crazy/good

We are settled back into the routine of school (summer passed by in a blink without me ever getting back into a blogging groove) and starting the day before 6...Ryan turns the TV on when I get up and we listen to the local news and then the Today show most mornings as we race around in the early morning darkness putting together outfits and packing lunches and preparing to go our separate ways when it's home together we'd all like to be...Sometimes the headlines are more than I can stomach any time of the day, much less first thing when I wake up.  The world goes crazy--both far from us and just a three hour drive up the interstate--but still we get up, get dressed, head out into our little part of it and try to focus on the good to be done, the good to take in.

Then yesterday in my classroom I flip through the copy of Alice Walker's The Color Purple I've had since college--it's my favorite book of all time and I've read it over and over--and see my unfocused feelings spelled out in black and white:

"Then Shug and me go fall out in her room to listen to music till all that food have a chance to settle.  It cool and dark in her room.  Her bed soft and nice.  Us lay with our arms round each other.  Sometimes Shug read the paper out loud.  The news always sound crazy.  People fussing and fighting and pointing fingers at other people, and never even looking for no peace.

"People insane, say Shug.  Crazy as betsy bugs.  Nothing built this crazy can last.  Listen, she say.  Here they building a dam so they can flood out a Indian tribe that been there since time.  And look at this, they making a picture bout that man that kilt all them women.  The same man that play the killer is playing the priest.  And look at these shoes they making now, she say.  Try to walk a mile in a pair of them, she say.  You be limping all the way home.  And you see what they trying to do with that man that beat the Chinese couple to death. Nothing whatsoever.

"Yeah, I say, but some things pleasant."