The Whole Mad Swirl

I was out of control, spinning on the whirligig of youth, giddy to be caught in what Kerouac called "the whole mad swirl of everything to come." I didn't know what to expect. I was ready for nothing though I had spent years in solitary confinement with books, exams and degrees. You would think I'd have learned something about life as it is, not as I wished it to be. I went out on the street to look for work and was surprised to discover no one spoke Old English like Beowulf or Middle English like the Wife of Bath. An old professor told me I talked the way e.e. cummings wrote and no one would hire me. A few years later I married a woman with several degrees. She thought I was normal. We had five kids in six years and drove landlords bonkers. "The Lord will provide," we said, and He did. Fifty years later, the five kids have rucksacks of their own packed with jobs, marriages, children and good lives measured against the standard of most. Their mother is dead, and like everyone else on this strange planet I am in the process of dying in the jaws of what Kerouac called "the whole mad swirl of everything to come." I have seen almost all of "everything to come" except for the best part and that, I am told, will take my breath away. Donal Mahoney