1 January 2017

A child who, not having meat, asks for salt with which to season it. She wore a billowing white dress, strode up and down Kainalu, less ghost than resurrection. She wrote in eight notebooks, one for each of her children in Utah. The families of those who played softball shared potlucks near her blanket at the rec center. Toilets just flushed and flushed. I took her a bag of Bic pens, but she said they were the wrong color. The man who perched on a mailbox outside Starbucks in LA took the coffee I gave him (he requested milk), then came inside and demanded a fresh cup. “The lady put something in it,” he told the barrista. “Sometimes you realize why they're on the streets,” my friend said. It's an argument they're having in philosophy, the extent to which empathy is or is not a good thing. To feel as another is to be absorbed, to wonder for a moment why you're not out there with them.

"Since feelings are so rare now, they are the most important thing in my calendar." Anna Politkovskaya

--1 January 2017