Protect, protect

Again today a local pastor, his church seemingly set up as an enterprise, is on trial for molesting a 13-year-old. My own 13-year-old daughters, twins, are due back to me this weekend, their absence the parenting-plan-purgatory of a slow motion divorce. A 13-year-old girl dies in Iraq, blown apart by a bomber who, for reasons beyond me, targets a school.

Protect, protect, protect.

Weather in Seattle was lovely last weekend, so warm in the sun, though in the shade a chill breeze betrayed origins much farther north. The Space Needle had crowds on Sunday. Lovers with intertwined fingers brushed soft lips down a curve of throat, parents overwhelmed by the cacophony of their lives herded yelling children who were as safe as they were annoying.

1st street was less crowded and more interesting than the cliché of Pike Place Market, reminding again that though Portland is my home town, Seattle enfolds a center Stumptown has not yet found.

In the car, a couple is looking everywhere but at each other, she has tears in her eyes he can’t see. Lost to one another, again, hurt and melancholy have pushed aside touch and tenderness.

In the rhythm of life, joy seems so regularly married to despair. Those addicted to adrenaline are doomed to live with all of it, contrast etches the context, gives a feeling of seeing it new again, the pleasure of new skin to the caress of god’s finger tip.

Routine feels like death to the dopamine addicted, yet children depend on the dependable, on the anticipation of meals and scoldings and hugs, piano lessons and recess. They need the corral, they need to know where fences lay so they can learn to run at full gallop.

Protect, protect, protect.

A suicide bomber blows up a bakery in Israel killing three, maybe the baker and his wife, a customer from Peru. Eilat was a small coastal town on the Red Sea when I was there three lifetimes ago, when I had more lifetimes in front of me than behind.

Two men are talking to the street walker on the corner in Seattle, she has sores on thin legs, flea bites from flea bags, an immune system long ago compromised by drugs and disease.

The twins want to go snow boarding this weekend, Brina went to the top of the mountain last week with one friend, she is quietly proud, her sister went up halfway with another. They have discovered that sometimes intermediate slopes are easier than trying to remain a beginner. I worry I won’t be able to coach them in soccer this Spring.

There was a car wreck on the Santiam last week, not long before I arrived on the scene a young man lost control on black ice and slammed into the passenger door of an oncoming car and killed the couple inside, the physics of heads coming together at 60 miles per hour is fatal, the last and ultimate bonding, I imagine the sound, soft and hollow and wet.

One of the twins needs to do extra credit in science, ask the teacher to be moved from next to the disruptive boy. When I am not anxious about her future I wonder about his present, if all he needs is breakfast, or less time in front of the xBox or tv. When I am less vulnerable I am more generous.

Protect, protect, protect.