Sustenance

Gary D. Grossman
Bookends Review, May 22, 2024

Picture a school of sperm milling around a monstrous egg, an ovarian Mount Everest, one thousand times the size of each swimmer. Their tiny flagella oscillating like oars on a small dinghy, each sperm filled with thoughts and prayers for a blissful genetic future rather than the evolutionary graveyard. It’s a biological version of veteran Manhattan shoppers jamming the front doors of Macys on the morning of Black Friday, except here there is only one winner, only one sperm who actually fertilizes the egg, sustaining their future.

“Soooo, that’s how you were made” Mom said, turning over the last page of “Where Babies Come From” and flipping the softbound book closed. I was six when I asked the question, and Mom was progressive enough to know that a kid should be told the truth when they asked about human reproduction, but sufficiently repressed to hand the task off to a text that was dry as a two-year old package of Tom’s peanut butter cheese crackers from an abandoned vending machine. I think I did better with my own kids, but please don’t ask me to ask them. Sometimes ignorance is greater sustenance than truth.

Memory is a fragile beast, a jellyfish dangling foot-long tentacles; impossible to grasp without loss. Some legs come away in partial form, some morph into new jellyfish, and others simply dissolve when touched. Even our intact memories actually are paintings coated with several layers of varnish; each one applied via a different relative or friend; each one…