This is also about Michael Jackson.

Yesterday afternoon we paused at work to watch the Memorial. I walked to the subway and talked to my mother about it. I came home and talked to Pillow about it. I have a few more things to say (with likely repetitions).

The service returned us (at least Pil and I) to some stasis, or, better yet, some plane of hope and action. We felt a pall lift, a release of those awful, vague, much-rambled-about jet crash and bad news fears. Michael Jackson had a difficult and unhappy life. He was not a well person when he died (presumably, by injecting a kind of pharmaceutical speedball). But since his death, at least for some, his human foibles, his long-documented madness and aloneness and otherness, have been eclipsed by one great conversation about the things he made, about art, American art, the connective triumph of pop, many of the great themes of our 20th century gone by. There is a tremendous mystical power in the release of a hit record, a record that becomes an elastic tissue linking millions of strangers and towns and eras, reminding us of all of the good universals and commonalities, ancient ecstasies.

In the 1994 Diane Sawyer interview with Michael and his then new bride, Lisa Marie Presley, MJ called a swathe of tabloid rumors about his health and eccentricities, "folklore." It's a sweet and brilliant moment. Michael was mythic; what was written about him was not gossip, but "folklore."

As I watched the Memorial, as I thought about the many others watching, I felt overwhelmed with joy at the scale of this ceremony meant to send up an American artist. Through our staff's lifetimes (and surely before), this counrty's military brutishness and bald capitalism have been unpopular, but our creative output has been definitive, vital, revolutionary, beloved. Of this, we should be very proud. We are, in a way, lucky to be reminded by this positive Christ-figure, Michael Jackson. Lucky to be reminded of the social power of art and the preciousness of time to the artist, to the appreciator of art and nature.

A friend was just describing to me how difficult her daughter found it to be away from home for three days. I, in turn, recalled that childhood conception of time--the endlessness of a single afternoon, the confusion about geography, the thrill and terror of first travelling. I am now able to remember in units of years, units of length-spent-in-this-particular-place-and-clothing. One day, I'll be able to remember decades, stacks of them. The point is: time does pass--we collect those past hours and days and months in memory--but they do go and go. How wonderful to spend it wisely, looking, loving, making, considering. How wonderful to remember too.