This world belongs to the young and the daring, the avid, the adventurous, and that's why one follows the saga of corporate bailouts with a certain trepidation. We're mortgaging the future and we are rescuing the stubborn and stupid. The cost of a good college education for the young and daring is stupefying; meanwhile the federal deficit yawns, tax increases lie ahead, job losses per month are like a major city getting wiped out, and India and China are doing what we used to do better.
So why does my mind keep drifting back to the woman I knew when I was in college, a writer like me, tall and magnificent, languorous, delightful, whose thighs were so ticklish that when I kissed them she burst out laughing. And now, when I hear young women laugh loudly, as I did last night, I think of her and wonder where she is and who is making her laugh.
Last night a couple of friends and I were in a restaurant, eating local produce and discussing the world's troubles, and we were on the subject of the Middle East and its intractable troubles when peals of girlish laughter rang out from the booth behind us. I had tuned out of International Relations a few minutes before and tuned into the program next door, so I got the joke.
One woman was talking about her mother, a nurse in a nursing home, and about a cocktail of morphine with a few additives that Mom would serve to select patients when she felt quite sure that they wished to be released from the bonds of earth. She ushered them out of the world around 4 a.m. when it was quiet - "hearing is the last sense you lose at the end, so if an old man hears a ballgame on the radio, he may come bounding back to life to catch the score" - and she made sure that someone was around to hold the dying person's hand. Death came painlessly around 7 a.m. and she called the family with the news, who now did not need to sit a long death watch, and the body was moved out and the bed changed for a new customer. All very orderly.
"But one day I walked into the living room and saw my father napping on the couch and my mother, the Angel of Death, standing over him and looking at him in a professional sort of way. Our cat sat on a chair watching her with concern in its eye. The cat knew. He never napped out in the open."
That was the laugh line, the wariness of the cat. And when the woman called her mother Snuff Queen, her mother said, "I just hope that when I get there, someone will do the same for me." More laughter.
