Playing Safe

Suburban mother, neat, ash-blonde, divorced, might pause beneath a Bedford bookstore awning, then check her list - lasagne, liverwurst ... today pilates, Thursday, coffee morning. One week is like another, which is fine (note on the fridge -- "collect new reading glasses"). She'll pass on Starbuck's (have you SEEN the line?) The bovine bustle of the middle classes. Ten years ago, I struck like Typhoon Trevor, intense and strange. Endearments and demands brought whiff of chaos. "Picket fences never restrained me!" But I left with empty hands. She went for bourgeois bland, for safety's sake, and never sees what's churning in her wake.