Past time

   It is Sunday morning.
   I am drinking a green smoothie flavored with mint and flecked with darker green leafy bits. A smeared up persimmon is in there, too.
   The National Public Radio team is interviewing people whose assumptions have been challenged by the mass murder in Las Vegas last week, including a gun dealer who sold that man one of his guns.
   I had a bad dream last night in which the last of my co-workers had already left the paper and moved on to better paying jobs they liked much better, leaving me to ... what? Be the newspaper alone?
   I have been sitting here working on my good attitude, trying to imagine what I might be asked in public Tuesday night about the 40 years of my one and only life that I have spent as a relatively unimportant and uninvolved and yet for some reason protected member of the statewide daily newspaper staff.
  I have been trying to become calm.
  It is past time for me to get in my clattering old car and drive the 35 minutes across the river to see my rigid mother in the nursing home.

  God help me, I do not want to.