You me a phoenix make each time we touch.
From ash I rise and soar above the world.
You rise on me and guide my soul to such
A land unknown by souls. With wings unfurl’d
I feel the breeze that lifts my body’s flight,
And though it feels as soft as sight of dove,
I know, tucked deep inside the cave of night,
It’s not the sweet caressing of your love.
We, flying high above the land we’ve known,
See hills and streams we ne’er before have seen;
The water’s blue; the bright gray light of stone;
The waving fields by meadows’ new bright green.
We didn’t know these colors yesterday,
Or see these things we’ve seen here from our birth.
So high and fast it looks so far away.
We fall to touch and lie on our New Earth.
Now down below we ground our childish feet
And gaze up at the path we’ve always flown.
The sea-soaked sky and sun’s deep orange heat
All listen to the rook’s new golden tone.
We didn’t see that sky, not yesterday,
Or any gone before we two were nigh.
So low and slow it looks so far away.
We listen after seeing our New Sky.
The whispers of our praise dance on the wind.
Our perfect union’s hymn now nature’s song.
Discordant notes? No tone I dare to mend.
If this be Mother’s tune, may it be long!
I didn’t hear this music yesterday.
My deaf ears open’d at the sound of you.
So calm your psalm sweet carries me away
To lands, more lands I’ve been, but now are new.
You me a phoenix make each time we touch.
From ashes rise I now alive, and you,
You live with me and guide my soul to such
A land, your land, I’ve been, but now is new.
-jlm for kdm (6/21/06)
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Saturday, June 17, 2006
White Washed Interaction
It’s a task of great difficulty for me to figure out whether or not I’m being sincere in all situations. I’ll not go into all the things which upset me about this idea of being “fake,” but I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about: how are you? how's your family? are you okay? etc. It gets pretty old to me because it bothers me to even hear questions like those, much less say them. But, in the South, How are you? and Hi are perfect equals. It bothers me because I honestly know that I typically don’t really want to know the answer to what I’m asking. No, that doesn’t make me heartless or calloused. It actually makes me utterly truthful for admitting it.
By the way, did you catch what I just did twice?! Look at the last couple of sentences – do you see them? Of course you don’t because you are just as used to it as the next person. Why in the world would I need to use words honestly and actually? Taken literally, one could deduce that I had been writing only half truths and partial falsehoods until I added those words, and that the only reason that I wrote them was to somehow overcompensate for something I wasn’t sure you would believe, or even something I wasn’t sure I would, but I desperately wanted you to anyway.
The moment I hear key words and phrases like honestly, truthfully, to tell you the truth, actually, truth be told, and so on, I shut down. I’m either about to hear a load of crap or a load of unsure, and not knowing which and not wanting either, I stop listening.
I’ve said all this to say: I’ve become an ultra-stickler for real. I know that if I began to tell the average questioner the answer, the real answer, to how I feel, how my family is, or whether or not I’m okay, they would think I’m a bit strange or even psychotic.
Where am I going with this?
The other day I saw a child and his mother in a store. The kid was a bit unruly and I couldn’t help but wonder about the mother’s skills as a parent. The child was beyond annoying with loud cartoon sounding noises, endless questions, and constant grabbing. He had thrown three items out of his mother’s cart while they had been standing in line at the check-out lane.
I don’t know what caused her to finally snap, but as he was attempting to get out of the cart, something against which she had apparently already warned him, she grabbed him by the arm and did the mother whisper (you know, the one that is voiceless so as to be considered a whisper in technique, but loud enough to be quite audible for several feet) in his ear: is that how we taught you to act? You’d better start acting right or I’m going to tell your father!
At that point, I stopped feeling sorry for the mom. Yes, I realize that she could have been an overworked, underpaid, single mother of three, but I still lost respect. It has nothing to do with the arm grabbing because there were times when I sincerely wished that I could have had a simple arm-grabbing when I was younger. It also meant nothing to me that she could have deafened the boy with the loud whisper. Instead, I sighed wishing the boy could have been taught how to be instead of how to act.
Isn’t that the major paradox of our salesperson society? How do we switch gears so quickly and maintain any level of sincerity? It seems to me that we are so insecure, sometimes, that we feel like we need to sell people on the idea of us as if what was there wasn’t good enough. The actuallys, the truthfullys and all the others are simply examples of our acknowledgement that we live alone behind of wall of separation twenty-four hours a day. The result = public behavior.
It’s an entirely different register. We speak differently, smile differently, eat differently, drink differently and even sit differently. The things most people tell you in their living rooms, depending on how many times you have been there, will widen significantly from what they would have told you in an elevator. It happens in nearly every case of interaction between two or more people in a public environment. It’s even a joke when someone does something a little out of the ordinary to say something like you don’t get out much or we can’t take you anywhere.
There are a few people, however, who don’t seem to give a rip about the group etiquette. Of course, they’re judged, and deemed too smart or dumb to handle the rigors of human interaction. Some, of course, do it on purpose, and that gets on my nerves. It seems to me that doing it willfully defeats the purpose because you’re changing who you are in public in order for the public to notice. That does nothing. But, it’s the people who waive the pressures of the norm sub-consciously, naturally, without motive, who intrigue me. What’s the difference? The ones who do it naturally because that’s just who they are and what you see is what you get all the time, those guys are. They simply are. They were taught by their parents, or whomever raised them, how to be, how to live. The ones who switch register, whether to public etiquette or away from it, purposefully are actors; they were taught how to act. They are the ones who act out or act up; they act wrong and act right. It’s all an act, and, if privy to it, I don’t think anyone really likes that if they are being honest with themselves.
By the way, did you catch what I just did twice?! Look at the last couple of sentences – do you see them? Of course you don’t because you are just as used to it as the next person. Why in the world would I need to use words honestly and actually? Taken literally, one could deduce that I had been writing only half truths and partial falsehoods until I added those words, and that the only reason that I wrote them was to somehow overcompensate for something I wasn’t sure you would believe, or even something I wasn’t sure I would, but I desperately wanted you to anyway.
The moment I hear key words and phrases like honestly, truthfully, to tell you the truth, actually, truth be told, and so on, I shut down. I’m either about to hear a load of crap or a load of unsure, and not knowing which and not wanting either, I stop listening.
I’ve said all this to say: I’ve become an ultra-stickler for real. I know that if I began to tell the average questioner the answer, the real answer, to how I feel, how my family is, or whether or not I’m okay, they would think I’m a bit strange or even psychotic.
Where am I going with this?
The other day I saw a child and his mother in a store. The kid was a bit unruly and I couldn’t help but wonder about the mother’s skills as a parent. The child was beyond annoying with loud cartoon sounding noises, endless questions, and constant grabbing. He had thrown three items out of his mother’s cart while they had been standing in line at the check-out lane.
I don’t know what caused her to finally snap, but as he was attempting to get out of the cart, something against which she had apparently already warned him, she grabbed him by the arm and did the mother whisper (you know, the one that is voiceless so as to be considered a whisper in technique, but loud enough to be quite audible for several feet) in his ear: is that how we taught you to act? You’d better start acting right or I’m going to tell your father!
At that point, I stopped feeling sorry for the mom. Yes, I realize that she could have been an overworked, underpaid, single mother of three, but I still lost respect. It has nothing to do with the arm grabbing because there were times when I sincerely wished that I could have had a simple arm-grabbing when I was younger. It also meant nothing to me that she could have deafened the boy with the loud whisper. Instead, I sighed wishing the boy could have been taught how to be instead of how to act.
Isn’t that the major paradox of our salesperson society? How do we switch gears so quickly and maintain any level of sincerity? It seems to me that we are so insecure, sometimes, that we feel like we need to sell people on the idea of us as if what was there wasn’t good enough. The actuallys, the truthfullys and all the others are simply examples of our acknowledgement that we live alone behind of wall of separation twenty-four hours a day. The result = public behavior.
It’s an entirely different register. We speak differently, smile differently, eat differently, drink differently and even sit differently. The things most people tell you in their living rooms, depending on how many times you have been there, will widen significantly from what they would have told you in an elevator. It happens in nearly every case of interaction between two or more people in a public environment. It’s even a joke when someone does something a little out of the ordinary to say something like you don’t get out much or we can’t take you anywhere.
There are a few people, however, who don’t seem to give a rip about the group etiquette. Of course, they’re judged, and deemed too smart or dumb to handle the rigors of human interaction. Some, of course, do it on purpose, and that gets on my nerves. It seems to me that doing it willfully defeats the purpose because you’re changing who you are in public in order for the public to notice. That does nothing. But, it’s the people who waive the pressures of the norm sub-consciously, naturally, without motive, who intrigue me. What’s the difference? The ones who do it naturally because that’s just who they are and what you see is what you get all the time, those guys are. They simply are. They were taught by their parents, or whomever raised them, how to be, how to live. The ones who switch register, whether to public etiquette or away from it, purposefully are actors; they were taught how to act. They are the ones who act out or act up; they act wrong and act right. It’s all an act, and, if privy to it, I don’t think anyone really likes that if they are being honest with themselves.
Friday, June 02, 2006
Every Trip is a Short One
"I have an existential map. It has 'You Are Here' written all over it." -Steven Wright
Friday, May 05, 2006
Tim Dumb
“I tried to study the Bible once, but I got confused,” the guy said to me. “When I try to put it up against itself, I don’t make a lot of sense out of it.”
“How so?” I replied.
“For example: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ right?”
“Correct.”
“Then why does God sanction war? I see that line in the ‘Big 10,’ but I make no sense of it elsewhere. And, too, how can we justify Christians going to war? War implies killing. Does that mean they’re going to hell?”
I had a reply. I almost gave it, but I stopped myself just before I spoke. I must have looked rather dumbfounded and stumped, and in some ways, I guess I was. This was not the first time I had been asked this question; I had asked it of myself as well, but how could I honestly give him my answer?
You see, my first reaction was to say that the command applied only to unjust killing; that it was meant to pertain only to killing in a murderous fashion. I know some of you are nodding your heads in agreement with that, but I had to stop before I said anything of the kind. The Bible doesn’t say that. I had to admit that to myself in a split second before I looked the fool by adding meaning to the reference which could not have been inferred by merely reading it in context.
“I’ve just decided that I’m going to go on with dumb faith,” he said. He must have seen a hint of puzzlement in my eyes as I pondered his questions. I don’t know that he was looking for an answer, but I’m sure he felt that I thought I should have had one. “I’ve asked myself this stuff a hundred times about far more than this one instance, so I decided to leave it alone in order to keep some measure of faith.”
Dumb faith? How is that appealing? I thought.
I make it a point not to initiate religious or political conversation with people, especially those I’ve not called friend for very long. No one likes someone with an agenda and those topics are trigger points for every almost every human. If it’s going to come up, I want it to come up naturally, and, if possible, on the other guy’s terms. Some may interpret that as spineless or non-evangelistic, but I think it’s the more mission-minded approach. By the time the religious conversation rears its head, trust has become a key issue and vulnerability essential.
Tim was opening himself up to me in a big way. Not only had we arrived at a point in which he felt comfortable telling me that he had committed a Southern cardinal sin by question the Bible, he was also letting me know that he had decided to be dumb about that which he believed. That is what dumb faith is isn’t it? Even if we took the word literally to take a little of the edge off it would still mean something along the lines of faith without a voice, speechless faith, faith inherently incapable of explaining itself. It takes a great deal of trust to provide the courage to divulge to someone else that you’re living within that perspective.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking dumb faith. I think a lot of people are satisfied with that, and I guess that’s okay. It’s certainly worse if someone arrives there as a result of laziness, but I don’t think that’s where Tim was. I think he had grown so tired of being asked to believe things he couldn’t explain or without reason that he had mentally thrown his hands up and did the responsible thing.
By responsible I mean that many do not choose this route and end up far gone. This type of questioning can lead to a lot of things and the most common destination is some form of atheism.
It goes like this: Something makes no sense to someone; they ask questions and request guidance, and are greeted with skepticism and heresy rhetoric as if questioning were the unpardonable sin. Since, as humans, we are built to reject that, that someone typically reacts negatively feeling that the mere act of seeking should have been viewed as progress. That rejection is devastating.
Tim, instead of giving up on God, realized that God was real, and, being God, quite complex. His complexity doesn’t mean that He cannot be figured out, but it does mean that He may not be understood by a human mind, or if we can, we haven’t figured out how using the methods of reason and thought we are taught to employ presently.
Dumb faith. I’m not so sure it’s wrong, and I can’t say I’m convinced it’s right, but I know surely that it is, in its basest form, giving up.
Here are a couple things I’ve learned: I know that there are answers to every question, and I know someone knows those answers beyond doubt.
What I have had to conclude without any proof beyond logic, though, is that if I believe in another realm with beings who inhabit it i.e. Heaven, then perhaps those inhabitants know some of the answers that we simply can’t figure out here simply because we're here and they're there. That makes sense to me. I don’t like it, but it makes sense. Still, if that is true, then I must also recognize that I can’t know what they do and do not know and must therefore continue to search in case what I am seeking can be found here.
Well, maybe I added that last line in there because I just don’t like thinking that I can’t know something. I mean, I have no problem understanding that I don’t know something because God knows there’s plenty of that: Calculus escapes me, math in general bores me, science, man's greatest map to the mind of God, means a lot to me in terms of figuring out the intricacies of God, but I don’t care if I ever understand the mystery of pi or the mystical physics of gravity, black holes and String Theory. My point is that I just like the safety of knowing that I can know something if I want to.
I guess that’s the reason we have libraries.
I say all that to say this: I can’t figure out, as of this writing, the answers to Tim’s questions. I’m sure there are answers, and I’m sure they can be figured out if I just give them time and effort (or maybe just time), but for now, I just don’t know them.
I do think, however, that there are more researchable questions in the story: why do so many people go Tim’s route? Do they not understand the gravity of not understanding the scripture? Is it possible that they are just giving in to their own desires and attempting to make God’s theology match the way they want to live?
I know, statistically, that it has to be a fact that some readers have shouted a resoundingly self-righteous "YES" to those last two questions, and I would be a fool not to concede that there are some believers like that, but I think that the sincere ones have figured out that they can resign themselves to be that way, and it won’t send them to Hell.
I think there’s an issue at hand causing this mentality that most certainly can be fixed, but there are few who are willing to go there.
“I don’t know if the way I’m thinking on all this is wrong or not,” Tim began to conclude. “If it’s wrong, then I guess I’ll have to live or die with that. I just know I’m tired of getting nowhere and feeling bad for it.”
I had nothing to say.
“How so?” I replied.
“For example: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ right?”
“Correct.”
“Then why does God sanction war? I see that line in the ‘Big 10,’ but I make no sense of it elsewhere. And, too, how can we justify Christians going to war? War implies killing. Does that mean they’re going to hell?”
I had a reply. I almost gave it, but I stopped myself just before I spoke. I must have looked rather dumbfounded and stumped, and in some ways, I guess I was. This was not the first time I had been asked this question; I had asked it of myself as well, but how could I honestly give him my answer?
You see, my first reaction was to say that the command applied only to unjust killing; that it was meant to pertain only to killing in a murderous fashion. I know some of you are nodding your heads in agreement with that, but I had to stop before I said anything of the kind. The Bible doesn’t say that. I had to admit that to myself in a split second before I looked the fool by adding meaning to the reference which could not have been inferred by merely reading it in context.
“I’ve just decided that I’m going to go on with dumb faith,” he said. He must have seen a hint of puzzlement in my eyes as I pondered his questions. I don’t know that he was looking for an answer, but I’m sure he felt that I thought I should have had one. “I’ve asked myself this stuff a hundred times about far more than this one instance, so I decided to leave it alone in order to keep some measure of faith.”
Dumb faith? How is that appealing? I thought.
I make it a point not to initiate religious or political conversation with people, especially those I’ve not called friend for very long. No one likes someone with an agenda and those topics are trigger points for every almost every human. If it’s going to come up, I want it to come up naturally, and, if possible, on the other guy’s terms. Some may interpret that as spineless or non-evangelistic, but I think it’s the more mission-minded approach. By the time the religious conversation rears its head, trust has become a key issue and vulnerability essential.
Tim was opening himself up to me in a big way. Not only had we arrived at a point in which he felt comfortable telling me that he had committed a Southern cardinal sin by question the Bible, he was also letting me know that he had decided to be dumb about that which he believed. That is what dumb faith is isn’t it? Even if we took the word literally to take a little of the edge off it would still mean something along the lines of faith without a voice, speechless faith, faith inherently incapable of explaining itself. It takes a great deal of trust to provide the courage to divulge to someone else that you’re living within that perspective.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking dumb faith. I think a lot of people are satisfied with that, and I guess that’s okay. It’s certainly worse if someone arrives there as a result of laziness, but I don’t think that’s where Tim was. I think he had grown so tired of being asked to believe things he couldn’t explain or without reason that he had mentally thrown his hands up and did the responsible thing.
By responsible I mean that many do not choose this route and end up far gone. This type of questioning can lead to a lot of things and the most common destination is some form of atheism.
It goes like this: Something makes no sense to someone; they ask questions and request guidance, and are greeted with skepticism and heresy rhetoric as if questioning were the unpardonable sin. Since, as humans, we are built to reject that, that someone typically reacts negatively feeling that the mere act of seeking should have been viewed as progress. That rejection is devastating.
Tim, instead of giving up on God, realized that God was real, and, being God, quite complex. His complexity doesn’t mean that He cannot be figured out, but it does mean that He may not be understood by a human mind, or if we can, we haven’t figured out how using the methods of reason and thought we are taught to employ presently.
Dumb faith. I’m not so sure it’s wrong, and I can’t say I’m convinced it’s right, but I know surely that it is, in its basest form, giving up.
Here are a couple things I’ve learned: I know that there are answers to every question, and I know someone knows those answers beyond doubt.
What I have had to conclude without any proof beyond logic, though, is that if I believe in another realm with beings who inhabit it i.e. Heaven, then perhaps those inhabitants know some of the answers that we simply can’t figure out here simply because we're here and they're there. That makes sense to me. I don’t like it, but it makes sense. Still, if that is true, then I must also recognize that I can’t know what they do and do not know and must therefore continue to search in case what I am seeking can be found here.
Well, maybe I added that last line in there because I just don’t like thinking that I can’t know something. I mean, I have no problem understanding that I don’t know something because God knows there’s plenty of that: Calculus escapes me, math in general bores me, science, man's greatest map to the mind of God, means a lot to me in terms of figuring out the intricacies of God, but I don’t care if I ever understand the mystery of pi or the mystical physics of gravity, black holes and String Theory. My point is that I just like the safety of knowing that I can know something if I want to.
I guess that’s the reason we have libraries.
I say all that to say this: I can’t figure out, as of this writing, the answers to Tim’s questions. I’m sure there are answers, and I’m sure they can be figured out if I just give them time and effort (or maybe just time), but for now, I just don’t know them.
I do think, however, that there are more researchable questions in the story: why do so many people go Tim’s route? Do they not understand the gravity of not understanding the scripture? Is it possible that they are just giving in to their own desires and attempting to make God’s theology match the way they want to live?
I know, statistically, that it has to be a fact that some readers have shouted a resoundingly self-righteous "YES" to those last two questions, and I would be a fool not to concede that there are some believers like that, but I think that the sincere ones have figured out that they can resign themselves to be that way, and it won’t send them to Hell.
I think there’s an issue at hand causing this mentality that most certainly can be fixed, but there are few who are willing to go there.
“I don’t know if the way I’m thinking on all this is wrong or not,” Tim began to conclude. “If it’s wrong, then I guess I’ll have to live or die with that. I just know I’m tired of getting nowhere and feeling bad for it.”
I had nothing to say.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
The Man Beside My Bed
I spent my kindergarten through second grade years just outside of Dayton, Tennessee, in a town called Spring City. My father had graduated in 1984 from the East Tennessee School of Preaching and Missions in Karns, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville, and his very first preaching position was there at the Spring City church of Christ.
I don’t remember much about our family’s time in Rhea County because I was so young, but I do remember the brick and siding split-level house about five miles outside town. It had a gravel drive that seemed like a mile going to get the paper or the mail on hot summer days, and an air conditioner that was as cool as the other side of the pillow after I had outrun the sweat bees on my way back from getting that paper or the mail.
In 1986, I sat on our brown couch in that house and watched the Challenger shuttle explode before America’s eyes on television. And, it was in the kitchen of that house that I accidentally killed Sea Monkeys by picking up the little plastic container by the lid instead of the base spilling its contents all over the linoleum. I felt like a mass murderer.
I learned to ride a bike without training wheels; I learned that Daddy didn’t like us boys to go out behind the old chicken coop; I found out that you can’t catch rabbits with a homemade trap made out of a Hardee’s cup, a stick and a few stale Doritos; and even though I didn't know it at the time, I learned about my great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jenkins.
If you entered the house through the front door, walked about four steps and turned right, you would be at the foot of the stairs that led to the bathroom, Dad’s office, my parents’ bedroom, and my brother’s and my bedroom. We slept on parallel twin size beds with a bookshelf between us. During the day in that room we would play church by mimicking the Holy Communion sacraments on a coffee saucer, and at night we would read Berenstain Bears books by lamplight and giggle ourselves to sleep.
One night something I could not explain broke me from my sleep. Without moving, I lie awake and listened, but I couldn't hear anything more than my younger brother, Shane, snoring, fast asleep in his bed three feet away, and I didn’t see anything other than what the yellow light from the bathroom down the hall revealed through our open door.
What I did next gave me a memory that has remained with me as clearly as any film or picture I have ever seen in my life.
Since I didn’t see anything while facing my brother, I turned to my other side just to re-position myself and returned to sleep. It was this move that exposed the reason I had stirred.
A man. An older bald man wearing a red, white and blue suit, a white shirt with a string bowtie, and holding on to a smooth hickory cane. He was sitting, smiling and looking at me in the same safe and warm way my granddad did when I walked through the door of his house on Christmas day after a long van ride from east Tennessee to southern Indiana. And, while I certainly wasn’t expecting to see some man next to my bed, I must say that the whole scene never scared or even startled me. In fact, seeing him made me feel good and well-protected.
I noticed he was in a rocking chair rocking back and forth, and after a second of just looking at him, he reached out his long arm to place his large hand on my side, and I immediately returned to sleep.
The next night it happened again.
I was lying on my side, the same as the night before, and awoke in the same fashion. This time I just knew he was there beside me so I barely leaned my body backward and peeked out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough, he was there smiling and attempting to lean forward himself to let me know that he knew I saw him.
It wasn’t until much later, in junior high, when I found out who he was.
I was standing in my great-grandmother’s dining room rummaging around next to her old record player through quite a collection of old canes. There was a long white one that looked like the striped cylinder that hangs outside a barbershop; a bamboo one that surely accompanied a dancer in the 30s; and then there was one that looked just like that old smooth hickory cane that I saw the man holding when I was in Spring City.
I grabbed it and ran into the kitchen to tell my grandmother the story that cane reminded me of.
I told her all about the man: his cane, his clothes, his head, his smile. Her expression looked as if she couldn’t believe her ears and walked away. I didn’t know if I had made her angry or sad until she returned holding an old, gold-framed picture taken in 1978 of her grandfather, “Paw-paw,” Arthur Jenkins.
When I saw the picture, I was speechless. In her very hands was a picture of the man beside my bed. She told me that while he did get to hold me when I was a baby, I’d never really met him because he died not long after my birth. The suit I had described to her was the very one in which they buried him.
We sat at the kitchen table for the next couple of hours talking about Paw-paw. And while the living room could have held us, we all chose to remain packed around the kitchen table glued to the unfolding stories of the family members who filed in one-by-one telling of the time that they too saw Pawpaw.
I don’t remember much about our family’s time in Rhea County because I was so young, but I do remember the brick and siding split-level house about five miles outside town. It had a gravel drive that seemed like a mile going to get the paper or the mail on hot summer days, and an air conditioner that was as cool as the other side of the pillow after I had outrun the sweat bees on my way back from getting that paper or the mail.
In 1986, I sat on our brown couch in that house and watched the Challenger shuttle explode before America’s eyes on television. And, it was in the kitchen of that house that I accidentally killed Sea Monkeys by picking up the little plastic container by the lid instead of the base spilling its contents all over the linoleum. I felt like a mass murderer.
I learned to ride a bike without training wheels; I learned that Daddy didn’t like us boys to go out behind the old chicken coop; I found out that you can’t catch rabbits with a homemade trap made out of a Hardee’s cup, a stick and a few stale Doritos; and even though I didn't know it at the time, I learned about my great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jenkins.
If you entered the house through the front door, walked about four steps and turned right, you would be at the foot of the stairs that led to the bathroom, Dad’s office, my parents’ bedroom, and my brother’s and my bedroom. We slept on parallel twin size beds with a bookshelf between us. During the day in that room we would play church by mimicking the Holy Communion sacraments on a coffee saucer, and at night we would read Berenstain Bears books by lamplight and giggle ourselves to sleep.
One night something I could not explain broke me from my sleep. Without moving, I lie awake and listened, but I couldn't hear anything more than my younger brother, Shane, snoring, fast asleep in his bed three feet away, and I didn’t see anything other than what the yellow light from the bathroom down the hall revealed through our open door.
What I did next gave me a memory that has remained with me as clearly as any film or picture I have ever seen in my life.
Since I didn’t see anything while facing my brother, I turned to my other side just to re-position myself and returned to sleep. It was this move that exposed the reason I had stirred.
A man. An older bald man wearing a red, white and blue suit, a white shirt with a string bowtie, and holding on to a smooth hickory cane. He was sitting, smiling and looking at me in the same safe and warm way my granddad did when I walked through the door of his house on Christmas day after a long van ride from east Tennessee to southern Indiana. And, while I certainly wasn’t expecting to see some man next to my bed, I must say that the whole scene never scared or even startled me. In fact, seeing him made me feel good and well-protected.
I noticed he was in a rocking chair rocking back and forth, and after a second of just looking at him, he reached out his long arm to place his large hand on my side, and I immediately returned to sleep.
The next night it happened again.
I was lying on my side, the same as the night before, and awoke in the same fashion. This time I just knew he was there beside me so I barely leaned my body backward and peeked out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough, he was there smiling and attempting to lean forward himself to let me know that he knew I saw him.
It wasn’t until much later, in junior high, when I found out who he was.
I was standing in my great-grandmother’s dining room rummaging around next to her old record player through quite a collection of old canes. There was a long white one that looked like the striped cylinder that hangs outside a barbershop; a bamboo one that surely accompanied a dancer in the 30s; and then there was one that looked just like that old smooth hickory cane that I saw the man holding when I was in Spring City.
I grabbed it and ran into the kitchen to tell my grandmother the story that cane reminded me of.
I told her all about the man: his cane, his clothes, his head, his smile. Her expression looked as if she couldn’t believe her ears and walked away. I didn’t know if I had made her angry or sad until she returned holding an old, gold-framed picture taken in 1978 of her grandfather, “Paw-paw,” Arthur Jenkins.
When I saw the picture, I was speechless. In her very hands was a picture of the man beside my bed. She told me that while he did get to hold me when I was a baby, I’d never really met him because he died not long after my birth. The suit I had described to her was the very one in which they buried him.
We sat at the kitchen table for the next couple of hours talking about Paw-paw. And while the living room could have held us, we all chose to remain packed around the kitchen table glued to the unfolding stories of the family members who filed in one-by-one telling of the time that they too saw Pawpaw.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
In Tune With the Storm's Garden (Ponderings About the Neutrality of the Future)
Right now someone is doing something for the very last time. It may even be me. Tying their shoes, cooking lunch, arguing, saying "I love you." It's the calm before the storm. The time when those who will die have no idea and every idea at the same time. They will say and do things that will be remembered on Monday when they are buried.
"How strange that he..."
"She told me..."
"I had no idea that would be the last time I ever heard his voice."
Something will be left undone. Something else will be wrapped up sufficently. Everything will end tonight for someone who did everything right and still died, and for someone who ignored and dies as a result. No one is safe. Nothing is sacred.
Say: I love you. I hate you. I will miss you. I need you. I'll be back.
Fate has you now and you will rest or roam with the answers to all your questions. Even answers you didn't know you would need to questions you never thought you would ask.
And, as much as you will want to tell me, and as badly as I'll want to know -- we can't communicate any longer.
Tonight will be the worst night of someone's life. Tonight will be the best night of someone's life. Tonight will be remembered forever. Tonight will never be thought of again. Tonight.
Forever tonight. Into the oblivion of time either on the line never visited again or on the circle to return one day.
Head to the east. Their sages can save you atop mountains of stone and knowledge where moderation and flow move through the body tuning every discordant note. The music will not fix you. It will not prepare you. It will not guide you. It will only accompany you.
The garden will not soothe you. It will order you. But only if it's in control. The sand, the rocks, the birds, the rake -- but instruments of splendor which by themselves represent only the ability. Combine with capability and acceptance, movement and light, sound and air.
Tonight marks not the beginning or the end, the middle or the prior, the thought nor the afterthought.
It will not be bad. It will not be good.
It will be.
So breathe.
(written while listening to "Mending Your Own Mind" and "Calming Insight of Ourselves" both from Dean Evenson's album Healing Sanctuary while contemplating the coming storms of April 7th, 2006 in the midwest and southeast)
"How strange that he..."
"She told me..."
"I had no idea that would be the last time I ever heard his voice."
Something will be left undone. Something else will be wrapped up sufficently. Everything will end tonight for someone who did everything right and still died, and for someone who ignored and dies as a result. No one is safe. Nothing is sacred.
Say: I love you. I hate you. I will miss you. I need you. I'll be back.
Fate has you now and you will rest or roam with the answers to all your questions. Even answers you didn't know you would need to questions you never thought you would ask.
And, as much as you will want to tell me, and as badly as I'll want to know -- we can't communicate any longer.
Tonight will be the worst night of someone's life. Tonight will be the best night of someone's life. Tonight will be remembered forever. Tonight will never be thought of again. Tonight.
Forever tonight. Into the oblivion of time either on the line never visited again or on the circle to return one day.
Head to the east. Their sages can save you atop mountains of stone and knowledge where moderation and flow move through the body tuning every discordant note. The music will not fix you. It will not prepare you. It will not guide you. It will only accompany you.
The garden will not soothe you. It will order you. But only if it's in control. The sand, the rocks, the birds, the rake -- but instruments of splendor which by themselves represent only the ability. Combine with capability and acceptance, movement and light, sound and air.
Tonight marks not the beginning or the end, the middle or the prior, the thought nor the afterthought.
It will not be bad. It will not be good.
It will be.
So breathe.
(written while listening to "Mending Your Own Mind" and "Calming Insight of Ourselves" both from Dean Evenson's album Healing Sanctuary while contemplating the coming storms of April 7th, 2006 in the midwest and southeast)
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
New Short Fiction Coming
My newest short fiction piece is in the works. Below is the beginning to "Dusty's Trail," which is supposed to act as a bit of a teaser for you, though it actually may have the opposite effect.
Dusty's Trail
"Up ahead is the trail Dusty told me about. I don’t think I ever would have seen it without his help. When you’re not looking for it, it blends in with the rest of the woods, but looking at it straight on it’s obvious. The new and old oaks rise and bend over it making the whole entrance look like a tall cathedral window so Dusty calls it Cathedral Trail. It’s religious for him, and it’s becoming that way for me.
I’ve been here to this field a hundred times. It never gets old because the seasons are always changing. Sometimes my feet drag the green grass and leave a light slug trail that’s visible when the sun is out. Other times the leaves crunch under my shoes and the sound of the rustle echoes for what feels like a thousand miles. I hate making noise out here. I feel like I’m disturbing all of nature, like laughing in church.
The air is a bit cleaner right here and it’s always windy. I have a theory about that. The trees trap this field on every side. The only breaks are the path I took to get here and the trail Dusty told me about. Sometimes it feels like protection and sometimes it feels like a lynching, but either way I think the breeze finds its way here because the trees open up like they do and allow the wind to fall to the ground pretty hard. I don’t really know that for truth, but I feel like it makes sense. But, I don’t guess nature makes a lot of sense. Like the trees – they’re here, I always see them, but for most of the year they’re dead, and I walk on the drippings of their death making all kinds of embarrassing noise.
There’s no time to be studying this place right now. I’ll be back soon enough. For now, I’ve got to find that stone-slab table he was talking about. Once I get to the trail it won’t be so loud and I think I can be to the table in about twenty minutes.
That table, according to him, either was or is a horrible place. Dusty said that a local Satan worshipping group used it to sacrifice their animals and do all their little rituals. Maybe I’m sadistic for wanting to go see it, but the thought of something like that being in these very woods is just haunting enough to be tempting.
I’ve never admitted this kind of thing to anyone, but I’m a little freakish like that. I love death and funerals and crime scenes. When I go to a place where I know someone has died, it feels holy, like a portal. All the seconds of someone’s life were counting down to this very place and maybe they, the seconds themselves, even knew it, watching sadly, or not, this human or animal do everything for the very last time. Maybe I am the only person in my life that doesn’t know when and where I’ll die, or how."
Dusty's Trail
"Up ahead is the trail Dusty told me about. I don’t think I ever would have seen it without his help. When you’re not looking for it, it blends in with the rest of the woods, but looking at it straight on it’s obvious. The new and old oaks rise and bend over it making the whole entrance look like a tall cathedral window so Dusty calls it Cathedral Trail. It’s religious for him, and it’s becoming that way for me.
I’ve been here to this field a hundred times. It never gets old because the seasons are always changing. Sometimes my feet drag the green grass and leave a light slug trail that’s visible when the sun is out. Other times the leaves crunch under my shoes and the sound of the rustle echoes for what feels like a thousand miles. I hate making noise out here. I feel like I’m disturbing all of nature, like laughing in church.
The air is a bit cleaner right here and it’s always windy. I have a theory about that. The trees trap this field on every side. The only breaks are the path I took to get here and the trail Dusty told me about. Sometimes it feels like protection and sometimes it feels like a lynching, but either way I think the breeze finds its way here because the trees open up like they do and allow the wind to fall to the ground pretty hard. I don’t really know that for truth, but I feel like it makes sense. But, I don’t guess nature makes a lot of sense. Like the trees – they’re here, I always see them, but for most of the year they’re dead, and I walk on the drippings of their death making all kinds of embarrassing noise.
There’s no time to be studying this place right now. I’ll be back soon enough. For now, I’ve got to find that stone-slab table he was talking about. Once I get to the trail it won’t be so loud and I think I can be to the table in about twenty minutes.
That table, according to him, either was or is a horrible place. Dusty said that a local Satan worshipping group used it to sacrifice their animals and do all their little rituals. Maybe I’m sadistic for wanting to go see it, but the thought of something like that being in these very woods is just haunting enough to be tempting.
I’ve never admitted this kind of thing to anyone, but I’m a little freakish like that. I love death and funerals and crime scenes. When I go to a place where I know someone has died, it feels holy, like a portal. All the seconds of someone’s life were counting down to this very place and maybe they, the seconds themselves, even knew it, watching sadly, or not, this human or animal do everything for the very last time. Maybe I am the only person in my life that doesn’t know when and where I’ll die, or how."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
