Cosi fan tutte

I think of my sweet Emily. Once we all were watching teevee in the way that you do after dinner, not quite watching, drinking a second beer, Bess tickling with Obie, Emily attending with half an eye but mostly intent on moving Brooke Shields in miniature from piece to piece of Barbie’s furniture, when Peter Jennings enunciating onward suddenly became a clip of film from El Salvador or somewhere, raw and unheralded, a soundtrack of women weeping. We all stopped and looked up in the way you do when it seems real, Bess and I caught off guard, too late to change the channel now that Em had seen. They piled bodies onto the bed of a half-ton truck, more women wept, flies settled on the stiff and jutting tongue of an awkward scarlet chested corpse. Chickens pecked dust elsewhere in the courtyard. Sad eyed children gazed at the camera.

We watched Emily and wondered what she would say.

“Uncle Pete was also in the service,” she said earnestly, absently smoothing Brooke’s tennis dress.

We tried to explain but Emily didn’t want to hear. You could see in her eyes how she hurt, but we knew enough of her careful ways not to press her.

Someone sold something. And in time Richard Dawson replaced Peter Jennings and Emily watched him kiss the ladies of someone's family, a smile too wise on her face.

It seemed sad to have a daughter who knows death abstractly. Yet the morning she was born I held her before me and wept thinking something so lovely also would sometime die.