mallorys_camera | A Couple of Sunsets and Some Music You Like (Reply)

Well, this was cool.

I was driving to a garden show, saw a mural I wanted to investigate, parked the car, leapt out, began snapping pix and heard somebody call my name—

Dayana!

One of the kids in the youth group I ran for AmeriCorps Vista five years ago.

I remembered Dayana very well because she was the subject of a fierce tug-of-war between her church-going grandma and her mama who’d just gotten out of jail/rehab (crack.)

She was clearly better off with the grandma, but loved Mama best.

I was shocked that she remembered me, but she did, she did, and she wanted to pose.

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Garden show was basically an immersive infomercial for a local nursery, but it was nice to see spring flowers:

Just think: In a month, there may even be flowers like this in the ground!

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Did some basting and hemming on the Work in Progress only to realize that several paragraphs have to be trashed. Descriptions of New York in the summertime: If only 42nd Street had been a couple of blocks longer, it would have led straight to hell. But In Real Life, Henry and June get married in June, so the events I am making up would have had to have happened in the dead of winter. Ugh. Completely different tone.

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In the evening, Max texted me a picture of the site where The Little Store used to be. He’s in Monterey, visiting the L________. He did it innocently enough, and he’s certainly not to blame for the fact that his Mom is a neurotic mess; but I saw the photo and immediately burst into tears and could not stop crying till I went to sleep. Woke up this morning and started crying again.

What a pathetic failure I am!

Well, no. I’m not. Or at least—I’m no more of a pathetic failure than 20 million other small business owners who lost our businesses when the economy crashed and burned in 2008.

The banks we owed money to were Too Big to Fail.

But we were not.

And, of course, we are but a fleck in God’s eye compared to what is gonna be happening in the next 20 years as automation and the Amazon business model make more and more jobs obsolete.

Blaming myself for that is a delusion of grandeur on my part, of course. I was just another data point.

Still. If I had an Off button, I would definitely push it this morning.

Life. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for a couple of sunsets every now and then and some music you like.