Out of all hooping

A girl came home from her first semester at college. I am frequently amazed all anew at the fluidity of a concept like normal: one minute you’re lying in a hospital bed, holding a little red burrito which a stranger has just handed you and saying to yourself, “Just exactly what have I done to my heretofore agreeable life?” The next minute the burrito is calling you long distance to say that the philosophy final is over, and that the young man to whom she has become appended wants to leave Dallas by 6 the next morning to drive thirteen hours to Atlanta to his parents’ house, then four more the next day to bring her to your door, and you realize that there’s an entire world beyond the walls of your own house, and it’s not you rattling around in it footloose and full of a sense of infinite destiny, but the burrito. You, rather to your surprise, are the one in the house, waiting to open the door and let some of the infinite destiny back in, to grace you with its gilded presence for a few minutes, until the phone rings and something else claims its attention. And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here? And also, Was it ever really otherwise?