“What word sums up your entire life?”
the online quiz asked.

And I thought to myself,
“None, yet. I hope”,
as I started clicking on a series
of mostly inapplicable pictures.

In the end
I got “influencer”
which isn’t too bad
but seems horribly incomplete.

Whom do I influence?
Myself? Others?
What sort of influence is it?
Is it positive, negative, or just is?
What sort of topics?
Politics? Arts? Sciences? Life?
Mundane? Profane? Profound?

So I told my friends
“palimpsest”,
a word I got from
Judge Woolsey
in his opinion about
James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Parchment, from which one text was scraped away
and another text added,
perhaps, also, to be scraped away.

I think of the palimpsest as a tapestry
where you can still see parts of old stories
mingled with the new.
and how old stories of my life
weave into new stories
providing context and contrast.