Resilience

I like to think of myself as a pretty positive person, steady in the face of crisis, even, but time and again, it's the little things that can get me down. Today I stoically bid my family good-bye and drove 9 1/2 hours through terrible traffic, only to arrive home and find my refrigerator not working. Sigh.

Yesterday at the beach I counted six iPhones, three iPods, an iPod touch, and an iPad in our group. Apple must have seen our family coming. Earlier in the week, my sister and I met the next door neighbor and his dog, a cute, nine-year-old, golden retriever-chow mix. Later, while walking with our mom, we saw the dog out in the yard, and my sister and I spoke of her in very familiar terms. "How do you know that?" my mother asked.

"We did genetic testing on her," I joked.

"We scanned her with our iPhones," my sister added.

"Yeah, there's an app for that," we laughed.

Eventually we explained about meeting the owner, but we were off and running on all sorts of app ideas. (Who Shat That? is still my favorite.)

Personally, I believe there is not only an app for most things, but a poem, too. Here's mine for the broken refirgerator:

Meditation on Ruin

by Jay Hopler

It's not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,
           or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment — these are the things that
           eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.

The death of a father — the death of the mother —
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken
           pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it's this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning—there's a
crack in the water glass —we wake to find ourselves undone.