THE SPECTATOR OF CALAMITIES ///Frank Richards
Lorena MacInnes always rose before dawn, and the first thing she did was put water in the kettle for her cup of tea. This chilly day was no exception. Then, electric lantern in hand, she picked her way through the darkness and out to the barn to feed the goats. The night’s moonless visibility enabled her to see the stars, her reliable companions, glittering in the early autumn sky; red, yellow, white, and blue, they were perpetual fireflies, shards of memory, spangling the darkness, looking down on her with their light from the past. She spotted Orion, fully risen in the southeastern sky. Orion had been Caleb’s favorite constellation. He had always pestered her this time of year that he might be allowed up early to see the Orionids, a minor meteor shower of particles left over from a comet that had passed this way once, perhaps too near the earth, and inevitably destroyed by the tug and pull of gravity, had melted away, until only a few remnants were left to fall to Earth, fiery, burning with everything they had before fading out. None ever seemed to reach the ground. In some ways, Caleb had been an easy son to raise, but in other ways, he’d proven himself a difficult child. Even when he was grown and had Willie, his own son, to care for and to teach, Caleb had a talent for being oblivious to the obvious. His keen perceptions of nature and the multiplicity of its interrelations were not mirrored by a similar perception of human motivations. He’d been flummoxed by even the simplest things, bursting into tears in frustration. Irony was lost upon him. She wondered at his perceptions. How had he seen the world? It wasn’t necessarily anything he lacked, precisely. It was as if his perception were off, somehow moved up the scale from that of the rest of us. He saw things we didn’t see, but he was oblivious to things that were plain to others. Sometimes, when getting him off to school or to a party with acquaintances, Lorena felt fear for him, for the lightness of his spirit, 10 SANSKRIT
