What is Necessary?

Bleary Saturday morning. Got up way too early on Jack's deflated blow up mattress. Kids fell asleep on pull-out couch so I bunked down in Jack's room with Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?" Most of the men she is writing about don't seem to be (necessary), and I was just getting down to the degenerative genetic state of the Y chromosome when I fell asleep. I woke up on the floor, underscoring how vital finding real beds for the children has become. Jack is growing up into a man who through his kindness, humor and intellect, will always be important to the world around him. The word "necessary" is interesting. How many of us are "necessary"? People die, disappear, move on, and the world still turns. A new person steps into the gap the old person left behind in all aspects of life. We're all temporary. So this morning it seems to me that nobody is really necessary. Objects, however, like beds that stay beds all night long, are. And so is the money to buy them. Children's father has agreed to pay child support this week out of his off-the-books salary. This is most likely not going to happen, but if it does maybe I'll bed shop this weekend.

After Us
by Connie Wanek

I don't know if we're in the beginning
or in the final stage.
-- Tomas Tranströmer

Rain is falling through the roof.
And all that prospered under the sun,
the books that opened in the morning
and closed at night, and all day
turned their pages to the light;

the sketches of boats and strong forearms
and clever faces, and of fields
and barns, and of a bowl of eggs,
and lying across the piano
the silver stick of a flute; everything

invented and imagined,
everything whispered and sung,
all silenced by cold rain.

The sky is the color of gravestones.
The rain tastes like salt, and rises
in the streets like a ruinous tide.
We spoke of millions, of billions of years.
We talked and talked.

Then a drop of rain fell
into the sound hole of the guitar, another
onto the unmade bed. And after us,
the rain will cease or it will go on falling,
even upon itself.