Home > Work > Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay
1 " I scrubbed in the water while Ellie Mae chased a jackrabbit that was wandering on the shore. She nearly caught the rabbit, but the rabbit called for reinforcements. Soon nearly eighty rabbits emerged from the brush and began chasing my dog across the Texas plains. These were not rabbits like we have in Florida. Some of these were carrying tomahawks, and a few were on horseback. "
― Sean Dietrich , Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay
2 " November. It was already getting cold in the Panhandle. I'm talking bone cold. Temperatures were sinking all the way to sixty-two degrees in some places. "
3 " The first thing I did was eat barbecue. I have always found that barbecue helps the human body work better. The cholesterol lubricates the mental passages. "
4 " I’ll be honest with you. The variables that construct my existence are confusing. Like handwritten math equations jammed together on a sloppy page of homework. They don’t make any sense. One math problem leads to another, and then another and so it goes. One day you realize that your life is one whole page of problems and nothing ever gets solved. One ongoing equation with no equal sign at the end. But it occurred to me, beneath the canopy of a starlight heaven, that I’d been looking at my life all wrong. It wasn’t a math equation. Things weren’t supposed to add up. There was no solution. In fact, there was no problem. Life’s variables and numbers and pages of chicken scratch weren’t mathematical marks. They were art. A drawing. An abstract painting. It was meant to be beautiful, not sensical. And embedded within the mess of it all were miracles. Small ones. I’d never paid attention to them because I was too busy, but it didn’t make them less real. "
5 " I grew up believing that fried chicken was a holy dish, and chickens were fundamentalist birds placed on earth to be fried for the forgiveness of sins. "
6 " For some people, the transition to adulthood happens almost overnight. It certainly did with me. I’ve met other orphans. We are kids who can’t even pinpoint when this change happened. We have felt like old people since our fathers died. Our mothers looked to us for big decisions. They relied on us. Before we ever went out on our first date, we were already acting like a retired father of four. All our paychecks went toward rent. All our spare time went toward helping to keep a home fire burning. We got so good at pretending we were older than our age that we started to believe it. We begin to hate our own reflections because they betray how we see ourselves. The mirror portrays us too young. We are not children; we are ancient. We’re fifty years old thirty-five years before our fiftieth birthday. "
7 " At sundown, our world comes alive, all nature feeds upon itself. The algae gets eaten by the mullet, the mullet get eaten by the redfish, the redfish get eaten by the pelicans, the pelicans get eaten by the chipmunks. No, I'm only kidding; I don't know what eats the pelicans. "