Just one minute.
We’ve all said that to someone or something.
One minute you are Baltimore proud, arching over the Patapsco River; the next minute, you are steel soup. One minute, you are forty-seven years old, namesake of the man who came up with the national anthem, and sometimes you’d belt out the first line, “Oh Say Can You See.” Now you’re in the bardo and blocking traffic from here to Colombo.
One minute you are fixing potholes in the middle of the night, say it’s alright, it sends money home, it puts comida en la mesa; the next minute you are fish food.
One minute you’re at the beginning of a four-week journey, just thirty minutes in, headed to the other side of the world, closer to home than here. The next minute, your home away from home, this floating skyscraper, is a runaway that has lost its mind, and you and your crew now its prisoners, marooned on Steel Soup Island, release date unknown.
One minute you’re in your patrol car; the next minute it’s mayday and you have barely two minutes to vroom to the bridge and stop life-or-death traffic.
One minute you are tucked in for the night; the next minute, there’s a call about the bridge tumbling down, and you are a widow.
One minute you’re waiting for a passenger who’s running late, and that’s annoying but also the life of a ride-share driver. The next minute, you’re on your way, approaching the bridge, and there’s a cop asking you to stop. The bridge is gone. The bridge that a few minutes earlier you would have been on.
One minute you are a stevedore, longshoreman, tugboat captain, union jobs that have fed your family for four generations. Jobs that nobody knows about unless they watched The Wire. The next minute, you don’t know when you’ll go back to work.
The twine, no matter how neat and taut around the pork shoulder, can loosen and come undone. We are all here until we are not. Every minute is a crumb to savor.
Isn't that how it really always is and then something happens to remind us of the truth of the precarious suspension in which we all hang - powerful meditation on it all and I love how you bring it all back to the pork chop and the wisdom of savoring every crumb.
So wonderfully imagined and written, Kim. Thanks.