Slice of Life Post for March 29, 2025 (7:56-8:27)

Last night after watching a few basketball games, one that definitely did not end the way I wished, we watched the final episode of Reacher: Season Three.

Just look at the photo and tell me, what’s not to like? He’s a brickhouse and a loner on a mission to live life on his own terms. Reacher has a heart, too, at least for those he works with and cares for.

Spoiler Alert: One of the best Reacher quotes came near the end of the show when the son of a wealthy man, Richard Beck, shares with Reacher that he wishes he could have had more time seeing the good in his father. He’s distraught and at loose ends. Reacher encourages him to take all the money in the house and hit the road. Then the following dialogue occurs:

Reacher: In my experience if you spend a lot of time thinking about the pain from your past….well, it’s probably not a good thing. Most people don’t handle it well.

Beck: What do you do when you can’t forget the awful things from your past?

Reacher: I find the awful thing, then I kill it.

I love dialogue that’s direct and carries a punch. It’s probably why I also enjoy James Lee Burke’s character Dave Robicheaux. Both Reacher and Robicheaux are violent men who have lost a lot of special people in their lives, but they carry on and wreak vengeance at every opportunity.

I’m off to kill my own awful things.

Baptized

dead things
remarkably bright
drew her to the riverside

beneath dawn’s lemony light
she found dead fish floating,
mouths open wide

a cacophony of bird cries
bugs and frogs intensified
as she slipped a toe into greenish slime

dizzying dragonflies flitting across
its loamy surface whispered like Macbeth’s weird sisters
to witness its seamy underside

she breathed deep its rank perfume
teeming with hog wash and insecticides
then followed the diamondback

snake winking by her side
until she drowned
her sins beneath its murky depths

no one recovered her body
but I heard she discovered
a mystical garden, kind of like Eve’s