If you can read this you are NOT Glen Fadlo of Waltham, CT.
This story resides in the Bleak Holiday collection.
The man sat at the table, drenched in the dense California sunlight that
burned through the glass patio doors - American sunlight - and he felt like an
important part of an important moment. He was in this place now. He stirred his
coffee and scanned his newspaper and felt satisfied. He felt proud of his
house, his career. He loved his wife. He realized this with urgent clarity and
a gratitude that usually eluded him. The sounds of Carol fixing breakfast in
the kitchen comforted him, secured him to the world, and after a while the
smell of bacon and toast traveled through the swinging door and he felt better
still. It was a perfect moment, an exact
moment, when the very molecules of existence seemed to coalesce and charge his darkening
heart; a heart that had begun to harden and retreat from the anxious
complications of impending middle age.
The newspaper was still filled with the recent tragedy. A great American
had died in Dallas at the hands of a troubled young man, and then the young man
was in turn gunned down by a man with a jeweled name who ran a nightclub. He
wondered if he should feel so calm and contented so soon after a national calamity
and with this thought, the perfect moment was gone. One brief blaze of doubt
had kindled it to mist.
The man felt diminished again.
