Last night, a small plane landed on a highway outside Kansas City. On the radio this morning, I heard an interview with the pilot, who is a year older than I am. He sounded stunned. He was amazed he was alive -- his plane lost power at 2 a.m. on the way to Kansas City from St. Louis. He clipped a bridge and landed on the highway. He said he decided to just keep thinking, just keep breathing.
A bystander told him he should buy a lottery ticket. Immediately.
Last night, I finished reading My Hollywood, a long and heavy novel by a writer I increasingly respected as I made my way through her book. She's well known, has won awards, and is impressively reviewed, but as I am useless in the name-recognition category, I had no idea who she was when I got the book. As I dug into her career, I realized she's been interviewed by everyone and fabulousity abounds. She's actually super intimidating, at least on paper.
And this was her first novel in ten years. The acknowledgements, which of course I read, indicated the book took a while to write.
This week, someone in my 28-day meditation challenge emailed me to say a woman had posted who had just been the victim of an armed robbery. I went immediately to read her post. She wrote:
My colleagues and I were the victims of an armed robbery on Saturday and lost everything. I have been hesitating to make a post about it, as computer access has been limited, but truthfully I do not want to vicariously traumatize anyone in the challenge. It was really, really, frightening and luckily no one was hurt. All I did was to remain constant with my breath and I believe we would have all been killed, had it not been for the calmness we maintained.
At some point in the past 24 hours, my anger dislodged and floated away. I'm sure it'll be back again, but for now, it has passed. The idea of sitting down with my novel again doesn't inspire flame-throwing fantasies.
The plane, the book, the robbery. Not necessarily in that order.
In other news: read my review of Mona Simpson's My Hollywood and my latest post on meditation.
