For the love of Rob

Thoughts are fleeting. Or so it’s said. They run. They run through your head quickly and escape through your ears, if you’re not careful. You have to be fast to lock them in and keep them – in the form of words on a page, permanent – or in the form of speaking them to someone, probably not-so permanent. Unless it’s a person who thinks what you say is such gold that they go write it down or pass it on to someone else, “whisper around the world” style. Which, as the actual game demonstrates, causes things to get lost or enhanced in the retelling and usually with laughable and humiliating consequences; depending on whether you’re the listener or the speaker.

Rob feeds me. He tries very hard to set the pins up for me over and over. Just so I can knock them down. His patience and loyalty astound me. Astound is the wrong word. They don’t astound me at all. In fact, it’s exactly what I expect from him. He lives up to my expectations, which, by the way, are extremely high.

He’s in love with the written word. He is well read. He lives in the words, worships the putting together of those words in various combinations and recipes. He finds just the right words for me. Plucks them, no, carefully dislodges them, archeologist-like from books or journals or dusty corners of his brain. He then hand-wraps them and delivers them to me so that I might swallow them. And that they might get led through the simple factory of my brain and heart and come out the tips of my fingers via a pen and on to a page in some way that is worth reading. And perhaps by some miracle (because it really would have to mean that some swirling cosmic thing would have to happen and a multitude of stars align) those words would appear somewhere (in some published form) for some other husband to read and be struck by those words in such a way that he too excavates them carefully and with love and passes them on to some probably unknowing and unappreciative wife who would process the words and also write them down and the miracle of words and thoughts would be complete – one cycle of it. Because, of course, there are hundreds and thousands of years of this passing down, the renewal and recycling of thoughts and words, all born out of love and caring and deep consideration. All started with the passion of a Rob or Rob-like figure.

All in all, the writer is merely a conduit, a scribe, who carries out the work and love of Rob.