found artifact: early college period, typewriter

We glide easily through the melting light because it's spring and we're young, afterall. The trees are bursting with the miracle of chlorophyll and from time to time I look over at the man walking beside me and he is smiling his crooked cinnamon grin. It's not hard to be alive, I think, and I calculate as best I can on just this day when sun and air intersect at such right angles that even Newton would forget gravitational forces in the sheer joy of each breath of apple blossom from underneath his tree. And I figure that out of the 4 and 1/2 lbs (that's 9.9 kilograms) of sunlight hitting the earth each day, much more than my fair share is landing on the bridge of my nose

(It's not really correct to speak of it in terms of weight, you see. It's more closely related to the force of momentum. But science makes way for poetry graciously enough most of the time.)

And then my phone rings. And it's my mom (mother's donation: one X chromosome and a hatred for entropy)and she's telling me something's wrong even though all she's asking is how my day has been. And I say what's wrong? DID SOMEONE DIE? because her voice is that grave. And she says I can't talk about it right now so I press her on it anyway. At your dad's school she says (father's contribution: a gene for green eyes and an appreciation for George Will&HARPER LEE) and I ask if it's a student or teacher and she says the former and I marvel at her ability to differentiate between former & latter so fast and think how she would've made a good astronaut, floating out there all alone in space and still knowing what's what. DEAD? I ask and she says yes and jumping to conclusions or maybe just being human I wonder how it will affect me. I look over at the man walking next to me and wonder when it's appropriate to cry in front of a stranger, even if he is your friend. MURDER? SUICIDE? I ask. The latter she says. It's going to be bad for your dad for a while she says. And so I tell her I'll do what I can on the home front as though there is a war on and I'm a member of the USO propping up troop morale with my cheery cherry lipstick smile and a patriotic song made popular by Bing Crosby. I can smile in the face of a faceless death.

And then I ask HOW? and she says Freon. And I think FREON: a trademark name for any of the refrigerants belonging to the chlorofluorocarbon family; composed primarily of chlorine and fluorine, group 17 elements, 7 valence electrons. Each atom looking for an 8th electron to lend stability and completion -- a non-polar covalent bond the most romantic attractive force in the universe, I think stupidly...and wish for less poetry and far less science and for a lot more answers floating around the cosmos.

And so I hang up and keep walking because nobody wants to fall over in the middle of a busy street for no apparent reason even though I know that someone has just boiled over with the desperation I always manage to hold at bay. And I don't want to say another thing because there's too much of that going around and no one has patented an antibiotic for HELPLESSNESS. So I'm silent until the wave of emotion splashes over the afternoon's calm shore. And I say something vague about it all being too much and the man walking beside me makes his own sort of sympathetic statement. And then for some inexplicable reason I smile, because I don't know what else to do and it take a damn fine novelist or a very strong microscope to diagnose the undercurrents and overtones of a moment's smile and no one will detect that mine is laced with cyanide, arsenic, and trace elements of hope under the copper sun.