I keep thinking of that photo of Grant.

I get fixated on things that burst with importance one moment only to be of no consequence an hour, a day, a week or lifetime later...
I've spent days - weeks and months, in fact -  idly thinking of a picture of Ulysses Grant.  One of his last. Crowned by a slightly worn top hat, with a scarf wrapped 'round his throat hiding the scars of the unsuccessful operations for the disease that would soon enough kill him.
What a life. An indifferent soldier at Westpoint up on the Hudson. A poor entrepreneur, reduced to selling tinder on the streets of St Louis by his early thirties.  By all accounts a strange and shambolic man. A failure in the eyes of everyone except his long suffering wife Julia. An occasional dauber in oils and charcoals. Quite fine at it too. Proud, in fact, only of his occasional painting and horsemanship.
And then the war broke out and he slowly set about putting down the rebellion. Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Shiloh of course. Savagely fighting Longstreet, who many years before had been best man at his wedding. Heartbreaking success after success until the desperate, brilliant Lee brought him to a standstill outside Petersburg where hubris got the better of Grant for which his army paid a terrible cost in that protracted south/left flank slide. A strange and shocking conflict.
He did all of this often very drunk.
"Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.", Sherman was to say at the height (or rather one of the Union nadirs) of the war.
And Grant sits on that porch, looking up from the newspaper.  All of this past, I imagine, playing like a thread-worn home movie over again and again in his head.
And later, how he became a two term President after the war. Posterity according his Administration small praises but for the corruption, cronyism and whiskey-for-all approach. But some good... Some good... So he might have thought in that photo.
And after the Presidency, a world tour - feted by kings and queens the world over. A fine home in Manhattan bought for him by friends upon his return. But seemingly all for nought as yet again bad investment left him and his family destitute by his early sixties.
And there he is, reading the scandal sheets between bouts of memoir writing. His whole life played out somewhere beneath that damned knitted beanie and the top hat.
But it doesn't end there, does it?  The memoirs restored the family fortune for generations to come.
I look at the photo and I think sometimes life is a mood. An illness or disorder. Cyclothymia. And people are thrown up and down on the waves of its caprice - ever bashing their heads on the ceiling of beauty, ever being dashed upon the rock and sand of heartache and uncertainty.
Masters and mistresses of nothing.
Swan, swan, hummingbird.