'An Ordinary Life Where Things Make Sense'

An old friend back in upstate New York and I were texting. We worked years ago as reporters for the same newspaper. She was married then to her second husband, who had multiple sclerosis and died slowly and horribly. When she had to  go out of town, I would stay with him and watch old movies – The Dirty Dozen and Shaft I remember. I never met her first husband, who died several years ago. The health problems of her third husband are getting more severe. Much of his life is organized around visits to the doctor. I met him once long ago and he seems like a good-hearted guy. Obviously, Kathy has been facing more challenges than seems humanly fair. That little itch I get when I feel powerless and can’t help someone is nagging again. 

Wilmer Mills was a fine poet who died in 2011 at age forty-one. He was a formalist, a thoughtful writer, not a whiner or hysteric. He was the kind of guy who could build his own house and earn a living as a farmer and carpenter, along with teaching and writing. What I’ve read about him reminds me of my middle son, the Marine, who also embodies competence. One of his poems is titled “Pop’s Happy Land and Truck Stop.” Mills focuses on a waitress who works there:

 

“Reality for her is like a story,

One that refuses to accept the past

And has no future, only now, today . . .”

 

What do I wish, futilely, for Kathy? Mills writes in another poem, “Crosswalk”:

 

“I want things I cannot have:

Assurance that my children never suffer;

An ordinary life where things make sense.”