by David Berman<\/p>\n
A child needs to know the point of the holiday.<\/p>\n
His aunt is saying grace over a decaffeinated coffee
\nand her daughter is reading a Russian novel
\nwhose 45 chapters are set
\non 45 consecutive Valentine’s Days.<\/p>\n
Grandpa is telling the kids fairy tales
\nfrom Pennsylvania’s pretzel-making region<\/p>\n
and it’s hard for me to be in the mood
\nyou need me to be in right now,<\/p>\n
as I’m suddenly wrapped up in this speculation
\non the as yet undiscovered moods of the future,<\/p>\n
like nostalgia for a discontinued model of robot
\nor patriotic feelings for your galaxy<\/p>\n
which will probably resemble nostalgia and patriotism
\nas we now know it, but with added tiers of complexity.<\/p>\n
Even if we could manage to travel in time, who’s to say
\nwe could relate with those who receive us?<\/p>\n
Perhaps we would not be able to read the expressions
\non our own descendants faces for what they mean.<\/p>\n
As advanced as we consider ourselves,
\nwe still allow ad copy to pander to us.
\nThe scam exposed, it endures with our permission
\nas a parallel narrative running beside our lives
\nwhere we sit with an unbuttered baked potato
\nand a warm beer in multiple versions of Akron
\nleavened with foreclosure, heartburn and rain.<\/p>\n
Great-grandfather’s hobbies, whether they be botany or magic,
\ncan barely make sense to a boy named Occupant III.<\/p>\n
Their genius was to let us criticize them
\nuntil it became boring and obvious to do so.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile they were up ahead, busily constructing a world
\nin which boring and obvious criticism
\nwas about the worst thing you could do,
\nand when we reached them in time they were waiting
\nwith their multiple Akrons,
\nalways one link ahead in the chain of consent.<\/p>\n
Maybe we need to give up on these simplistic
\n“us vs. them” oppositions that we shouldn’t believe in,
\nbut in our anger do.<\/p>\n
Perhaps we should be concentrating
\non what’s going to happen an hour or two from now,<\/p>\n
whether the human race will survive into this afternoon,
\nwhat kinds of food they will eat at the dinner table<\/p>\n
and what tales they’ll tell of this morning.<\/p>\n
-Read at St. Lydia’s on February 19, 2012<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by David Berman A child needs to know the point of the holiday. His aunt is saying grace over a decaffeinated coffee and her daughter is reading a Russian novel whose 45 chapters are set on 45 consecutive Valentine’s Days. Grandpa is telling the kids fairy tales from Pennsylvania’s pretzel-making region and it’s hard for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1197"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1199,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1197\/revisions\/1199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stlydiasliturgy.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}