My daughter lives in LA

...a dispatch from bewilderness

As a kid, I dabbled in drawing and poetry. After college, I got a job writing captions for pieces in Time Magazine and short descriptions of films on PBS, Nova and Masterpiece. This required no special skill and turned me toward comedy. More or less.

I told stories for forty years. This was called freelance writing. Very short stories. I married once. Briefly. That was another short story.

Then my mind was blown. It moved a few inches to the left and a few inches to the right and up and down and inside out all at once. That is called a Traumatic Brain Injury. As opposed — it would seem — to the non-traumatic kind?

Seurat’s famed painting, which most people call “Sunday in the Park” even though that was not its name, consists of a few million dots. Or a few trillion. So does brain damage. But Seurat’s dots stay in place. Mine don’t.

I write dots as they swarm, swell, dissolve. The birth of rock n’ roll, the world’s most ancient river, the world’s most ancient tree -- uproot, swirl, twirl away. Color, light, form, any semblance of order, balance, harmony, a million points of light swarm in random constellations to random constellations.

My dots deconstruct. Woops, a bunch of delicate objects get blown to smithereens. They were neurons. My neurons. Then LA goes up in flames.

Things don’t fall into place. They fall out of place instead. Everything chars, burns, turns to ash: A hat, a ribbon, a rose, a bird, a tree, a home, another home.  

The mind races to keep what it can. The body races, works harder to breathe. Then even harder. The air is black. Then orange. Then black. Some things have a future, some have run out of time.

First a thing disappears, then, in time, its name disappears, then even the memory of it disappears as if it were never real. And you? You return or not to the world you used to know.

My daughter lives in LA. This is for all those in LA. Perhaps you had to evacuate. Perhaps you couldn’t evacuate. Perhaps it wasn’t safe to stay, but also wasn’t safe to leave. Perhaps your homes remained standing. Or — as in my daughter’s case — perhaps it’s too soon to tell. Love and prayers to and for you all.