Pajama Quotient

Coinage of the not-yet-wholly- hardened custodians of public health, as health is roughly measured in the rougher parts of Dearborn. Meaning, how many parents, when things get bad, are wearing what they’ve slept in when they come to pick up the kids at school. The best of talk, said someone once, is shop talk: we can go to it as to a well. But manifolds and steering racks are going the way of the wells—offshore— so the-nifty-thing-you-do- with-the-wrench-when-the-foreman- has-sped-the-line-up has become a ghastly shorthand for despair among the people you are paid to help. Despair, sometimes, of helping. In the winter dawn a decade and a half ago, we’d gather around the school bus stop—the unshaved fathers, mothers, dogs, the siblings in their snowsuits—so the children bound for Johnson Elementary might have a proper sending-off. The privileged of the earth, in our case: words and stars and molecules were all our care, a makeshift village blessed with time and purpose. And a school bus stop, to make it seem like life. By far my favorites were the Russian mathematicians: bathrobes hanging below their parkas, cigarettes scattering ash, their little ones for the moment quite forgotten, they would cover the walls of the shelter with what to most of us was Greek but was no doubt of urgent consequence for quantum fields. So filled with joy: their permanent markers on the brick. And then the bus, and then the children off without us and our little human pretext gone. Fragile the minutes. Fragile the line between wonder and woe. The poet when he wrote about our parents in the garden gave them love and rest and mindfulness. But first he gave them honest work.