Thinskinnedness

Apologies! Nearly a week has passed and I just realized that I forgot to link to LM’s interview in Boston Review. The link has been inserted! And for good measure, here it is again!

So transfixed I was, I tracked down LM’s article “The Kindest Cut,” about kidney donors. (Here’s the online version … this reprint may be cheaper.) No, I’m not about to give up a kidney; right now I couldn’t. Just reading the article was harrowing enough for me.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My semester has ended, and as usual I’m sentimental about it. (The last student I tutored was writing her final college paper.) I’ll have a short break, and then it’ll be back to the office for Summer Sessions I and II.

South Bend rejoices for springtime. It never seems trite to marvel at the green shoots, at the flowers, the birds, the increase of rain, the river’s rising. How easy to forget the winter! And yet this is the time for planning ahead, for calculating how to cope. God, this year remind me to make allowances for the coming leanness. Remind me that to harvest, I must now plant (though the sower and the reaper are not always the same). Forgive me how foolishly I’ve been living.

Some years ago a friend was beaming at another’s child, and I said to her [Quote:] You need to get your own damn baby. Well, now she has one, and it’s my turn to do the beaming. How can a creature resembling, alternately, a roasted chicken and Jabba the Hutt still be piercingly adorable? Such is the power of this child. And my adoration is reciprocated. :)

But yesterday I mimicked, a little too harshly, the child’s cooing, and made her cry. It shouldn’t still bother me. But it does.