My Executive Order

From UMass Amherst

Guys, I write to you with my thumb, on my phone, from a UMass Amherst dining hall filled with old people. It’s closed on weekends but you can buy food from across the hall and bring it over to these tables. Our daughter is off with a family friend who’s a sophomore here. This morning she had her first in-person flute audition. She reports that it went well and that the flute professor was very tall. “No, like seriously tall.”

I wouldn’t go here, if I were young again, choosing colleges again. I’d go to NYU or maybe a meditation school in Arizona.

Anyway, I hereby declare that the United States government will no longer make pompous public decrees on websites. In fact, the executive branch of the federal government is hereby on break. In its place, flickering thoughts of sleepy men and women, thoughts like blades slicing through water, exhalations from sheep’s nostrils alone in icy fields, unexpected wind picking up in pretty, resort towns lifting branches, hair. I miss Mexico in 1985, when I walked alone through the empty streets of San Miguel de Allende and came across a little show store, which I entered bravely. There I bought a pair of pink silk-like fabric flats decorated with a purple flower. I paid $7. The world felt endless and magical.

Oooo, she is ready for us to pick her up!