-The greatest person is entirely without superstition (and without Dogma).

-Favor no faction. Your genes do not cry out for a fellowship of like-birthed and/or like-minded kin. No person seeks a chorus in which to hide the lone voice, unless it be out of fear, or in the spirit of a pride that chooses partial sight.*

**

*- Elfie quote from ‘whither equality?’ on Bias/intelligence.

**- Sense of “shared destiny” inculcating hatred/contempt for strangers and enemies alike.

- I have learned this way

And I’ve become this way

By an apropos suite

Of suffering and reading

And of joy and reading

-Girlhood is a very ignorant time. One meanders, eyes to the rooftops and gutters and grass, delightedly or mopeish, with interest, scheming through it. It is the manufacture of memories that will cause misery in years to come. Real memories only plant their seeds in times of ignorance. Not bliss but ignorance- the forbear of a spectacular normalcy. Lack of pre-meditation. It is the understated bud, the one that shows no promise that will eventually produce a cherished bloom.

C+C tire shop auto repair. 7 brothers convenience store. Hersheys ice cream. Dajajo’s Market II, Spanish American grocery. The guilty pleasure coffeehouse. Social security administration. Birch florist. Bob’s pita bakery. Birch shoe repair.

PARKING.

Sullivan’s pharmacy. Charlot coiffures. Belgrade motors.

From these clues, do you know what bus I’m on? Through what neighborhood of Boston? That’s right, the 35 from forest hills through West Roxbury. I’m 17 years old. It’s 1998.

The man sitting in front of me has gel (grease?) in his hair. He is wearing a scarf. My stomach feels a little uneasy- a little bit in my throat. Probably because of all the coffee I’ve had today on an almost empty stomach, and the food I do have in my stomach being not serious, coffee neutralizing food, but chocolate chip cookies and a cranberry muffin. I have a feeling today that’s hard to describe- a feeling about the city and about time, about growth and preservation. Because the trees are bare still, the sky is particularly wide. Because the wide sky is very blue, and the sun a spring sun, it feels not like winter at the fin de siecle, but spring at the beginning of the century. 1900 or 1902.

It could be my grandpa Focer’s birth year, before everything was built, destroyed, rebuilt.

5 ton marble eagles from Penn. Station in a junkyard. Frank Lloyd Wright disassembled, disappeared. Before all that, in a type of morning (if years were hours), this is what it might have felt like.