Devonne Brown

“I hate this. I’m terrible at figuring out what ifs. I have the worst logic of anybody I know and always have had. Logic tests make me crazy. When I was a kid, we had these tests where we had to decide where the moving dot on the domino would be next in the sequence. I never got those right. I’ll never get this right.” I whined loud and long. I suffered.

“This isn’t one of those tests. You’re just supposed to write a simple essay about something that doesn’t exist and what impact its absence made on the world.” 

“No. That’s not the assignment. The assignment is to figure out what the world would be like without a cool invention like a plane or email or something like that.” I kept whining.

“Well, do it. You’re smart. What’s the what if? What would the world be like if you didn’t have email?”

“If I didn’t have email, I wouldn’t spend half an hour twice a day deleting a bunch of shit I didn’t want in order to find something I did want to delete so I could find something that I wanted to keep for five minutes before I deleted it.”

“What about airplanes?”

“We’re just supposed to pick one topic. Airplanes would be a whole ‘nother ball of wax altogether anyway. It gets physical with the planes. That goes back more than a hundred years, to the beach even. We have dunes to consider when we get into airplanes. I’d really rather not go there. Think of the children, my children. The layovers I’ve lived through. My god…what an ordeal they were.”

“So let’s talk about email some more then it seems to be emotionally safe to discuss too, like logic.”

Email is emotionally safe to discuss, logic isn’t. Logic got me in all kinds of trouble in school. I could never figure it out, I still get it wrong. 

I’m sixty-five and I read that I’m moving into the Crone era of my life. I seem to have defied logic. I realize this is good. Epiphany. I defied the logic I cried. Fuck that moving dot.

Logic is now safe to discuss. I am almost Crone, the wise mountain woman in the ramshackle house under the oaks on the hill with the cats, Grey Malkin and the Madam. Full Crone is seventy. I have five years to go before I get the full Crone badge of honor. That’s “Miles to go before I sleep” in the language of the poets. 

Until then, I’ll continue to wear long flowy things, sparkle, and eat sushi.