It takes a long time to receive Carte Blanche. In fact, it takes so long to receive it that when you are told it is revoked, you can only understand. Not why, per se, or as such, but that there is no need for anyone to understand the why. Because the wages of aging are understanding. One understands. And that is all that matters.
The blank, or white, check, or card, recedes into the kind of a blackness--or with the change of a letter, as Updike memorably demonstrated, but in reverse order--a blankness, that we reserve for our older selves, because, there, it is only then, only there that we can now know that it never meant very, very much, anyway. And what could be more blank than that?
Only here, in the facsimile of adulthood can we see how it's perfectly fine, that piecrust promises can be be easily made, and when easily broken, in point of fact, friendship, actually, still remains. It is only as an adult, when one is a thing that only children seem to know doesn't exist, that one can know that la Carte Blanche n'existe pas.
La Carte Blanche n'existe pas....
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