THE HAUNTING (reader advisory below):

How Many Ghosts? (Philip Gold, August 23, 1999, The Washington Times)

As I write these words, a friend of mine is out on the highway, counting down the hours to the death of his unborn child. Before leaving, he wrote his (now former?) girlfriend a check for half the price of the procedure. He said it made him nauseous.

Long years ago, having nowhere to drive (or perhaps the car was in the shop), I did my own countdown in an Eames chair with a bottle of scotch. I do not recall writing a check, or offering, or being asked. The nausea occasionally returns.

My friend is a young man, the kind who almost makes you believe the X in GenX can also stand for excellence. Intelligent, well-educated, thoughtful, college football player/philosophy major, with a limitless future in a field so high-tech I can't begin to understand what he's talking about. I understood well enough, however, when he told me about his on-again, off-again girlfriend, brilliant and beautiful and volatile in the harsh, addictive way that brilliant, beautiful young women often are. She had gotten pregnant on a night when off changed, somewhat unexpectedly, back to on. He does not doubt that he loves her, or she him.

I asked him if this was the first time he had faced this kind of situation. He answered, yes. Then welcome to reality. Before it's over, you're going to learn a lot about who and what you are.

This is a terribly disturbing essay that some folks may wish to skip entirely. It seems unlikely that we truly desire to know who and what we are as a society. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2003 8:34 AM