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Show -309 was trying to teach Jacob how to do handstands. They were down in the grass on their hands and knees, and Carlo was showing him how to kick upward into the perfect balance. Alice and Morgan were with them and I was alone at the table. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again all four of them were up on their hands. The sight of my family doing these lunatic capers-competent Morgan, serious Alice, Jacob surprisingly unclumsy in his upside-down position, legs firmly together, his cotton slacks falling up his leg to reveal hairy ankles, the perforated wingtip lawyer's shoes pointed in a perfect toes-up at the sky-only increased my desire to make sense of everything that had happened here, and the hopelessness of trying. The trouble was that all the sense-makers had gone out of the world. What sense there was had to be made without the help of God or Reason; it had to be made from scratch, painfully, in primitive fashion. Personally, I thought about the sort of man my father had been: a serious person, solemn even in his playfulness. He was a man dominated by the desire to be Good; he wanted to be right. His view of the world was different and dark; early in life he had woken up and been sad to find himself a civilized person, white, European-descended, Anglo-named. My old man didn't believe for a second in manifest destiny and thought America should have been left to the Indians, |
