The 45th parallel is the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, and you can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water.
I wonder if deep down each of carries a fantasy of one day becoming an ascetic or a mystic, some hardwired notion of stripping our lives bare and praying in the gloom.
I remember smoking a cigarette in the subzero wind while watching the lights of freighters on the horizon. I thought we were at the edge of the earth.
I try to see the world through my father’s eyes, his sense that everything looked like science fiction.
After receiving a lung and transforming himself into a grand old man, my father slipped suddenly from this world.
I’d like to be a little beacon of joy for my father, chipper and zen and awake at six in the morning eating a piece of fruit. Instead, I stay up late reading Schopenhauer.
