All is vanity

Feeling very mortal today. A good friend from college, someone who's been very helpful to me at a number of times in my life, mostly likely has cancer in the lymph system of her breast. They initially thought a lumpectomy got it, but now it's not clear, and she may have to have chemo.

So when Mary brings Graham in bed with us in the morning and he's crawling around over me and everything, being annoying but cute, I'm thinking that my life basically feels right, that it makes sense to have a less than scintillating or particularly remunerative career to spend more time with the family. Vanity of vanities, that sort of thing. And the whole thing with mortality being brought so close to home, so wierd given the seemingly infinite volume of the past, the infinite number of details from the past that one recovers only gradually and by happenstance, even as the whole slips away... which seems to point towards what feels like a similarly infinite future, which all of a sudden gets cut down to size.

And then the lactic acid in my legs brought me back to the soccer field on Sunday, when I ran an overlap and that moronic Swede passed it back to me from behind me instead of playing it through in front of me or chipping it over the defense, where surely I could have controlled the ball in the air and either hit a man on the far post for a header goal, or knocked it inside the keeper to the near post with the outside of my foot, all without letting the ball touch the ground. That's what I was gonna do.