Watching the Bridge Collapse, and: I Am Sitting at the Table

Watching the Bridge Collapse

On tv I watch as the bridge collapses. Minnesota. Rush hour. Trucks and cars suspended over water. Cars swaying and falling. Imagine what those people felt, caught as they were in their cars, listening to music or All Things Considered or to a mystery on tape, imagining their families waiting for them, the dinner bubbling on the stove, the tv programs they planned to watch, when everything they knew, everything they believed they could trust, crashed and broke beneath them, that final moment of disbelief and then the terror as they fell. Sometimes I think all our lives are like that. We really believe we are safe, the roads we travel built to last, and are shocked no matter how many times it happens, when the ground falls away,—that moment in slow motion, when we are walking, confident, strong through one day, the next when we fall, stupid and helpless on the floor. It was like that when you got sick. Can it be so many years ago already? We were young. We loved each other. Our children were smart and healthy and beautiful. How could we lose? And then, one day, you, who could swim forty laps in the town pool, who jogged even in a midwinter snowstorm, began to move slower and slower, your hands no longer functioning the way they always had, your legs unwilling to obey your brain’s command to move. And now, your head bent sideways, so it nearly touches you shoulder, your legs so weak they cannot hold you up, your voicethin as a thread. Now you even need your aide to feed you. We are like those cars that trembled and swayed on the edges of the broken bridge, as frightened and unbelieving as those people must have been when everything they believed about themselves and the world turned out to be wrong, nothing between us and terror except air that seems suddenly so thin we cannot breathe.

I Am Sitting at the Table

I am sitting at the table in my friend’s dining room her children age five and two are there also, the little one with her curly electric blonde hair that reminds me of my daughter’s hair before my sister decided it was too messy and had it cut short. When I came home from teaching there was my furious five-year-old, her curls gone. It was years before she forgave my sister and years before I could forgive myself for not being there to stop her. Funny how the past and the present are mixed up in our minds like colored glass in a kaleidoscope. Anyway, there I am in Vestal, ny, my children grown up even my grandchildren much older than these children at this table and I look at the youngest child with her tough stance and her big smile and her wild hair and then at the oldest child with her light blonde hair that falls in a straight line to her shoulders and her eyes wide and blue as pansies and I see in her, the delicate precision with which she moves the careful way she lifts her fork to her mouth, her serious concern that every action be completed in exactly the right way, my own daughter, grown now and with that veneer of sad cynicism, that loss of hope, so evident since her divorce, the sharp wit she uses to hide her thin skin, the place inside herself that even six years have not been able to heal. I think of my sixteen-year-old granddaughter and see in her those same qualities—all three of them, the little girl sitting near me eating her ice cream cake with such sweet concentration and my daughter who tries to save herself by that same precision in everything she does writing an article, or preparing to teach her classes, or setting up her new condo. “I don’t want to talk about my life,” she says. “I never want to talk...