I must admit to feeling tired and depressed all day and although I got very little sleep (sick child, dog with temporary nightime paralysis of the hips and back legs) I think most of it is due to my unhealthy obsession with and absorbtion of the events that unfurled so tragically yesterday in Virginia. Partly, yes, it is because N is off to college next year and this has been our overwhelming preponderence of late, and partly, I suppose, because it is a train wreck. I am utterly amazed at the bravery and heroism shown by some of the young men and women and I pray that there will be a way for them to get through this.
And so, selfish git that I am, I needed to be cheered up and as luck would have it the lovely J (female J) gave me a Pal versiaon of the Vicar of Dibley Christmas Specials, which I've been watching in the kitchen, surreptitiously on my laptop, while making spaghetti bolognese for the children's supper. Silly I know, but Dibley reminds me of Aldbury, and it makes me happy to cure my homesickness, especially when Little is in here with me, giggling at Alice and imitating her so beautifully. I feel as if I'm home again, in my Mamma's house in the summer, drinking a glass of wine and watching the air balloons go by, high in the sky.
My friend Gary, who is a good deal older than me (by 25 years), revealed that he goes to Mass every Sunday. "I arrive late and leave early" he confides and "it makes me able to face the rest of the week." But, since his mother died, he has been unable to believe in the Catholic idea of God. Death, he says, seems so final now. One is not often faced with belief or put on the spot to describe the specifics of one's beliefs, and put on the spot I found myself speaking about the gratitude that you should feel every day, the thanking of the higher power. But to the question "where do souls go?" my answer was ruefully inadequate. Do I say that I believe that everyone we ever loved is there, in the sky, looking down on us, guiding us? Making sure nothing bad happens? Can I dare say that now? When 32 completely innocent and hard-working children are shot down like so many beef cattle, or worse, is there really an argument that there are angels watching over them? Where were their grandparents or unborn brothers and sisters then? And that poor man, the 76 year old holocaust survivor my mother mentioned to me - he's been through the worst attrocity in history and then stands in front of his classroom doors to bide time with the shooter while he lets his students jump out of the second floor windows to safety? God, it's all so fucking random.
