Winter reflections, sunset

From the roof of the Government Center Parking Ramp at 5th Street and 5th Avenue, the winter sun's acetylene flame burns into the old brick Sexton building at 4:40 pm, in January. Kids are barely home from school. Dinner isn't even started. Commuters hitting the freeway replay the slights and mischances of a day at the office. Those driving west shield their eyes from the incandesence of a sustained nuclear fusion 93 million miles away in space...hydrogen atoms becoming helium in an alchemy that made men believe in gods, and made gods out of stars at the dawn of time.

Work defines banality for most of us. A few of us escape the routine often enough to feel some satisfaction or achievement. Increasingly I hear that people in their fourties and late thirties have lost their vision of work as fulfillment completely. I stand on the top of the parking ramp, my nerves resonant with the spectral majesty of refracted sunlight reflected in a banal building. The distance between the ordinary and the breath of gods contains all human imagination, and it seems to be collapsing into itself today.

In Tuscon, Arizona, the president prepares to eulogize a 9 year old girl born on Sept. 11 2001, and died on the knife edge of a rage that the word "madness" cannot contain. It is as though the old gods are bursting through the tv screens, the reflections of humanity framed in our rec rooms.

In the kitchen, a woman stands in front of the stove and stares through the window, out over the pond, west past Minnetonka, and sees an illusion of gold for a moment, which then fades. She bursts into tears, and turns the flame on under her frying pan full of hamburger helper. The voices of the gods are silent, now. Their breath hangs in the frozen air. The light dies, and the earnest cadences of a president strokes the frayed grief of a nation, a voice of resolve but a voice of tin and candle wax, a voice spilling the past from the demented flatness of her high definition tv.

Who have we become, and when we turn inward, is there anyone left there to answer the cries of the parents, or the prayers of the wives, or the questions of the children? How do we explain the distance between the banality of our days and the inconceivable power of the sun's inhuman heart? How do we help our children find their own arc across a sky we abandon, we fall from, we darken with our fear?

The days are actually growing longer in January, but the emotional depth of winter is just beginning to swallow us up. We grasp the flare of sunset briefly, then drive.