september 17, 2001. It's time to write again. But what is there to write about? This morning the Boy woke up at 4:30 so that he could leave the house shortly after 5 a.m. I was...confused...as I often am during this interval. The alarm goes off so damn early that it completely disorients me, and I have to be careful not to make decisions or express opinions during this time of the morning, as I tend to be quite stupid & irrational. (No! You?! - irritating fictional ed.) This morning I somehow got the idea that when the Boy left the room for the last time, he was actually coming back to say goodbye to me. I waited for him to return, half-asleep & three-quarters irritable, and when he didn't, I fell into a disturbing dream: This is taking too long. He should be back by now. I get up to see what's going on, and I find the Boy lying dead on our front walk. This concerns me, obviously. Soon his ghost appears to drive me over fields of concert-goers. "So, what happened?" I ask with natural curiosity. "Why'd you die?" He is unwilling to answer, acting as if he didn't hear the question. It's just like the times I tried to find out how much is left on his student loan, or how many course credits he got in university - he is ignoring the issue completely. By the time I wake up, I still don't know how he became a cold body, curled on the asphalt walk in front of our house. We were looking forward to church this week, looking forward to a place where we could grieve and pull together some sort of understanding that could get us through the rest of our lives. It didn't disappoint, either. Rev. Robyn kicked ass yesterday, exceeding all of our expectations and then some. She hit the social justice gong pretty loudly, drawing inescapable parallels between the greed of the Western materialistic world and the inevitable hatred of the disadvantaged and poor. Unfortunately, so much of economics is a zero-sum game: to keep the prices low, we have to pay some workers tiny amounts to produce. And then we get to shroud ourselves in material goods, ignoring the war-torn and the poor and the exploited. She also didn't flinch from condemnation, calling the terrorist acts "abominations in the sight of God," which is a pretty brimstone-y thing to hear from a United Church pulpit. All the more striking, then. We left sad, but with the idea that we had seen the edges of the problems. When you can see the borders, you can start to make sense of the pattern, or at least you can try. We're all trying, really. Too much to do. Too much to do. Today was a 3-hour class, a lunchtime meeting, an afternoon at the office and an evening of homework. If all goes well at tomorrow morning's meeting, we'll have an article all ready to present & I won't have to spend hours researching auditory processing disorders. (Whatever they are.) Still ahead before I can sleep: a sinkful of dishes, over 100 pages of reading, and innumerable trips to the front door to let Ceilidh in and out of the house. At least there's comedy tonight on my 3-channel universe, and fine Canadian comedy at that. Be happy for small blessings, they say. this time 4 years ago: 3 hours in Le Château. Oh, how I have the urge to mock myself.