Statistics

I was halfway through writing a flippant post about trivial things. It will have to wait.

I got a text from my dad this afternoon. Call home, is what it basically said. With gravity. I had time to think, “Dad’s had to make too many of these calls lately,” before I went outside and pushed call back.

Out of respect for... out of respect... Jesus, I don’t even know. I’m not going to share it. That’s the point. It took Dad a full five minutes to get the words out to tell me. I don’t know what I could possibly say to you.

I feel like someone reprojected my world to a different datum. Everything’s shifted 100 meters to the left and rotated by 5 degrees. Where’s north?

You hear statistics about horrible things that happen to people. 1 in 10 Americans will be _______. Heart attacks or lightening strikes or crocodile attacks. The thing is, I have a pretty big family. You just want to put your arms around all of them, all the time, to keep them safe. But I guess no arms in the world can protect you from numbers, and sooner or later those statistics land in your backyard. It’s right there between your tomatoes and your impatiens and you’re left standing there wondering how the hell it possibly got there.

Seemed like a nice little garden, you know?