Tracy Chapman

Driving along, looking ahead of my car, checking my rear view mirror for cars shifting lanes and listening to "The Yiddish Policeman's Union." I had been out there since leaving Wooster, somewhere on the new 30, still miles from Dalton. The lay of the road was the slightest incline and on a bend so like a slingshot. Speeding behind me, leaving many car lengths to pass, a car in my near-car style ducks and swoops around my side. As the car is in passing I remark at how fast it, now she, now she with a ponytail, now she with a ponytail with her headrests extended in a model of car I can't identify, is driving. As she's passing and continuing, an officer in the story comments on a death to another detective by saying something like, "I may have to rethink my atheistic assumptions." She becomes a car again and zips forward and my head rotates back inside my windshield to center and it's suddenly, "I am going so slow. I am driving this slow. I am driving this car slowly."

Like the wastoid character in "The Pale King" on a couch in front of a soap opera on a Friday afternoon. It goes to one commercial and two and then the program checks back in with the title card and a voice over says, "You are watching As the World Turns." He repeats it until he's watching as the world is turning.

My session with Dr. Karger was our best yet. Like the only requirement with a book is that it ends (period) in a kind of tie-loose-ends summary, this sixth session could not have happened without the previous five. At the very end - I think we exceeded 50 minutes - he told some of his personal history. A math major who took that degree even higher until he said no more math; I want to work in social services. Um, his story told, along with a phrase I have never said before - "This is what I want to do" - along with the previous 50 minutes of session took me back to Sunday morning's candidates and catechumens with their sponsor's arm draped around their opposite shoulder. Emotional. Then, somehow when I said, "I'm okay," it felt like the right thing to say.