Someday I'll tell you about my computer inexplicably crashing.
Nothing this time was recoverable from my hard drive.
Before I have been lucky. My husband who is a techie super hero
has been able to go behind a curtain and whirl dials and return
with all my poems and all my emails and all my spreadsheets
but not this time. I woke in a sweat missing the New Yorker cartoon
I used as wallpaper. I am deeply denying the years of poems
I won't be seeing again. Maybe this is for the best. My folders
were cluttered with drafts upon drafts and maybe these were
poems that needed to get written on the way to better poems.
Maybe this silicacious cataclysm is clean slate, tabula rasa,
do over and get it right this time with no evidence I ever flubbed.
Yes and you know what Mike Meyers said when he was not
Bill and Ted but that other duo with that blonde SNL guy - Dana
Carvey. You know what he said even though the fog won't lift
here in Pullman where I'm cobbled onto somebody else's
wireless. Not cobbled. Glommed. It is hot here and I don't
have any folders to browse through and feel smarty smart smart
for making so many folders full of poems that might some
of them have been poems. This will give me a chance to look
at the poems I printed out and decide if they warrant another
look. Today is the first day etc. as the golfer girl said in high
school, the one who collected those sayings in a thick binder
eager to share the sappy wisdom that embarrassed me even
to hear it near me. My legs are sweaty from my daughter's
tan leather couch that is her boyfriend's tan leather couch.
My husband is working on another computer. I am typing
on the tiniest computer I've ever owned, with the idea of
getting to a place where I'll know if I want to keep it within
the fourteen days that would let me get my money back.
I'm charmed by this box the size of a clutch purse (not a car
clutch, even that of a Morris Minor, such as mine.) My
Morris Minor by the way is for sale. Three years ago I said
$14,000, at last month's All-British Fieldmeet at the former
Bellevue Community College, now Bellevue College, I said
$12,000. Right now, I say anything over $9,000 and you
walk away with my car. I'll put in the fuel pump. I mean my
husband will. If he names the tool and maybe draws an outline
of the more obscure ones, I'll fetch them/it for him as he
works, but no I will not do car repair myelf much as I thought
I might when I was a radical woman in the early 70's doorbelling
for the ERA in Olympia where more than one woman told me she would not vote for the ERA because it meant unisex bathrooms. We don't have the ERA honey and we still make 78 cents to every dollar the men make for the exact same job, but hey! we got unisex potties when they're one-seaters.

On my old computer were photographs from the last five years, many of which have no backup as in this digital age who prints? My India photos for example are no more. No pictures from Greece either.

This is what death is. Unique memory gone. And life goes on. Which is cruelty.