I remember standing across the street for the longest time watching pages from a zillion books billowing from the library building and flutter on fire through the air till they disintegrated. Words were falling upon us like rain, you could catch them on your hand and they’d dissolve. One fluttered down and landed on my hand, a corner of a very old page bearing a few fragments of sentences and quote marks. Some one was saying something, but the words turned to ash in my palm, and I never knew what or who.

In the wee hours of the morning I was sleepily walking through the kitchen with my arms full of laundry when the sinuses set off a sudden spell of vertigo which combined with my trick knee sent me tumbling backwards with all the grace and power of a falling redwood tree. Crash, then silence. I guess the knee isn’t as good as I thought, I said aloud, and laid there a second as I’ve done after a hundred falls, making sure I could feel and move everything. Nothing was broken save my wife’s tub of bird seed which kept my head from slamming into the wall. I will buy her a new one. Realizing everything was sound—limbs, back, brain, jewels—I clambered back up, took the day’s clothes I had left in a neat little pile on the counter mid fall and tossed them in the laundry basket and made my way without any more gravity issues towards the bed. She was sound asleep. Nothing wakes her up, not even crashing redwood trees. You’re going to hurt tomorrow I told myself, and I was right.

I had promised a doctor I wouldn’t fall down anymore. You can break a hip, she said. I didn’t tell her I’ve fallen those hundred times or more over a lifetime, that I fall like a stuntman, that I’ve never broken anything. I’ve been lucky, I said.

[Popped up today on Facebook from 1988]

Aquarium is almost completely restocked and lush with plants. Still looking for a few otocinclus (impossible to find lately) because they devour algae like no other. And also three or four freaky spooky see through glass catfish for when we drop acid and become one with the pesciverse. Aquariums are Fish TV, no commercials and Trump free. If only I could see where the trio of ghost shrimp slipped off to. You can see right though them, just innards and legs and beady black eyes.

We’ve had a continuous aquarium nearly as long as we’ve been married, since 1983 or so. We were married in 1980. Sometime back in the ’80’s the dreaded fish disease ich struck and all our fish died but one, a black mollie, who got desperately sick but survived. She had the tank to herself for maybe a year when we decided to introduce some pretty but inexpensive fish. They were neon tetras, I think, and they thrived, so we restocked our tank around that one mollie. It lived for years. Thirty years later we still have a thriving fish tank. The filter wheel is probably twenty five years old. We’ve never had another epidemic and the fish live forever. Unless, of course, the danios go berserk and eat everyone. But they seem past that now, the Charlie Manson danio died after psychotically attacking a plant for days, and the other danios are back to their hyper wiggly mindless selves. All seems well. Weird how a marriage and a fish tank go together for decade after decade, somehow inseparable.