Launch Day

7:00 tonight, Barnes & Noble HarMar, 2100 N. Snelling Ave., Roseville.

It’s launch day and it’s below zero and the snow is falling. In case my advance thoughts had anything to do with this, I’m thinking how the snow is going to let up and the roads be clear before evening.

When I first sat down this morning I thought I’d left the yard light on…that’s how bright it was outside. It wasn’t only from the fresh snow though. It was from this small light over the kitchen sink. It’s the one we leave on overnight and that I rarely shut off before daylight. I’ve not ever noticed it making a speck of difference in the yard, nonetheless a beacon across the snow.

A friend called me yesterday to say she’d gotten thrown all out of whack by The Given Self so she knows there’s something about it.

Things that throw us out of whack tend to build, snowflake by snowflake/word by word, until they become a powerful force that can bring down tree limbs or inner walls. There’s seldom any real explanation for it. It’s not often from the greatest writing in the world or a coherent kind of thing where you can turn down a corner of a page and say “That’s it – the part I want to remember – the thing that got to me.” Things that throw us out of whack do it in a mysterious way.

All of which (or at least the “speck” part) may relate to me watching “Horton Hears a Who” with Henry as much as anything. Horton the elephant finds that there’s a whole world living on a spec. No one believes him. The idea of it – of something unseen and unheard (by anyone but Horton) – is threatening. But in the end Horton is vindicated, forgiveness is offered in the form of a chocolate chip cookie, and the final line is, “People are people, no matter how small.”