Wednesday, August 6, 2025, 50.7*, 82% RH, 0646
She said, “If, is the biggest little word in the English language. It isn’t good for anything.” It didn’t keep me from dreaming. I would just phrase things without “if.” In math I heard the word used in formulas. Years, later I discovered “if” while studying psychology. If-Then Flowcharts instruct the course to take depending on what is happening. The greatest impact of that “little word that doesn’t do anything” came early when I read Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and decided it was a description of Butch, my one-year older than me brother.
Perhaps she had no use for “if” as her dreaming turned surreal. Taken that day to an orphanage by a stone system that commanded “It wasn’t fitting for a child to be in the field while her mother picked cotton.” I’ve seen them side-by-side our young pictures. We could’ve been twins. No one wanted to adopt a child, they wanted a baby to raise as their own. It was past the time when children were adopted to work on farms, not to be family. Or was it?
I don’t know how long she missed her mother; she tried to find her while pregnant with Butch. (She had died the week before mom began searching.) I don’t know how long she was in an orphanage.
The couple did not love her. They did not love each other. Sam had been a bus driver. He couldn’t read. Vera may have been a nice woman before her sister ran away with the man she was to marry days before the wedding. The story of mom’s past, came as an avalanche when Butch died in Vietnam the day before she was going to meet him on his R&R.
Threads of our past
weave invisibly through phrases
we tell ourselves,
we tell others
perhaps protection from “if”
not protection from dreaming,
but protection from
unhappy endings.
Art: LJ Austin
