Thanksgiving was fine.  Thanksgiving was lovely.  Seeing my cousin and meeting his girlfriend were both fine and lovely.

Here’s the crux of it: there is a significant disjunction between that which gives me anxiety and that which actually occurs.  And I know that’s the case even as I’m responding to the stressor, whatever idea it is.

I would think that, as a poet, I would be particularly well-equipped for coping with this kind of overlapping of multiple and simultaneous perspectives.

•     •      •

My grandmother fell this morning.  

Each time I see her, her skin looks more and more like tissue paper through which I can see her blood and corpuscles and all of those sundry things that make her physically herself.

She fell and hit her face and my aunt Karen (the unmarried only daughter of the family – the one who takes primary care of my grandmother) dropped meal preparation and brought her to the hospital.  She got stitches on the bridge of her nose.  It was strange looking at her today with it swollen and pressing the skin tight.  My nose (the most delicate in my immediate family) comes from my grandmother and looking at hers, suddenly so different from mine, was very jarring.

She has bruises on the backs of her hands and a leg brace.  It was a bad fall, but she was not on pain medication (other than that which they gave her for the stitches), so there’s a lot for which to be grateful.

But there is part of me that is seriously considering putting off my application to St. Andrews.  It’s hard to consider being 3,000 miles away instead of 30.  

I want to be hear for her.  More than that, though, I want to be around her.  Remarkable woman.