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309 Have a Nice Day I shovel up what’s left of a wild rabbit smattered on the road. It leaves a red memento of itself . . . . Years back, my neighbor would be mowing, pruning or watering his roses. Now he neither speaks nor walks and cannot recognize the woman shaving him or changing his pajamas as his wife. Later, while swallowing coffee and headlines, I skim this morning’s harvest from the killing fields surnamed the world. Inch by column inch, a list of military losses lengthens like a final bookmark or a grim receipt. Nasdaq and the Dow show gains although the news today is worse than yesterday’s. One analyst alliterates that “greed is not accountable to grief or glee.” Crossword puzzles, sports, the comics and the elegiac prose of the obituaries serve as filler. It’s cloudy in New York, sunny in Detroit and sweltering in Santa Fe. 310 Scattered “shower activity” is predicted locally by midnight. My neighbor, mute and unremembering, is spared all this. For him it’s yesterday forever. Am I the wiser if I strive to know what’s going on? Or is it all a waste of time since history’s “the propaganda of the victor” anyway? I fold the paper like a used tissue, its news passé. Nothing’s the way it seems. Tomorrow’s headlines will erase today’s as surely as the rabbit stain by morning will be rained away. ...

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