I feel bad....

I feel bad because I haven't been writing anything of substance lately. I don't feel like I have anything really substantive to say. I'm just stuck in a situation right now that I have no power to change and yet is holding our lives hostage at the moment.

Alex is handling the whole thing rather well. She has managed to steadfastly hold her father on a pedestal through out this whole thing while making sure I know just how much I have failed her by ignoring her all the time. Really. I ignore her. I guess we aren't counting that trip to the country, the day I left work early last week, or that on going Monopoly game we have been playing every single night all summer long. (For the record, I hate Monopoly. I don't play games I hate with people I ignore.)

Its hard to come up with something sanguine to say in this situation. Last night I picked up the book Long Life: Essays and Other Writings by Mary Oliver. It had been siting on my coffee table because I'm really crappy when it comes to putting that kind of thing away. Those kinds of books in which I have fallen in love with the writer's language. I tend to keep these books near me so that I can pick them up and swoon over a sentence or two without care for the actual context of the words. This passage in Mary's introduction reached through my incurable frustration and made me swoon.

"...And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you each morning. 'Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?' This book is my comment."