Four Things That Go Together

Although it is perhaps only the Argentine Finca Flichman 2007 Chardonnay, Oak Aged Three Months, and a September NYC night that feels like one in August that makes them do so.

1) The closest star to us is Alpha Centauri. It is four light years away. To travel there in our currently fastest spaceship would take 70000 years. There are uncountable billions of stars in the universe. Alpha Centauri and our sun are no big deal. To put it in baseball terms, they probably wouldn't even get drafted.

2) Lyrics from Orphans of God, written by Mark Heard, sung by Buddy and Julie Miller:

Like bees in a bottle
We are flying at fate
Beating our wings
Against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle
Is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe
The unbelievable truth

3) I've been studying the early vertebrates in preparation for my test to be a Museum highlights tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History. There were some very scary monsters 400 or so million years ago. But tonight I wondered if we had been around to harvest them, instead of vice versa, they would have been as tasty as the shrimp in the pasta I tossed for dinner.

4) Today I was helping one of the hospice patients pay his bills. I'd write the checks for him to sign. He wanted to pay some of them by phone. So, laboriously with his arthritic fingers, he punched the too small buttons on his phone to reach the 800 Citibank number. He got through, listened, then hung up and handed me the phone to dial for him. "Wild Party Girls," he said. We laughed, truly, in the face of his proximate end, the mistake at once funnier and infinitely sadder because his partner of forty years, who sometimes exasperated him as in any couple so long together, died last month in a separate hospice.