Every day I fall madly in love with someone.

I can’t help it. My heart races and leaps. I am glitter and breeze and sunsets and clouds. I am stardust and radiation and Dark Matter and inexplicable time and the Big Bang. I have told my husband that this is normal. He will believe me one day. When we are ninety, or thereabouts.

This is who I fell in love with today:

He was a skinny thing, all elbows and reeds. A long neck. Sharp chin. Pale skin like milk. Thick black leg hairs standing straight out, as sure as tree trunks. He was wearing black gym shoes and black socks stretched to the middle of his bony calves, long shorts, and a tee- shirt with Phil Collins on it. He had a red white and blue sweat headband around his head and trucker-shaped sunglasses with white, plastic frames balancing on his long, straight nose and another pair of sunglasses on his head just in case. And he had a boom box. One of those ancient magnavox numbers with the double tape deck that I remember asking for Christmas the year I turned eleven.

(I didn’t get it, by the way. Thanks a lot, Santa.)

The boom box was turned all the way up. Peter Gabriel. Of course.

I was on my way to the library to get work done out of the chaos of my house, and I couldn’t stop. But I wanted to. He sat down on a low wall under a tree, his boom box balanced on his pale, bony knees. And I wanted to sit next to him and take his hands.

Here, I would say. This is your life line. And this is your head. And this is your heart. And my heart. And everyone’s heart.

Here. My fingers curling into his, my eyes bright, my lips curled into a smile. Skin and bone, breath and thought. The vastness of space. The beauty of the atom. Your perfect soul. My mind is inscrutable. It is burning and storming and wild. It is a cosmic wind, blowing from one end of the universe to the other, looping inside itself like a snake swallowing its tail, forever and ever and ever.

Here. My life and my love. I have known you before. I will know you again. Every moment happens simultaneously with every other moment, every life harmonizes with every other life. We are linked. We are song. We are the woven roots of the endless grass. And we are all one.

But I had work to do. The light turned green. I adjusted my backpack and headed into the library and left him behind in the shade. He didn’t notice me. He didn’t need to.

(Incidentally, I also fell madly in love with the elderly gentleman playing the Steinway in the workroom next to mine at the library. And now I have my eye on a broad shouldered woman cupping her hands around her eyes as she stands at the bus station. This happens a lot. I am large. I contain friggin multitudes.)

And now I shall pour that love into the work. It is not a bad thing. It bubbles and flows. It is a river. It is the rain. It is the swelling ocean. Who have you fallen in love with lately?

Infinity Dollar Bill

 

My son, last night at bedtime, asked me if there was a such thing as an infinity dollar bill. I asked him what he meant.

“It looks like one dollar, and it is one dollar, but it keeps on being more. And then you’ll have all the money in the universe in your very own pocket.”

I told him, no, there wasn’t a such thing as an infinity dollar bill, though I rather like the thought of it – sort of a conceptual vertigo, like all of heaven dancing on the head of a pin, or an entire universe in the nucleus of a cell, or consciousness and art springing from the gooey carbon muck of our brains, and so forth.”It sounds like a pretty cool idea,” I told him.

He crawled under his covers. “When I grow up,” he said, “I’m going to invent an infinity dollar bill.”

“I’m not sure they’ll let you do that,” I said.

“Oh,” he explained. “No one will know. It will be electric.”

“Will you need to plug it in?”

“No, it will have solar powered chips in it. And when I invent it, it will only be one dollar. But when I give the dollar to someone else, it will become one hundred dollars. And when they give it to someone else it will turn into a thousand dollars. And when they give it to someone after that, it will turn into ten thousand dollars.”

His eyes were shining.

“So,” I asked for clarification, “if you keep it, nothing changes, right?”

“Right,” he said “I can’t wait to invent this thing.”

“But what if you spend it?”

“Nope,” he said. “The infinity dollar only works when you’re giving it to someone. It can only be a present.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m inventing it,” he said. “And presents are awesome.”