I woke up to the news this morning that Robert Redford has passed away at the age of 89.
My allergies had gotten the best of me, with all sense of smell and taste vanquished beneath the constant rain and the landscapers with their lawn mowers, their leaf blowers, and their rakes doing their jobs to clear the tropical land of their fallen debris.
But I took an allergy pill and soon the flavors and scents came back, coloring the landscape the same time as the sun filtered in the great large window of our living room.
Yesterday I did my laundry while a sun shower fell. I felt good after a long morning and afternoon spent volunteering at the local branch of Habitat for Humanity. I cleaned the bathrooms, I sorted through the racks of thrifted clothing, and I went home happy I had spent my day not mucking about my halfway house. I had a clear conscience wiped clean and took a long, hot shower.
Redford lived a long and beautiful life. I know he spent his time near the end of his days in Utah, near the Rocky Mountains, where the water is blue and sweet and clear.
Today is my father’s birthday. I know he misses my mother and yearns to be reunited with her, how he dreams of the border of Heaven where she resides as an angel with her sisters.
I will spend my today doing mundane things. Buying cream from the supermarket for my coffee, indulging in my vices, speaking with my therapist. And tomorrow I will volunteer once more, until my time here is done and I can return once more to the plaines and silver rivers of Illinois, the state I miss so much.
Tonight, I’ll rent The Sting and Ordinary People, motion pictures that have been lying in wait for me to watch on my Hydra list of endless movies I mean to see. A beast that keeps sprouting heads, much like my reading list.
One thing I despise about my personality is how something is never enough. I will never have enough books to read or movies to see, despite feeling overwhelmed with the embarrassment of riches I have already. How my collection of cigarettes and e-cigarettes are never enough. How, despite all the food in my freezer and refrigerator, I will always want something more.
Redford was a Leo, with a Leo’s beauty and blonde mane, and ferocious sensibility.
I am a Scorpio, “I desire”; I desire, I desire, I desire.
But Redford always seemed so evolved to me. Always, even when the characters he played were so human and so wanting. And now he’s an angel too, much like my mother.
Yesterday, I spent my down time at the thrift store where I volunteer, reading a book on gene sequences. On cancer and on mental illness. How genes care little what we think and how we desire and how we feel, how much like desire, they continue to replicate themselves, long after we’re gone. How their sequences just continue to thrive undaunted by our narrow window of consciousness.
They’re always there, genes. Creating and recreating.
Nightingale 
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