{"id":114,"date":"2008-09-14T20:23:11","date_gmt":"2008-09-15T03:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/?p=114"},"modified":"2008-09-14T20:28:11","modified_gmt":"2008-09-15T03:28:11","slug":"astonished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/?p=114","title":{"rendered":"Astonished"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\nGone are the seventy one boxes<br \/>\nof books that filled up half of<br \/>\nthe storage Pod, her historical<br \/>\nbiographies, my old textbooks on<br \/>\nPseudodifferential operators and microphysics,<br \/>\nall the Pogo books<\/p>\n<p>Gone are the arcane kitchen utensils,<br \/>\nthe high-carbon cleaver I&#8217;ve<br \/>\nhad since &#8217;78, the<br \/>\napple corers and lime squeezers I&#8217;d<br \/>\nused to make Cosmos on Thursdays<br \/>\nsipped on the balcony watching the container<br \/>\nships come in from Shanhai<\/p>\n<p>Gone are the strings of Christmas lights in the shapes<br \/>\nof pigs, and all the other pig items<br \/>\npeople gave Gigi because they thought<br \/>\nshe liked pigs because of all the pigs<br \/>\nshe had<\/p>\n<p>Gone are the mattresses, tables, flashlights,<br \/>\nfood processors, crescent wrenches,<br \/>\nclothes, framed pictures of grandmothers,<br \/>\nturkey smokers, halogen reading<br \/>\nlamps, geometric models of archimedean<br \/>\nsolids that used to hang from<br \/>\nthe ceiling of my office<\/p>\n<p>Gone and Gone are all the<br \/>\nthings that kept the wood-floored<br \/>\nrooms of this apartment from<br \/>\nthe echoes of footsteps<\/p>\n<p>Now there is only me, and Gigi,<br \/>\na couple of rosemary plants<br \/>\nwhose branches have seen so<br \/>\nmany roasted chickens, a philodendron,<br \/>\nand a bonsai juniper tree that<br \/>\nmom just sent, with instructions that<br \/>\nit needed daily watering<\/p>\n<p>Now in this house<br \/>\nthere is only air, a solid<br \/>\nfloor on which to walk, and<br \/>\nwe the living, we the mortal<br \/>\ntransient things to whom existence<br \/>\nis a fragile thing, and not a<br \/>\npermanent state of being.<\/p>\n<p>And Now, Only Now, is it so<br \/>\nclear: These things,  these<br \/>\nfoolish solid things, are of no weight.<br \/>\nWe the living, and those that<br \/>\nwe love in this one, wild life,<br \/>\nare all that have ever mattered,<br \/>\nand all that ever will.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Niles Ritter (With eternal thanks to Cathy &amp; her Writing Class)<br \/>\n   July 2, 2008<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gone are the seventy one boxes of books that filled up half of the storage Pod, her historical biographies, my old textbooks on Pseudodifferential operators and microphysics, all the Pogo books Gone are the arcane kitchen utensils, the high-carbon cleaver I&#8217;ve had since &#8217;78, the apple corers and lime squeezers I&#8217;d used to make Cosmos on Thursdays sipped on the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blueberry-lane","category-writers-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nilesritter.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}