Our advisor all but wags a finger while impressing upon us the importance of utilizing bonds and REITs and mid-cap stocks as part of a strategy to mitigate our risk in these tumultuous times and I am nodding politely and emitting the occasional mmhmm while my husband engages in diligent if inscrutable note-taking but what I am contemplating instead is a tabloid article from some years ago claiming that Kate Winslet and her then-spouse never boarded the same flight because what if God forbid the plane went down what would happen to the kids which sounded quite sensible to me even as I continued to book seats 23A and 23B on multiples airlines which reminds me that a girlfriend mentioned recently that she planned to encourage her younger son to join his brother at a nearby university and I blurted out that’s a terrible idea and she looked at me blankly before venturing a soft why and I chirped joking, joking because if she doesn’t already see the problem there’s no way I’m going to be the one to tell her.
Hear Colette Parris read her piece
Colette Parris is a Caribbean-American attorney with work in Michigan Quarterly Review, Scoundrel Time, The Offing, Cleaver, and elsewhere. She is a three-time Pushcart nominee for fiction, and three of her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net. She lives in New York. Read more at coletteparris.com.