Strange days.
I’m around. The semester draws to a close in less than a month so I’m all work and stress. Summer has, more or less, already arrived: the warm weather both inspires and taunts.
Days in which every minute is calculated in order to maximize work generate odd moods. Caffeine, fatigue, stress, and ceaseless reading, writing, and thinking all add up to unsettle. Yet, fear not. Mostly this is not bad.
The Thursday before last was a strange day. It is my busiest day of the week and I was a flurry with nonstop activity. A storm that had terrorized the South was making its way north, although considerably weakened. The air was humid, moist, and highly charged. The clouds intermittently dumped, without warning, downpours. The New York Times was reporting that much of the Birmingham suburb where my uncle lives “lay in ruins.” That in the aftermath of the massive tornado, “no one knows yet how many people died in Pleasant Grove.” A vague and unsettling statement. Power was out, so I did not hear either from R., who lives in Birmingham’s unaffected southwest. The news that day was also reporting that a cafe we visited together, overlooking a square in Marrakech, was bombed in a terrorist attack.
I do not mean to leave you in some sort of sick suspense. My uncle is fine. His home, miraculously, too. A graphic that one of my father’s brothers e-mailed around shows that worry, though, was warranted.
For the sake of perspective, that half-mile wide tornado was within a half-mile of “David’s place.”
