Once I had a girlfriend so mad I had to spend all my time keeping her sane.

Or so I thought.

It was neither a successful or enjoyable pursuit.

Let me explain.

It was Christmas Eve, maybe 71 or 72. 

We lived alone in a cold water flat in

Hackensack NJ.  I don’t remember how or why it came to that

My parents were just miles away and her’s in NYC.

But there we were.

She was in what passed for the bedroom,

I holding my head in my hands in the kitchen listening to her

wailing and carrying on,

I wondering what to do to ease her pain.

Then I had an idea. 

At the time I considered it a stroke of genius…

I built an aluminum Xmas Tree.

I took a full role of aluminum foil and tore off great

Strips 10 and 12 feet long.

I tied string to the ends of each and cut them at angles to resemble

Sabers and strung them to the ceiling chris-crossing one another.

At the end I had a strange, ferocious, slashing tree-like

Structure that filled the kitchen.

It was unapproachable, forbidding, beautiful and cold.

I called her in.

Filled with the rectitude and daring of my work,

I expected to, godlike, overturn her despair into joy,

Her loneliness and incapacity into sanity.

And I did!  Can you imagine success from such an endeavor?

It shook her out of her sadness.

She looked at it with wonder and surprise.

She was taken with shock and awe.

At some level, she must have realized her own despair was nothing,

Compared to my own.