They patched the potholes on my street yesterday. A big front-end loader waddled up from city hall, which is just down the road a bit, its bucket full of asphalt. A man with a shovel did the work. He patched five holes. I wonder if he has anything for broken hearts. Probably not and what’s a patch worth anyhow? The real solution is to pave the street. I have no idea what the solution is for a broken heart. A transplant?

And I’m not real sure how I got from potholes to broken hearts. There’s a puzzle. Maybe it’s something that just happens when you have a lot of words banging around in your head and they pass by a random emotion lying there doing nothing. The words say, come on, let’s go for a ride, and the emotion, says, sure and jumps on board, even though neither of them are making any sense. And everything starts trying to fire off until an unoccupied portion of your brain wades in and says, calm down boys, you’re getting all excited about nothing. Then everything just fizzles like a wet firecracker.

Oh, and yesterday a friend came by with his truck and we hauled off an old mattress and bunch of other useless stuff. The outside is back to being relatively tidy, and I know that would have made my wife happy. Hell, it makes me happy. And I just realized, that’s not as sad as it seems, because I got a random call from my oldest grandson last week, my youngest grandson opined to his mother that he really wanted to go see grandpa, and even a friend’s grandchild gave me a big hug the other day. That’s a lot of love, and maybe that’s how you mend a broken heart.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale