The last entry brought me back to the time of my mother’s death, for a moment. I can be so dispassionate these days. “My old car died the same day my mother did,” I said rather flippantly the other day to someone who had asked me how I had come to buy car I now have. Because I had no car and I had to help arrange my mother’s wake, and I lived three hours from her house and Dad’s, and because all I could remember was the way her eyes wouldn’t stay closed after she died. Pennies don’t work, movies be damned. You can’t close dead eyes by a brush of your hand.
She looked at us from those milky sightless orbs, blinded even before her last breath, and SAW.
I needed a car. I wanted to resurrect my old Toyota, with its 307,000 miles, but it wouldn’t run. I couldn’t bring my mother back, either.
So I bought the first car I really looked at, although the salesman was a crook and I’d always sworn I’d never buy a brand-new car. At least it was a Toyota. It’s been good and reliable for the past five years, run its 100,000 miles without complaint. It should go half a million miles, the salesman told me. If it runs that long, and it marks the days of my dad’s life the way my old car marked my Mum’s, he’ll be almost 100 when it goes. Ha.
Clearly, I’m in a flippant mood. The gods laugh, and I laugh with them.
Tarakuanyin 
🙂