Illiterations: Laughing At My Own Expense

  I am swimming across a vast, threatening channel.   The water is cold and dark.   The current moves me more than I manage to move across it.   I see lights at the far shore, appearing just when I need to see them the most.   I swim, and swim, and swim, until I just need to rest.   I just need to close my eyes against the tide, and the force that pulls at me.   And then I wake and I fight to keep swimming,  because that is all that I can do to stay afloat.   I cannot go under.   I allow myself to dream of the shore and that safety.   I was there, once.   I left the shore, and the warmth of safety on my own accord.   And, now, having become immersed in the dark channel between that time  —the shore; warmth; life; people— and another life, I know that to keep swimming is the only way.   The closer I feel I may be getting to the safety of the shore,  the more deeply I feel the deep  reaching to pull me under  and to rally it’s monsters to converge at my back  and devour me wholly.   I am

My recent visit to see Alice, my lifelong childhood friend, afforded us a number of opportunities to reminisce. Predictably, the conversation eventually meandered to our memories of the summer day a few years back, when the El Dorado County sheriff raided my property in full riot gear, with dogs and assault weapons at the ready. Alice, her husband William, and Jeff and I were all in shorts and even possibly underwear (having never gotten dressed on a hot September weekday when I was working in my home office and they were newly arrived guests who’d just driven ‘round the US on a late summer vacation to get here). I was in my separate office, a building I’d crafted with love as my sole and separate space where I could work undisturbed. My wonderful, barn-like office building was flooded with filtered light and views of my beach and the American River beyond. I detected movement on the hillside looking away from the beach, and the motion was moving in the direction of the vacant second h