January 13: Nostalgia, Tracy K. Smith, "The Good Life"

Nostalgia is a strange thing.  It makes a person happy and sad at the same time.  This morning, I was watching my son sleeping next to my wife.  He always crawls into bed with her after I get up to get ready for work.  He looked really small next to her, like he was still two or three years old.

And that made me think of my daughter when she was four or five.  How she would get off the bus from preschool and climb onto the couch with me.  We would watch "Frosty the Snowman," and she would fall asleep on my chest.  She was like a little furnace, and I would stay there, sweating, replaying Frosty's trip to the North Pole over and over, until she woke up.

I didn't know it then, but that really was the good life.  My beautiful little girl, sleeping in my arms, completely trusting me to keep her safe. 

Saint Marty misses those times.

The Good Life

by:  Tracy K. Smith

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One of two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.