"C"

The letter for today, Elmo, is the letter C.

To the Romans it meant 100, but I’m thinking more about Consuming Caffeine and Copious Quantities (Cheating a bit there with the Q, I know) of Cholesterol, in Cheap Cafes, Cruising Cross-Country, in a Convertible (Car, not Castro…), to see Canyons, and Cactii…I originally named this trip Cholesterol, but I’m really thinking about Change. Colossal Change. After 10 years on the east coast, we are moving to tuCson.

Arizona.

No C. This essay would work so much better if we were moving to Connecticut, with 3.

We’ll be living near my mother and my brother. Otherwise, what’s the point in having them? My top secret master plan is to build a compound and install my entire family around me, so that later, when I’m older and even grouchier there will be lots of kids available to keep me focused on something other than my impending demise.

Thinking strategically here, people: focusing on the future.

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Among other reasons for leaving our life here behind is a sinking feeling that our efforts to get ahead left us simply elsewhere in a maze of corridors all the same. It is an awkward kind of security, knowing too much about tomorrow. For all of our striving with time ticking by, one place looks and feels exactly like the last, each day the same, no sense whatsoever of progress beyond an accumulation of gray hair. We suffered from a diminution of hope, a hardening of our habits, a clotting of our vital juices, a cholesterol of the psyche.

Hope requires faith in the possibility of change, and change is what we’re betting on to restore our trust in the future. It seems slightly archaic or simply naïve to believe in change, as if we wouldn’t be dealing with ourselves whether we moved or not. Perhaps this is a way, on the other hand, not to find ourselves but to lose ourselves, or to get beyond ourselves: to fuss less in any case about our own nest and pay more attention to the horizon…and what better place, than the wide open space, of the wild, walmart west? West, with no C.

For Sale. $399,800. Acton’s original 1798 Schoolhouse. Now 3 bedrooms and 1½ baths.
The schoolhouse is right on the town common, and the town mows the front yard.
The Town Hall and the Library are right down the street.
The schools are some of the best in the state.