Miraculous Morgan
Everyone needs a boost now and again
I’d grown accustomed to dying. We all do if we live long enough. My latest death, the third in ten months, came over dinner at a chain restaurant with Angela and took the form of, “I’m sorry, I can’t watch you do this to yourself, I’ve met someone else, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so, so sorry…”
I should have died and, in the following month or three, decomposed and resurrected. That’s the usual process, no? Hell, I was only forty-three and had a few good demises left in me. But the knife had struck too quickly too many times of late: my job axed in a reorganization; my identity stolen and credit profile demolished, making it so impossible to land a new job that I quit trying; and now Angela, who it turned out wasn’t a for-better-or-for-worse woman, which fact neither of us knew until then, but that’s how we learn, right? By doing our worst.
My friend Ignacy, on the other hand, reveled in worst. Not that he was a holy terror himself. He just loved psychoanalyzing everyone from presidents to street corner beggars, delivering his diagnoses in impeccable English wrapped in a thick Polish accent. Fittingly, I called him “Professor,” because he had been in his home country. Arriving on these shores, he traded academia for real estate investment, a.k.a. house flipping. It hadn’t made him rich, but he loved it…
