Gloom and doom - and light

Looking back, it now seems somehow fitting that my copy of Nirvana's Nevermind - an impulse buy, on Amazon, meant to take me back to September 24, 1991, when the seminal album was first released - arrived in our mailbox this past Monday. On the first day, that is, of a week that was characterized by a litany of tragic details and morose happenings. In a sense, there couldn't have been a more fitting soundtrack than the plaintive, restless sounds of Nirvana: sounds now all the heavier, due to the band's frontman's eventual suicide.

Early in the week, L. and I awoke at about 2:3o in the morning to the screams of a woman, a few hundred feet from our house. I called 911, and the sounds soon receded, but I was up until at least 4:00 merely wondering what had happened to her. Several days later, Cleo and I returned home from a morning of play to find a neighbor's house boxed in by police cars, ambulances, and a fire truck - the institutional response, apparently, to a drug overdose. Shortly after that, while crossing a city street, I peered into the windshield of a car stopped at the light, and saw a woman weeping, while speaking into a phone and wiping her eyes. And today, as I walked to get Cleo at school, I passed by a father who pushed, in a stroller, a tiny boy with an oxygen tube running under his nose.

Everywhere, then, it seemed a fallen world. Which is why I was so happy to come upon Cleo, as she and the Bluebirds were walking back from their playground to their school, singing to herself while her classmates merely trundled along. From a distance, I couldn't quite make out what she was chanting, and then, suddenly, the sounds came into focus: next time won't you sing with me.

Yes, yes I will. In fact, given the overcast aspect of this past week, I'd be absolutely delighted to.