My aunt and uncle's grave is walking distance from the hotel. 

The large sign at the side gate says NO JOGGING.  Descending past fields of stones into the main complex, I join the river of tourists.  At the visitor's center, the computer monitor (the interface glows somber in faux marble) asks for the last name.  A map prints smoothly.  The lady at the information booth asks twice if it is okay to write on my map, before tracing a bright hi-lighter line from Here to There. Even so, I wander confused in several parking lots before finding the path.

My uncle's stone bears the only Unitarian Universalist symbol in a sea of crosses, barring his neighbor two down on the left (deceased 11 days prior) who has a Star of David.  My aunt, named on my uncle's reverse, is called "Louisa B, His Wife."

Rush hour susurrates over the wall.  The obelisk across the river, outlined by a westering sun, is visible from the grave.  Squirrels cavort on stones and birds freewheel above.  Over the next hill rises an unfamiliar monument: three arching pinnacles, contrails in stone. 

I call my father on my Blackberry to say that I am sitting on his sister's grave and that it is peaceful and beautiful.  He talks for a long time about a family matter.  We rehash ground that we have gone over before.  He predicts a grim future.  I say I believe in a bright tomorrow.

The sun twinkles, slips, disappears.  A vast white moon sails up, casting the obelisk into blue relief.

We end our call.  I rise, and pause (not jogging), six feet over.

Ms. 7:  You know, one good thing about being short and small is that you can fit through cracks.

Ms. 6:  “Mommy?  Mommy, I don’t see the girl hamsters.”

“Okay, okay, honey. 
Just a minute.”

Ms. 6 has been anal, verging on obsessed, with our dwarf
hamsters since the day she discovered one sneaking out of a temporary box, and
the other vanished.  Despite the salvage
of both would-be escapees that time, she constantly checked on our burgeoning
hamster brood, paralyzed that they’d escape. 
I treated her compulsion with alternating kindness, concern, and irritation.  Recently I called all the
pet stores, wanting to rid ourselves of this whole issue, but there’s a current local
dwarf hamster overpopulation and donations are unwelcome.  I resigned myself to perennially assuring her
that no, the hamsters were just fine. 
They weren’t lost.

Well, last night: 
they were.  Four girl
hamsters:  vanished, but for an
undeniable pile of droppings, outside
the cage.  My own initial denial,
followed by irritated glancing under the bookshelves, followed by frantic
floor-wide searching with flashlights, and a sleepless night leaping up to
check every half hour to see whether the bait-food had drawn back the renegades,
was all to no avail.  Twenty-four hours
later, I did a final sweep, dreading an impending ‘is that a rotten mouse?’
odor, and preparing the youngest. 
“Honey, I made a terrible mistake. 
But I think we just have to accept that it’s very likely we’ll either
never find them, or they’ll be dead.  So
we just need to get ready for that, honey. 
Let me tell you about something called ‘lessons learned,’ okay?”

This little period of Hamster Hell leads me to random
thoughts.  How ‘missing’ always
goes.  You’re ticked that you lost your
keys.  You’re furious that they’re
lost.  Five times, you search the place
they ought to be.  You look wider.  Ten times, you search the place they ought to be.  You look in places they should never be.  You give up. 
Then you find them someplace entirely unexpected.  Or never find them. 

Of course there’s things more serious than keys, or even
small rodent pets.  Your beloved family
dog.  Your child, godforbid.  Those parents in Portugal, how one blanches to imagine
their growing terror (regardless of one’s feelings about their parenting
choices):  “She must be huddled in the
covers.  Under the bed.  In the bathroom.  On the balcony.  Omigod, migod …. must be under the blankets…”

There’s public kinds of ‘missing.’  Missing WMDs: a political nightmare from
start to finish.  Missing in action – a
phrase from my Vietnam-era childhood, recast into the modern mode.  The public face of private agony:
aggrandized, politicized, made monstrously part of the national psyche.

Ms. 6:  “Mommy?  I think I am
broken-hearted about the hamsters.  But I
think it’s the kind of broken-hearted where you can feel, little by little, the
broken-heartedness going away, slowly.”

Seeking the silver lining: 
I’m glad we’ve begun with that kind of broken-hearted, if it has (as
tragically it must), begin somewhere.

The compressed-air cannons pooot explosively, acoustically
linking this play-world with my real one, where, the day before, to the background
of compressed air cleaners and humming test rigs, I fired the guy who taught me
the ropes.  We didn't make eye contact during
the firing, except once, fleetingly, as if by mistake..  Now, while I'm accompanying the kids
through the Lazy River,
the Family Flume and (when ‘wet’ gets old), the Tree Top Play and the Madagascar
putt-putt, he's coming off a lengthy drunk and talking to a lawyer.  Although not the one we've both used daily
for decades.  Because that one, our
corporate counsel, was by my side at the execution. You could call it betrayal,
but it's more complicated than that. 

We all knew the game too well for drama.  He was largely silent.  He rolled his eyes a couple of times, when
lines were flubbed or silly.  I half
expected him to say: “Come on, guys.  You
can do better than that.”  I half
expected him to say: "Let's go over that one again before you do it for
real, okay?"

I need to stop wondering how he's doing and start thinking
corporate (what is how  he's doing going
to mean for our HR strategy?). 

Actually, right now I need to be having a fun vacation with
the kids.  That would have been easier if
I hadn't made the short list for the firing squad at the last minute, and
instead of packing and housecleaning went into work and printed the exit memo
on letterhead while dodging the unwitting victim who, in the light of my secret
foreknowledge, seemed to be having an extremely happy and productive day.  I know it's always like that. Watching the
gist sink in, and the laugh go out of someone's eyes, leaving them flat-gazed.  Tired. 
Sardonic.. 

Knowing doesn't make it any easier.  Believing it was the right thing to do
doesn't, either.

Anyway, that aside for a moment - there's something beyond
the explicitly outré about a waterpark called ‘Kalahari’ that’s made for the
American minivan set. Whoever designed this thing didn't just toss in plastic
lions and zebras, murals depicting glowering silverbacks, and realistic-looking
plastic palms with broad waterproof leaves --although all that's certainly there.  No, they went to great lengths to replicate,
in a safety-conscious, photogenically-perfect way, other more subtle and not so
charismatic-megafauna-type aspect of the continent.  The great encompassing hotel complex,
surrounded by smooth pavement with rushing RAV4s and Odessys and catered-to by
smiling khaki-clad lackeys, is molded into fetchingly stucco'd rondavels, with mock cracks in the walls and scruffy browning grasses on
laterite-tinted painted ground.

I've been to Africa.  I lived three years in then-Zaire, and spent weeks in other countries North, East and Central.  I know what Africa
is, and this is nothing like.  But the
colors and the look-and-feel are true enough to give one pregnant pause indeed.

There’s a lot of confusion in the air today.  Mine, in a pristine Western playland
decorated incongruously with the patina of a complex and poverty-tinged land
half a globe away.  My ex-colleague’s,
having expected one kind of ordinary evening, facing instead a blank future
tinged with anger and regret.

Ms. 9 and I were attending a meeting.  Or rather, I was attending the meeting and she was sitting patiently through it.  It was at the school, about the school play.  I'm one of the parent coordinators.

Afterwards, we walked quickly out into the cold night.

"Mom," she panted as we trotted through the parking lot, "Was that, like, a typical grown-up meeting?"

"I guess so honey, yeah, it was pretty typical.  Why?  What made you ask?"

"I dunno."

"What did you think of it?"

"Well -- it looked like you were all spending a lot of time trying not to say how preposterous the other people's ideas were."

I'm not sure whether she'll go far ... or be thrown out of society altogether.

"Me 'n Suzy cleaned up," she said, lovely curls falling back from her small pixie face.

"Thank you, sweetie, it looks great!"

She
smiled proudly, merging back into the raucous group of five.  There's
not much to choose between them, my daughter's friends, helping
celebrate her entry into the 9-year-old club with a weekend trip to the
city.  Blonde and brunette, slender and solid, shorter and taller:
they're all good kids.  They support each other's weaknesses and
celebrate the strengths.  They recognize differences and seek
similarities.  I'm proud of them.

I'd gone out to get pizza,
leaving them temporarily behind locked doors with fruit, nuts and juice to tide them over. 
When I got back, all the snacks were tidied away and Ashley made her
pleased announcement.  I left them choosing cheese or pepperoni and
thought about that.

Ashley lives in a minuscule trailer with her
mom, grandmother and disabled half-brother, disowned by her dad and
dissed to her face by her step-mom.  Suzy packs her belongings from
one parent's house to the other's on a weekly basis:  a bipolar
existence already two years long.  The other three live in
two-parent homes ranging on the scale from the well-off to the lower
middle-class. 

I'm particularly stricken by this anecdotal
moment because I often wonder where, in the course of the prepubescent
learning curve, a kid completely assimilates their sense of social
class.  When do they assume the prerogative of privilege?  When is does
a sense of inferiority innate?  How, now pushing their first decade's
experience, can three of them sit by while two of them clean up, and
somehow no-one questions that?  The two didn't think to leave the
mess.  The three didn't think to help out.  The moment went unremarked
by the participants, but over here on the grown-up side of the wall I'm
left wondering.

I went to school with one of Ashley's aunts.  I remember her from my
high school days as a 'redneck.' I did not consider her 'friend' material.  I assumed she felt exactly the same about me.  I believe she now works for Maid-To-Order.

When did I learn so definitively to disrespect someone else?  Where,
along the line, did she join the ranks of those who clean up other
people's messes, and I joined the ranks of those who could, if we so choose, pay (very little)
to have it done?  Does it have everything to do with money, or not much
at all?  Can I do something now to modify the trajectory of the next
generation, either on Ashley's behalf or my daughter's? 

The party's about to wake up in the next room, and over here I'm
suddenly seized with a sense of social responsibility far greater than
making sure everyone's fed and has a good time.

Or actually:  maybe that is it, exactly.  Is it possible to get us all fed and happy.....equally?

"The woman," the New York Times online quoted the officer as saying, "in a defensive posture, had both of the children surrounded underneath her arms in an effort that we can assume was to protect them from the gunfire."

We can assume.

In 2005, 16,692 people were murdered in the United States.  Of those, 403 were children between 1 and 8.

As an educated American adult, on a daily basis I am properly appalled but otherwise unaffected by statistics.

As a mother, I am stricken to the core by "to protect them from the gunfire." 

Under virtually no conceivable circumstances would I and my two children between the ages of 1 and 8 be evicted from a van on a deserted Florida highway at 2:30 am and mowed down by gunfire.  But reading this official pronouncement, for one split second of horror, I too was there, futilely, "in a defensive posture."

No further comment, no anguished query for a 'why,' no cry for retribution, no juxtaposition of the probable and the statistically impossible, is necessary for me to have tasted her terror and been flattened by both her specific, and our systemic, helplessness in the face of it.

There is no defense.

 "I have changed.  I'm not as sure as when we started.  Then, I was inspired."  The light was bright on his bowed head; his thinning hair glistened.  The haunting melody sighed through the hushed crowd.  "Now I'm sad, and tired.  Listen:  surely I've exceeded expectations?  Tried for three years .... seems like thirty.  Could you ask as much from any other man?"

I felt tears in the back of my throat.  The threads of time and tale wound tight around the moment: a story two thousand years old embodied in an aging man reprising a daring, joyous enterprise from his youth's glory, in an era far more fraught.

Once, as I reminded myself in front of the DVD last night, thirty-year-old Ted Neeley sang those words into a wild wind careening off the Negev desert, and the engaging story was about  a rock star and his nimble young fellows playing at prophet-and-disciple. 

Last Wednesday on stage, Neeley didn't struggle to mask his age in a role too young for him; rather he used the screech and crack of his elder's voice to underscore the tragedy of a man at the mercy of a merciless God.  Aloft on the barely-outlined cross while a fortuitous thunderstorm boomed outside the theatre, his wrinkled skin heaved across arching ribs -- and every middle-aged audience member drew in a deeply personal empathetic gasp.

In the opener of "Superstar's" current tour, shrouded disciples draw their staffs across the floor and spotlights lay down the arc of the fish.  On a scaffold overhead, Roman soldiers pace nearer, and as the disciples withdraw, the whitelight fish melt into a greater pattern that confounds the eye.  Then the viewer suddenly sees the great spiderweb, woven across the set and melting into the audience itself: an apt metaphor for Christianity in the modern age, when the site of the fish on the bumper in front of me brings to mind more the webbed interstices of national and international politics than the vital precepts of an age-old vision. 

 Watching the lithe, wild-haired, bell-bottomed youth cavort around the dusty ruins onscreen, even Judas' tortured indecision seems fleeting enough.  The last moments of the film, as the actors pack themselves on the bus in the sunset and the cross stands strong against the sunset is a moment of innocent hope.  In contrast, the modern stage version comes to a cacophonous end as the dazzlingly raucous finale of 'Superstar' fades into an antic ovation.

The world is a conflicted place, and we are all much older now.

"Then, I was inspired.  Now I'm sad and tired.  After all, I've tried for three years ... seems like ninety.  Why then am I scared to finish what I started?  What you started.  I didn't start it.  God, thy will is hard.  But you hold every card.  I will drink your cup of poison.  Nail me to your cross and break me.  Bleed me, beat me, kill me, take me now -- before I change my mind."

Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just
  Ourselves –
And Immortality.
  - E. Dickinson

Sitting on a bright late September  noon with the door open, listening to the breeze rustle the just-tinging trees and hearing the cat purr in my lap, I thought:  we anthropomorphize death because it is so feared, and in our society so taboo, a topic.  But on this gaspingly beauteous day, which itself brings to mind another woman’s poesy:

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
   Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
   Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour!  That gaunt crag
To crush!  To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
   But never knew I this;
   Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, -- Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, -- let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
-    E. St. Vincent Millay

… it’s possible, as my old cat purs and rubs, to put aside all  thoughts of Death as the interloper, the ghoul, the ax-man, the executioner, and think rather of death, not as a person, or a thing, but as the absence of it.  Life is the Thing.  Death is the not-thing.  What we mourn, when we mourn death, is the life that is gone.  We don't really mourn that death happened, or even how death happened, but instead the absence of life.

The cat purrs.  Her eyes close.  Tears catch in my throat.  Time presses.  It’s 12:42.

Today:
3:45 answer first email
6:25 rouse the family
7:00 re-rouse the laggards
7:42 off to work
7:43 back in the house for forgotten item
8:30 find IT and get the newest computer quote
10:30 teach first graders creative writing
12:00 meet with Principal about PTO
12:45 euthanize cat
13:05 watch sobbing husband bury cat
13:30 ice down soccer team snack in cooler
13:46  discuss stock issues with subordinate
16:03 give up on work and write

It is easy to say:  the cat was old, feeble, sway-backed, failing on her legs.  That renal failure rendered her unable to make it to the box.  That she could no longer clean herself.  That she cried piteously into her aging night.  That her quality-of-life was fading.  That nineteen years, in cat-dom, is aged indeed.  That I myself would want to go quietly on a beautiful day in early autumn.

It’s easy to say:  the system is okay with this.  You call up and make an appointment.  You bring in the animal.  You sign that you have the right to do this (you pause….you have the right?  Because …. you own this cat?  This Cat Who Walked By Herself, all these years?).  The vet is soothing and hands you the tissues.  There is no questioning of your decision.  It costs $20.  They expect you to bring the remains to your vehicle before you sign the check.

No-one says:  who are you, to stop life like this?

It’s hard to know if it was okay.

Or who (if you are me, without a System to explain Who) would have the authority to say:  

It wasn’t.

 Or.  

It was.

In the Congolese jungle, the Gabon viper is rare, and torpid, but if it bites, it kills in five minutes.  When I worked there, I thought about those five minutes a lot.  It was something of a fixation with me; a metaphor for everything that was dangerous about living in central Africa.

Leaving the Ituri rainforest for the last time, the truck I rode on overturned and killed the man sitting behind me.  There was that sense, at the scene of the accident and later as the African continent sink below my contrail, that I'd had a narrow escape from the viper on my heels.

Yesterday, dragging the lawnmower thankfully toward its shed in the sweltering heat, smiling at my girls cavorting in the kiddie pool, I leapt aside as a rapidly undulating 3-foot copperhead crossed my path. 

A local venom-seller having removed the snake, I made the kids' lunches and glanced through the Sunday paper.  Among the elderly eulogized in the obituaries was an infant.  It took me several re-reads (because you don't want it to be true; you want yourself to have been mistaken -- it was someone else, someone you don't know, facing this tragedy) to confirm that this was my youngest's classmate's baby sister.  The mother and I alternated volunteering in the classroom on Thursdays, and on one of my Thursdays in May she was in labor.  I remembered how excited the kids were, how the soon-to-be big brother was a figure of envy.  Now, said the paper, that much-awaited little sister was 'unexpectedly' ... dead.

I'm thinking, in these wee hours, of that mother across town preparing for the funeral.  Of how she's feeling, how she's coping.  How she's quietly checking on her sons, weighing her gratitude for their health against her heartache for the loss of her daughter.

Browsing sleeplessly through the news online, other women's griefs -- in Iraq, in Lebanon -- are thrown into heightened prominence.  Empathy mixes with culpability:  the American arsenal is rending many mothers' lives, to uncertain end. I am a perpetrator as well as a helpless observer.

A sense of security is a balancing act between the simultaneous knowledge of the imminence of disaster and the inevitability of escape.  Americans in particular seize a disproportionate right to the latter.  But sometimes, even on the well-tended greensward of the obliviously fortunate, the frail fronds part and the snake passes heartstoppingly close.

I'm left teetering, where before the balance seemed so sure.