Taking Care

I went to the book store in my shiny black shoes with some money in my coat pocket. The doors don't open themselves there- I kind of like that. I looked through magazines and featured book tables and eventually, I stumbled onto a glossy photo book. The paper isn't good paper, it's magazine paper, it's one of the TIME-LIFE picture books they stick in the newsstand every so often. I got the hi-gloss cover smudgy and thumbed through. I handed the cashier a smooth bill and felt happy. These are all pictures of Audrey Hepburn. In some of them, her baby deer is asleep with her on the couch. I want to be that kind of elegant, humble woman.

This is an age of days with elegant exertion, ungraceful negligence, aesthetic ideals forming, a sharpening of the mind and the transfer of emotions. I think about the things that transcend and try to figure out what they are, where they are, how to communicate them, how to find more, and how to immerse oneself in them. I think about how I can write better. I think about food and being kind. I am taking in more information than I exert. I need raw material to process. Someday, something good will come of all of this.

I think about drinking milk out of small paper cartons and eating cut-up food with oversized utensils. I think about popsicles running down the stained wooden stick and sliding down my arm. Then I'd have sticky fingers.