Sheik Yerbootie

I gotta tell ya.

Having to live through this year's Republican primaries has been like being jumped and beaten and then tied to a tree on the walkway just outside Monkey Island with my eyelids propped open with toothpicks and forced to watch the priapicly stupid simians inside perform unspeakable acts on themselves while those not frantically performing the Sin of Onan pelt me with rock-hard nuggets of used Purina Monkey Chow^TM.It's been a living Hell.

Not content to cut off the head of Zombie Lincoln it seems that this overpaid crew of impudent protohominid snobs is trying to shrink it, paint it black, stuff it full of over-ripe kumquats and then jam the rotting horror into a gaudily painted circus cannon labeled "No New Taxes" and blue the filthy mess all over the republic.

Sigh.

I've long since given up hope that the GOP is in any way, shape, or form saveable. The 2012 edition of the Republican Party is a gibbering loony, a tale told by a congeries of idiots in tri-cornered hats, full of sound and fury, signifying that if you pay Rush Limbaugh to puff out his flabby cheeks, rattle his newspaper, and shove enough rats and old socks in your brain and tell you that the moderate Republican elected three years earlier is a Market-Hating Commie Kenyan Muslim said brain will devolve into a puddle of thick drool and slime mold before breakfast.

The combination of Islamophobia, Taxophobia, Modernophobia, and Thoughtopobia have driven the modern GOP utterly batshit. There is no saving it; ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam - the GOP must be destroyed.But of all the utterly bizarre, completely clueless things the GOP has done this election year, it's feckless pursuit of contraception strikes me as beyond utterly mad.

And that was before the Walking Id of the Republican Party, ol' Rushbo himself, went all Morals Proctor on some poor woman with the unhappy name of Fluke who stood up in public and stated the simple fact that hormonal contraceptive pills are a form of medication and as such in her opinion were a legitimate part of a health care coverage plan.

Aside from the fetid outburst of stupid that revealed that there's a room inside Rush's brain (the one with the "Gurlies!" sign on the door) that's papered over with tattered Maxim and FHM covers and soggy Hooters T-shirts from Rushbo's early pubesence, this slut-shaming seems to have brought the entire howling crew of "conservative" C.H.U.D.s out of their sewers, shrieking about sluts and ho's, and chaining together the notion that a woman who wishes her insurer to cover her birth control is some sort of lust-crazed harlot with a sexual orifice as deep as a well, as wide as a church door, and as insatiable as a swarm of locusts, and that her sole purpose in life is to ingest free oral contraceptives so that she may swive the entire UCLA Marching Band, including the women and the costumed mascot, and, presumably, the wind instruments.

I mean, just look:This is your GOP, circa 2012. It's hard to tell which is bigger, the racist forebrain or the woman-having-sex-hating hindbrain.

But either one is completely batshit insane.

I mean seriously fucking insane.

Canvas-sportjacket-with-wraparound-sleeves, shoes-off, scribbling-with-feces-on-the-padded-walls insane.

Leaving aside the question of the other effects hormonal contraceptives have, the simple fact is that this entire nonsense is based on the notion that sex without the threat of pregnancy is bad.

Sex; fun sex, companionable sex, sex as affection, sex as bonding, even sex as recreation, or sex as friendship - all of these are BAAAAAADDDDDD!!!Even for the Party of the Incredibly Dumb Fucking Platform, the notion that pursuing this issue as an electoral winner?

Insane.

But...I want to pause here for a moment and reflect on the fact that this got ANY traction at all.

What does that say about us, us 21st Century Americans, and especially the sort of people who are clustering around the radio listening to Rushbo, or busily typing away at letters or e-mails about sluts to Powerline and the usual hives of scum and villainy that serve as watering holes for the terminally patriotic?

Why are all these people so wrapped around the axle about sex without the threat of babies?

I mean, human beings have been leaping upon each other for all sorts of reasons since - and probably before - we descended from the trees.

Certainly sexual congress is a way of procreating. But let's be honest; how many times have you approached your lover with the thought, oh, yeah, honey, let's start a family!

Okay, well, if you're the Duggars, yeah, maybe every time. But don't get me started on that one-family football team. For most of us...there's all sorts of reasons for making love.

We may want to hold our lover, or be held. We may just be crazy-wild with lust; he or she may just be driving us completely berserk. We may be lonely. Or sad. Or joyful, and want to share that in the closest way possible.We may want a challenge, or a reassurance, or tenderness. We may want to make ourselves a chalice to hold the one we love, or overwhelm someone with pure physical sensation.

And there are times when we just want to get laid. Personally - and this is just a suggestion, guys - my feeling is that if you're not interested in the woman attached to the vagina?

Take yourself in hand, let's say. Masturbation would be better for all concerned; quicker, cheaper, safer, and nobody has to lie to anyone else.

But that's just me talkin'.

So here's the point; there's a hell of a lot of times and places where two people want to put the totem pole in the donut hole - or whatever else they feel like doing with someone that, hopefully, in the best of all worlds, they deeply care for. And a hell of a lot of them don't - and shouldn't! - risk producing a kiddo as a result.

For the record, I'm all in favor of those of us who want and intend to make sweet, sweet love to do so, in the times and places and ways we deem best. That is our great strength and our great joy as humans - as often as we fuck it up, screw the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and get ourselves and others in trouble because of it - and we should cherish that sacrament, not hate or fear it. Let us love; let us MAKE love; honestly, openly, truthfully, recklessly.

But that unless we are very, very, very sure that we want a child, are aware of what that entails, and are prepared to deal with the consequences...I want us to make sure the joint venture between my little wrigglers and your egg never gets to float an IPO. Birth control? That's part and parcel of the deal unless we decide otherwise. We should be able to love without risking our lives, and the life of a child, every time we do.And anyone who thinks they should is a complete and utter moron.

Or a Republican.

But I repeat myself.

Custerfuck

I had an interesting experience the other day; actually had a visitor to an OLD post, specifically the one I wrote for the "Decisive Battles" series back in June of last year, the one about the Little Bighorn/Greasy Grass.This guy wrote a ton in the comments section, including a detailed breakdown of both the unit strengths and casualties in the 7th U.S. Cavalry. But the really interesting part, for me, anyway, was his intent, which seems to be best summed up in two of his comments. First; "Custers Plan was BRILLIANT except for using a coward for his left flank", and, second;

"I love to hear Indians bitch about stuff like land they killed other Indians to be on, and that they say "no man owns it, yet act like something they didn't "own" was taken from them..LOL...MANIFEST DESTINY is OK if Indians do it..rolls eyes...did I forget to mention the decapitated burnt heads on poles in their camp found the next day, along with a medicene bundle of 200 scalps..and that the Indians stripped all the soldiers naked and mutilated the bodies by cutting off parts, then hacking them up with tomahawks so they would be messed up in the next life???..no sympathy here for the Indians..war is war.."

Wow!

The curious thing is that this sort of stuff seemed to turn up pretty regularly on the various websites I visited when I wrote that post. There is a pretty hard core of people who are really invested in ol' Yellow-Hair, who are still fighting this fight even today. And, like our anonymous commenter, seem to combine a pugnacious fury at any sort of imputation against the Great Commander with a real vicious anger against the redsticks who gave him and his troopers such a bad day along the banks of the Little Bighorn River one hundred thirty-six years ago.

I was going to just pass all this stuff with a sort of "Ummm...well, okay then." when I read jim's post about the old bastards he's encountered in the SF community who are so furious when anyone questions the Goodness and Rightness of Our Cause and realized that this is the historical version of the same thing.What it really is is the righteous wrath of the Orthodox at the scent of heresy, the defensive anger of the Established Faith with the suggestion of innovation. Any fraction, the slightest hint, that the icons may be less than the utterly brilliant, perfectly correct, ultimate expression of the True God must be ruthlessly suppressed for fear that the questioning will spread, and might even bring the entire Rightness and Goodness of the Power That Is into the balance.

And if We are not Good and Right and Pure, We are Lost.

So, being the nasty sunofabitch that I am, I fired off a response to the series of posts. Not really with respect to his scholarship - which was pretty impressive; the guy knew his numbers - but with his use of them.

Specifically, to Point One; if LTC Custer was such an allfired Great Big Brain, another Fredrick or Guderian, why didn't his "brilliant" plan work? Even more to the point - why come up with such a goddamn brilliant plan that depended on people who were "cowards" and "fools"?

In war the first thing you learn is that you go with the troops you have, not the troops you want. And the Seventh - hell, the whole U.S. Army of 1876 - was a pretty tight little community. If the acting regimental commander didn't know his subordinates inside and out, he should have.So if Reno and Benteen are such fuckups, why give them independent commands and then come up with a brilliant "plan" that depends on them doing things that - being the cowardly fuckups our commenter insists they were - they couldn't have seen through on their best day with a bottle of Clorox and a shiny new copper penny?

Nope. If you're Rommel or Zhukov or goddamn George MacClellan and you've got a bunch of knuckleheads for subordinates you damn well keep them right under your hand where you can unfuck their clusterfuckery when it happens and prevent it before it does. You don't spread your command all over half of northern Wyoming, every bit of it out of supporting distance of every other, and then get surprised when things go utterly to hell.So...on the whole "Custer is brilliant" issue, I stand where I stood; the man was a fairly average 19th Century cavalry commander. He could do decently in a conventional stand-up fight (as he did in the Civil War) where dash and git-up were pretty much all that was asked for. But in a less-conventional setting his sloppiness (I mean, the guy was the lanterne rouge or whatever they call it - the goat? - damn near dead last in his class at WooPoo, and that mostly for demerits involving goofy slipshod stuff like attention to uniform and discipline detail) and his tendency to half-ass his way through planning and battlefield C3I tended to bite him in the ass.

Ask MAJ Elliot how that worked out for him and his guys at the Washita.And as for the whole "Lo, the Poor Indian" meme...

Who's sorry for the Red Man? Our commenter seems to have drifted over the part in the original post where I said

"Had the Cheyenne been fortunate enough to have discovered gunpowder, steel, and several epidemic diseases and been bitten by the conquest bug they would very likely have happily conquered Europe and exterminated the Britons and the French as the descendants of those Europeans did them. This wasn’t the question of a noble savage and a rapacious invader; this was two tough, smart, ambitious cultures that both wanted the same piece of real estate."

I stand by that, too.

But...here's the thing.

Us white folk were the invaders. We were the Huns in Gaul, the Normans in Britain, the Japanese in Nanjing, the Soviets in Chechnya. We came, we saw, we kicked their ass. We took an entire continent from them and in return named some basketball teams for them and handed out some trade whiskey. We were bin Laden, we were Attila, we were Caesar.

And y'know what - I'm OK with that.

Not overjoyed, but I can live with it. Vae victus; woe to the vanquished. Welcome to 10,000 years of human history, Cheyenne.

(And lemme tell you this; you come in my crib, you try and fuck me over, you threaten my woman and kids? Getting "parts" cut off, getting mutilated, getting scalped? That's the least that I'm gonna try and do to you. The boys of the Seventh waded into a Neolithic war, and as Cersei Lannister will tell you, when you play the Game of Tribes to lose is to get your dangly bits cut off and shoved down your throat. Don't like that? Win, or don't play. But don't come whining to me about it, or try and make it sound all icky. That's how the game was played, hoss.)

So here's the other thing.

Regardless of who got what cut off, regardless of what the Red Men did or didn't do...I can see the shittiness of what we did, my sainted ancestors, and I can still live with that.

I don't have to make the natives into Bad Guys, to natter on about how rotten they were, how savage they were, to talk about how I don't feel sorry for them, to try and pretend that what my gangstas did was something Good and Right.

I do feel sorry for them; not enough to do anything about it, not enough to fret about what my ancestors did, but enough to accept that what they did was pretty shitty and to make it a reminder to myself not to do something similar to others, like, say, Viets, Afghans, or Iraqis.

Or Iranians.

And this is where I tie the whole thing together with jim's SF detractors. Because to me it's all about seeing your own potential for the Dark Side; for accepting that just because you are a Speshul Snowflake doesn't mean that everything you do is good and everything you think is Right. But that seems to be the operating mode for some people, and, in particular, for a lot of soldiers.

Guys, look; your brain is your most potent weapon. Use it!

You're not there just to close with and destroy the enemy; you also need to assess whether that killing is getting you anywhere.

Because if it isn't, you're not a surgeon, bleeding to heal, you're just a goddamn butcher and an incompetent one at that.

Instead of focusing on the official propaganda, you should be capable of recognizing bullshit as bullshit, standing up to your commander and telling him his "brilliant plan" is as fucked up as a football bat and that the only sensible option is to blow the hell out of the place and grab a hat. He may tell you to shut up and soldier, and at that point your only option is to move out and draw fire. But FUCK!

At least engage your brain housing group first and try and avert the disaster.

The world is full of people - my Army is and was full of people - like my Custer commenter and jim's SF squaddies - who can't and won't figure that out. Part of me understands that.

Well, OK - no, I don't understand the Custer comment guy. To get all that about some long-dead light colonel who screwed up his assessment of the enemy's most dangerous course of action and lost a chunk of his command? M'kay, that's kinda whack.

But the SF guys probably devoted a good-size chunk of their lives and most of their youth to something they were told was Good and Right and having to face that you've just been another imperial legionary rented out by a fading empire run by a bunch of greedy boneheads for their own selfish benefit...that's tough. You probably wouldn't WANT to figure that out.

And that's fine, usually; armies and junior soldiers aren't supposed to make policy.

But when the people who do make the policy think and act the same way...

Well...

You get a pretty fucking huge custerclusterfuck.

Look around you; look at the Middle East, look at our economy, look at this country.

See something familiar?I'll bet Miles Keogh would.

Katter bort!

Went to the Timbers match Sunday, and took my bride.That in itself is something of an oddity. The Loved One enjoys a good soccer match as much as the next woman, but she also loves her peace and is a woman of calm good sense, none of which is there to be had in the North End at a Timbers contest.But she knows I love both the game and the surroundings, so when our friends Brent and Julie offered us their tickets she gamely stood by her man for ninety minutes to watch the final preseason friendly against the Swedish club AIK.

It was a fairly decent match, as footy goes; one-nil to the home side, which is always polite - a guest is never pushy - although these guests played a pretty rugged game of calcio. Our new Scots striker headed one in almost before the singing started (and was desperately unlucky not to get a second before the half) and the Boys in Red held on to the one-goal lead despite some shifty work at the back.But for my inamorata the real fun was all around her.

Our capo - the leader of the singing and chanting in the Timbers Army was this wonderful gal we called "Rosie" (because she looked sturdy and energetic enough to pull a double shift at Kaiser riveting together Liberty Ships) - is a long-term fixture in Section 108 and did her usual terrific job of conducting the singing; Mojo found her quite delightful.I liked this gal, who, in the excitement of the moment, actually slipped her feet out of her shoes and stood on them. Probably easier on the soles than the nubbly terrace pavement, but whatever the reason she made for a rather cute picture.As always, the Army poured out their hearts and their songs for the team; that's the Great Tradition of the game, and in case you enjoy a good singalong, here's a terrific place on the Web to learn a new song or two: "FanChants". They even have my favorite Newcastle song to the tune of Yellow Submarine, with the chorus that goes "Peter Reid had a fookin' monkey's head, a fookin' monkey's head, a fookin' monkey's head..."One thing you can always count on in Portland is creativity, and here's my vote for the so-far tifo of the year.I have no idea if AIK has a mouse mascot or not, but Jeld-Wen Field - from the days when it was plain old Civic Stadium - really DOES have a colony of feral cats, so, there. Great signage, whatever the real Swedish mouse situation.

The real thing starts next Monday, and should be a hellacious battle; our old enemies the Flounders of Seattle are looking scary good, and we'll have to be strong and fierce to bring the Cascadia Cup home to Stumptown this season.Cats away!

Nutjob Rules

OK, so enough with the garment-rending. Time to get back to the wider world.

Oh - first, a question for the readership; this months' battle is either going to be the Reoccupation of the Rhineland (1936) or the Battle of Adowa (1896). I'm leaning towards the latter just because it's more interesting and less known. But in pure "decisiveness" terms the Rhineland was the more critical event. Any strong feelings one way or the other?And this morning I was scanning through the news and one thought kept sticking in my head; why does it seem that my country seems to be stuck on the notion that the world "should be" something other than it is?

One example is this year's ridiculous presidential campaign, which - in the middle of some truly spectacular economic and geopolitical fuckups - seems to be mainly about what women do or don't do with their genitals.

WTF?

One of the other examples is summed up in my friends jim and Lisa's post about the recent "Koran burning" controversy. Their money graf is:

"The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is not about liberal democratic values and has nothing to do with the welfare of the Afghan people. The entire philosophy of Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24 was based upon a simulacrum of truth, and the burning (as with previously reported incidents of Koran desecration) proves the point to the citizens of Afghanistan."

Which is absolutely true.

But IMO the greater point is; we knew that the central Asian plateau was chock full o' religious nuts when we went in there. We had a ringside seat for Charlie Wilson's War, watching the Soviets try to turn the Afghan Allah-pesterers into good little Young Pioneers and failing bloodily.

Why the hell - why the HELL - would we think otherwise?Here's my opinion; it's because we as a people, we as a polity, are eaten up from head to toe with magical thinking. We believe wholeheartedly that if we just WANT it bad enough that the world will be what we want it to be. That we have the Awesome Yankee Doodle Dandy Power that will make Afghans become suburban Maryland Presbyterians, make piles of corporate money do something other than turn our electoral process into a pimp-and-ho show, make individuals and corporations act prudently, sensibly, and responsibly...in other words, make the world into a rational and sensible place rather than the monstrous concatenation of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision we should know by now that it is.

And, specifically, in Afghanistan we the U.S. chose to go into the religious nuthouse and play with the religious nuts. Inside Chock Full o' Nuts you either play by the Nutjob Rules, you lose, or you don't play. All the power and money in the world won't change that, because you're dealing with religious nuts; they don't care about power and money - they're doing what they truly deeply believe their Invisible Sky Daddy wants.Their magical thinking is always going to be stronger than your magical thinking. It's really that simple.

Why is that so difficult to understand?

It seems that it is.

Ten Years of Yesterdays

Tomorrow is always ephemera.

Today is a fact, is happening as we move and speak and act, is created as we live and collide like atoms in aether with others living their lives in their own ways. Today is the play we're writing as we live it, passing moment by moment into yesterday and past history.

But tomorrow is a chimera.

Much of our tomorrows is entrained by our todays. But there's always an uncertainty, a randomness that makes tomorrow nothing but a vague sort of promise half-muttered, half-heard until the remorseless wheel of Time brings it to us as the next today.

Being human we love - have always loved, probably always will love - the idea of messing about with yesterdays and tomorrows. I think it has something to do with our contrasting the mutability of tomorrow with the intransigence of yesterday, and the contrast between hope and regret.

"If we fall in the race though we win
The hoof-slide is scarred on the course.
Though Allah and Earth pardon Sin
Remaineth forever Remorse."
~ R. Kipling

If we could only go back and change this or that yesterday; say the "right" thing instead of the wrong one, do this instead of that, love more wisely, act more quickly, fight harder, think faster...if we could just do all of that we would have saved that beloved, not lost that marriage, gotten that job, become wealthy, happier, greater than we are today, and present ourselves with an even greater tomorrow.

I got to thinking of all of this while writing the two preceding posts.

Because there was a time when if I could have I would have stopped time, reversed the spinning Earth, undone the hidden tragedy that took my elder daughter's life, diverted my world into another tomorrow where little Bryn lived and grew into that young woman who burned the offering at my grave.

But...

If Bryn had lived...

The world that cascades from that chance spins off into an infinity of mirrors.

With a living older sister my son, even if he arrives as such, becomes a different kid. And there's no guarantee that Mojo and I even have a son; perhaps our second child is another daughter. Perhaps we never have another child.

And with a living daughter, we certainly don't go through the insanely difficult and painful adoption process that finally, through some bizarre miracle comprehensible only to Loki, the God of Mischief and several junior functionaries working for the China Center for Adoption Affairs, provides us with the little girl who we know as Missy Shaomei. That little girl becomes someone else, in some other lifetime. We never know her.

And having sat up with her just last night (she was feeling quite unhappy with a sick headache from having fallen asleep with her glasses on combined with a stuffy sinus) I can't contemplate that with anything but horror.

So to change the past we change the present, and the future; to regain a lost daughter we have to lose another.

That's not an exchange I could, or would, make.

So I have to release that phantom-Bryn, that skinny girl wrapped in night-bedclothes, that stern young woman standing over my grave, to retain my very real Missy who is at this moment cuddled up with the Yellow Blanket and her beloved "stripey wubbie" watching some sort of awful Air Buddies movie her brother adores.

And - while a part of me grieves at the betrayal - the greater part of me is not displeased with that.

Lois McMaster Bujold writes that the problem with result of making the inflexible pledge of death before dishonor means that time will produce only the dead and the foresworn. I am in the unenviable position of the latter; for my living daughter I must foreswear any wish to restore my dead one.

I'm sorry about that, lovie, but the dead must bury their dead. I have a now-dear child that calls to me from this side of the Veil, and I would - even if I could, even if I had the power to change yesterday to be otherwise - go to her.

This time next year I will grieve for you again. But buried in that grief is the smaller sadness that I would now choose her over you, choose the life I have over the life that might have been, choose the messy reality of today over the unrealized promised of the tomorrow that never came.

Burnt Offering

Last night I had a dream.

-- --

The sky was low and gray; it should have been late February or, as it is now, early March when Oregon wears all the colors of the rainbow from steel gray through dark gray to gray-green.

Though the rain had stopped the mournful firs were still dripping from the drizzle that had ended in promise of more rain to come.

Entropy had split the little group that was leaving the cemetary, dividing into ones and threes, talking quietly among themselves as they looked to find their cars for the wet ride home.

But the young woman who remained was still and silent, looking down at the wet grass.She was of a very middling sort; medium height, medium build, the hair escaping her dark headband a sort of midtone brown, her eyes a quiet hazel. Her face in repose was an unremarkable sort of oval, pointed chin small, brow smooth, her best feature that clear gaze now hooded with thought.

But when she spoke her voice was anything but midrange, instead, a startlingly deep contralto that cut through the distant street noise with a hint of brass.

"When I was a girl I never understood what you meant." she said to the ground before her feet. "And then when I grew up I didn't want to hear about it." She reached into her pocket as she continued. "But when you got sick last spring I remembered what you'd asked for. So. Here."

She bent a knee and laid the shallow brass bowl down next to the ash-spot on the grass. And, still genuflecting, placed several small items in the bowl; a spring of holly, and one of juniper, and four short hair-clippings.

"That's from Mom, and Shea, and one from me. And that sad little one is yours, what you had left after the chemo. It was the best I could do."

She removed a small vial from the same pocket and poured the contents into the bowl. Then struck a match and dropped it into the oil, which flared up in a smoke twining with the scents of juniper and hollyberry mixed with the acrid reek of human hair."You did the best you could, too. I miss you already, Dad. Thanks. Goodbye."

And my daughter Bryn straightened up and waited for the flame to burn down to ash.

And nodded her head once and walked away into the misting rain.

-- --

Of course, in life my oldest daughter never lived to burn a momento mori for me; instead ten years ago today I held her tiny body and felt her heart run ticking down and stop. Felt her little arms and legs grow cold. Held her and hugged her and wept over her.

And when I think of that day now, I can only weep again and remember why Heroditus said that only a great fool desires war more than peace, for in peace sons bury their fathers, while in war fathers bury their sons.

I cannot describe the loss of your child,except to say that there is as yet no nepenthe for fathers who bury their daughters.

Ten

I'm here, sweetie.

What was it? Was it a bad dream?

Yes, I hate those, too. Even when you know they're not a really real thing, they're still scary. Here, let me wrap you up a little and I'll sit with you for a while and tell you a story. Would that help?

Okay, well, it's sort of an old story, but it's about you so I think you'll like it.

Ten years ago today your mommy and I were all excited because it was your birthday. Your mom was excited about today that day, but I was excited about tomorrow.

Your mom, who is a very much more sensible and realistic person than your dad, was excited because that day was the day you were going to be born. She'd carried you around for nine long months and she was so ready to have you come out and meet her. Being pregnant with you had been tough for her, and she wanted you to be born. She was ready to be a mom rather than a baby-carrier. She was ready to be YOUR mom.

I was more excited about tomorrow, though. Because I hadn't been able to do anything with you - you were inside your mom's belly and all I could see was the funny shapes you'd make on her tummy when you moved - I was so excited to be able to do stuff with you. Dads are funny like that - we like to do things; tell stories, and tickle-fight, and run and kick footballs, and scare boyfriends, and talk with you.

Yes, you, with that funny look in your bright button eyes, just like I'm talking with you now. That's the sort of thing dads like, and that's what was exciting for me about today-ten-years-ago.

So I went to the hospital all excited about tomorrow.

But tomorrow never came for us, did it, lovey?

Because something happened, and you never woke up like you woke up just now. Somewhere inside your mom's belly you passed from that darkness to another darkness, a true-life scary dream, one that no hugs and no stories could chase away.

So there were no tomorrow kisses, were there, little girl?

No nighttime talks, no bedtime stories, no tears to wipe away, no soccer games, no boyfriends, no tomorrows at all. Ten years of no tomorrows.

All that remains of you are gray ashes in the little urn beside my bed and this, these sorrowful nights when I dream that you sit up in the bed you never had, your dark hair all atousle from your pillow, your skinny little-girl arms wound around your knees and your eyes shining in the darkness as I tell you about the dreams I had that, as dreams often do, faded into formless nothings in the light of day.

Are you sleepy now, lovie? Are you ready to go back to sleep?

Of course you can give me a hug. No, no, I'm not crying. Just something in my eye.

Snuggle down now.

There. Alright, goodnight, sweetie.

Happy tenth birthday.

Sleep tight, lovie.

Goodnight.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar 3/1/02-3/2/02