Tomorrowland

Family dinner night, and we are deciding what to save: polar bears or slipper limpets. Girls in Afghanistan or the wolf. We can't save everything but the kids are ready with their banks, the season's extra, the not- ice cream. How does the Afghan girl feel to make our list? We bring more and more money to the table but the list outruns it. My mother comes in from visiting a friend in hospice, sick from all the chemo. When I get whatever it is, she says, I want you to do nothing. It's only May and already they've declared a statewide drought. Yesterday I hiked over a river that was not there. Coral reefs, my son says, that's what I want to save. And so we do. Whatever is happening to us is deductible. Silence of the was-river, was-bear. In the movies everyone is building some kind of ark.