But all I ever saw of that one was the commercial—
my mother’s only soap opera was All My Children,
every day at 1:00. Noon, when we lived in Minnesota,
which is where I first began to follow it, when poor
Nina was in the bank vault without her insulin,
held hostage during a robbery, and Erica was having
another round of marital problems, this time with Tom,
who (it seemed) only ever wanted to have a baby,
whether with this wife or the next. Did he have a baby
with Brooke, Erica’s do-gooder nemesis? (I forget, and
anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.) At the time when
I picked up the thread of the story, Erica was with Tom,
though my mother told me that would not last, and
she was right. There were two things my mother told me
not to tell my grandmother: that she smoked, and that
she watched a soap opera (even just one), though
my grandmother smoked like a chimney and, no fan
of soap operas herself, surely would have understood
the value of another daytime vice, a well-timed
respite, right at the edge of 1:00. Or noon.

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Today’s Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge prompt was “______ of ______.”