My dad was sick and we were trying to get the house ready and a cow got stuck in a tree and we thought we might have to put it down before it died up there and our only help was a young man like a young woman with whom I once worked who couldn’t be counted on for shit and the house seemed SoCal, the land of now.

I said, to no one in particular, that this was like “jumping from the pot of absurdity to the fire of the ridiculous” and the young man turned to me like I’d caught his cheek with a fish hook and pulled hard so I said one day you’ll read that book and it’ll change your life and threw him back into his babbling brook.

My dad didn’t make it because none of us do, but we did manage to get that cow down once the world turned back over to ordinary believable neological sensicality and, everafter, we made our truth of the whole thing simply by telling it, each and every time he came back to the house to see me. Remember when… And he’d pour me another, a look of deep, melancholic tenderness spread evenly across his kind face, and tinged with a sorrowful pity of which I was always sure he was never aware.

Originally published on Hijacked Amygdala.