leopold-bloom's CivPage

A kidney. Dripping slightly. The kidney is a dark red, purple and fascinating article. Dangling on a hook in Thornton’s, where the street enters the cold morning. It’s a beautiful cut, that kidney, frim and weighty, and the smell of the shop is of fresh meat, sawdust, and the faint, sharp tang of blood. I think about kidneys and their function, how they filter, how they clean the blood, how they work silently and without thanks. Like a heart. Like many things. Cats wander in the sun. A cat stretches near the wall, licking her paw. The way she moves—deliberate, unconcerned, clean. Better at living than most humans. In the windows above, flowers in boxes: geraniums, nasturtiums, a flash of colour against the grey stone. The sun makes everything bright for a moment. Cloud shadows race across the ground. The cry of a newspaper boy echoes down the street, calling out the latest news from somewhere far away. War, politics, the affairs of important men. It all seems very distant from this quiet street. I have soap. Brono. The scent of it clings to my hands, a clean, chemical smell. I think of the advertisement: *What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?* Incomplete. Like a question without an answer. Or a life without... No. Not that. I have my things. My books. My belongings in the drawer. Milly’s hair in the envelope, taken when she was small. The sea. I think of the sea often. The way it moves, grey and green, endlessly repeating its patterns. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. There is comfort in that regularity. Science tells us about the pull of the moon, the gravity, the mechanics of it all. But standing on the shore, watching the waves break and reform, one feels something else. Smallness, perhaps. Insignificance. But also connection. The water that touches this shore has touched other shores, will touch others still. We are all connected in this way, whether we know it or not. Jews and gentiles, kings and common men. The same water. The same salt. I was thinking about what it means to be an outsider. To be from somewhere else. Ireland is my home—I was born here, as was my father before me—but still, sometimes, the look in their eyes. *The stranger in our midst.* As if blood and birth count for nothing against the weight of ancient suspicion. But I endure. What else is there? Anger? Resentment? These are heavy bags to carry, and I have enough weight already. Rudy. My son. Eleven days old. If he had lived... he would be eleven now. A boy growing tall, perhaps reading books, asking questions about the world. I would teach him things. About the stars, about the way machines work, about kindness. But he is gone, and the years pass, and I remain. His memory sits quietly in a corner of my mind. Sometimes I visit it. Sometimes I try not to. Evening comes. The lamplighter makes his rounds. The gas flames hiss to life, one by one, small suns in the gathering dark. I walk home through the streets I know, past the shops closing up, the voices calling goodnight. The smell of someone’s dinner drifts from an open window—cabbage, bacon. The ordinary world, continuing its ordinary business. I have no great statement to make. No manifesto, no grand philosophy. I believe in small kindnesses. In the dignity of going on. In noticing things—the texture of a wall, the sound of a bell, the warmth of tea in a cup. The world is full of pain and injustice and cruelty. But it is also full of cats and kidneys and soap and light on water.