brick, her many features stoic and eternal excepting her inflating prices. We should mourn the lost book report now under a road-stained snow bank, the brook trout blasted elsewhere by a firecracker jammed up its ass, the plain, heartbreaking failures of the Carter Administration. Let us now praise the Squirrel Lady and the Butter Queen. Let us cheer the Austerlitz Volunteer Fire Department’s annual lobster shoot and barbeque. May it arrive soon. Let us commend both the peach-blueberry tart and its creator. Let us celebrate the Little League team mired in last place, the left fielder who’s turned his fear into heroism. Let us acknowledge the efforts of the oaks holding the edge of the meadow. There is no reason not to honor the bear who tolerates the subdivision, if occasionally raiding its delights. The triumph of crabgrass cracking the asphalt. The before-dinner nap also deserves our respect. Please pay tribute to the stone fence forgotten by extinct farmers, thanklessly dividing beeches from pines, accreting into the entropy of needles and grubs. Remember the paper cranes folded by the thousand each Hiroshima Day. May their feigned wing-flaps in the hands of New York children eulogize the clouds, distribute our molecules, dissipate this sting that is history.