A Silent Night on the Psych Ward

It was a silent night on the psychiatric ward

where Sarah sat staring at the flickering TV

while snow fell outside the locked windows.

It was a holy night with Frank fluttering 

his magnificent wings through sleepless

nights and places unreachable by reason.

All is calm, especially in Mary's room 

where she lies motionless staring at the

ceiling, unable to move or speak her mind.

All is bright for Brenda who sees lights and

stars filling the creases and crevices of

sterile rooms in infinite dimensions.

'Round yon virgin stands Crystal who has 

been raped so many times she has lost

count, revisiting them nightly in her dreams.

Mother and child, a relationship lost to Rick 

whose Mom had abandoned him as a kid,

growing up in a treacherous foster care system.

 

Holy infant visit this place of damaged

and lost souls who have seen and experienced

what few can even begin to imagine or understand.

So tender and mild, Tina the underpaid psych tech

who is a ray of hope to these patients with her

concern, graciousness, and lack of judgement.

Sleep in heavenly peace you who have not been 

forced to see those in such a state or had to 

imagine what these tortured lives might be like.

Sleep in heavenly peace remembering all who

suffer this Christmas without consolation of 

family or friends, isolated from the wider world.

***

Ghost of a Prayer

Feeling empty, 

waiting to be filled 

with something more 

than the petty pittances 

of misguided desires,

I quietly offer up a 

ghost of a prayer

***

Grandma Galatians

It seems that so few people go to church anymore
or treat it like just one of many possibilities that
can fill a week of activities, like getting ice cream
or going to a sporting event.  When conflicts arise
it is the first to go, an easy cut from the schedule
that seemingly has no repercussions.  But for me,
it's like failing to visit an adoring grandmother who
lives alone, in failing health, and is eager to see me in
order to heap love on my shoulders while taking off
the heavy stuff that is otherwise crushing my soul.
But maybe in my short-sightedness I have failed
to see or understand that love.  As I prioritize other
things she sits in her rocking chair looking out the
window hoping to see my family pull up the driveway.
It is not about boredom.  It is not about inconvenience.
It is about love because God *is* love and longs to
meet with us in his house and sup with us so that
we grow together sharing one another's burdens.


***

Elementary School Field Trip

I Dream of Trump

A long and meandering dream last night... I was hanging out with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in NYC.  Donald was driving the car, I was in the middle, and Hillary was on the other side of me by the passenger door.  We reminisced, pontificated, and emoted on a variety of subjects like old friends.

At some point I notice we are coming up on a stop sign and Donald is not even attempting to slow down.  I tell him, "Donald, that's a stop sign."  He shakes his head like "I know, I know," then commences to blow right through it as another car enters the intersection.  Donald simply goes around it in the opposite lane and when oncoming traffic presents itself he keeps going left, up over the curb, over the sidewalk, and onto the grass of a city park.  He continues across the park and then remerges with traffic on the other side of the park going the right direction.

We drive through old town Manhattan and then park and go into the lobby of a building, waiting to meet someone.  Donald's hair is a mess and I try to convince him to put on my baseball cap.  "It's fine, it's fine," he waves me off.  During all of this, Hillary is like the long suffering mother-figure keeping her comments to a minimum.

I was describing this dream to another staff member today at work and it struck me that 1) he ignores the stop sign and gets in trouble, 2) he is still in trouble with the oncoming traffic, but 3) he avoids the consequences of both actions by short-cutting through the park.  That is DJT in a nutshell.

'til away I fly

humor is a drug
I shoot into
a willing vein,
trying to fill
the empty spaces,
crowding out the pain

making a sound
that could be
a laugh or a cry,
before I die,
wanting to love
and be loved in reply

without a need
to ask why
or to justify,
something that is
and will always be
'til away I fly


***

The Airfield Mosque

It was a beautiful Sunday morning when Captain Love opened his eyes to see the sun streaming in through his window.  Still thick from dreams he thought he was back home and rolled over to kiss his wife, but found himself alone in the small bed.  The light coming through the single window illuminated his flak jacket and shoulder holster with 9mm pistol hanging from a hook on the wall.  He pushed in firmly at his temples and then rubbed his shaved head vigorously to exorcise the disappointment and depression threatening to overwhelm him at finding himself once again in Iraq.

Eventually he rolled over and sat up clopping his boots to the ground and checked the cargo pocket of his combat fatigues for a pack of gum.  Years ago as an enlisted infantryman it would have been a pack of smokes to help clear the cobwebs from his brain.  Those were the years before he'd had a wife and small son to look after, when his health was something he'd taken for granted.  His back was sore from spending half the night under his bed as a spate of mortar fire had hit somewhere inside the base walls.  He rubbed at his lower back and was reminded of the title of a book he'd read in college "Things Fall Apart."

Several plastic bottles of what appeared to be Mountain Dew were sitting on the floor beside his bed.  Stumbling through pitch darkness to find the port-a-pot at night was an unpleasant and somewhat dangerous exercise in a war zone, so empty water bottles were saved throughout the day and served as temporary holding containers for a soldier's urine.  He had accumulated a good number of them over the course of the week and they were beginning to take up an inordinate amount of floor space in his small hooch.  There were certain advantages to being a male in an austere environment and this was certainly one of them.

It was his day off, the first in over a month.  His plan was to avoid the Combat Stress Clinic where he worked and stay away from his sleeping quarters as well to assure he stayed off and could enjoy his time in whatever way possible in this god-forsaken place.  The only way for them to find him would be to send the runner on duty to pick him up at his hooch.  A light rain suddenly began to fall and he could hear the drops tapping on the plastic coverings of the sandbags on his roof.  He stepped back inside and grabbed his wet weather gear as well as his small digital camera, tucking it into a waterproof inner pocket.

His practice of taking pictures during the day and downloading them to his laptop in the evening had become his go-to method for stress relief during this deployment.   He was always amazed at what beauty could be found in even so desolate a place if the eye and heart remained connected and attentive.  He was partial to shadows, his own included, as outlines on a variety of backdrops.  This was most effective during the golden hour of early evening and worked as a metaphor in his mind for his feelings of loneliness and insubstantiality brought on from being separated from his wife and son on the wrong side of an ocean.

Large sections of the base were a maze of concrete walls meant to isolate damage from incoming mortar fire, a regular source of things raining from the sky.  In comparison, Captain Love did not mind the watery kind.  It was a different kind of chill.  The base was on the outskirts of Mosul and used to be the city's airport before the US Army rolled in and took control of it.  Any possibilities of air travel rested solely with the foreign occupiers inside their walled compound.  Within those walls he'd seen a stone minaret beyond the Combat Support Hospital that had piqued his curiosity and promised to be a prime spot for taking pictures.

This was his opportunity to explore, but not before getting a cup of coffee to keep the chilly air at bay.  The Green Bean sat next to the Hospital just off of the flight line.  It was a modular room fronted by a covered patio with a random assortment of tables and chairs.  He recognized the music as "French Cafe", one of many Putumayo World Music CD's played in rotation and a favorite of his.  It was mid-morning and the line was uncharacteristically short.  The men working there were good-natured with strong accents and easy smiles, just a few of many foreign contractors working on the base from places like Pakistan and Somalia.

He did not linger as he was want to do.  The promise of the mosque beckoned him and he needed to keep moving to keep warm.  He walked in the general direction of the mosque hitting a dead end or two before finding the main road that got him to his destination.  The mosque was situated at a convergence of three roads and was surrounded by a stone wall about chest high.  The lone minaret was the commanding feature and looked to be leaning at a slight angle.  The road he was walking on split in two at the backside of the small mosque compound and he had to circle around, following the wall, to find access through the front gate.

Having spent time in Tikrit and now Mosul, Captain Love was often saddened by the lack of greenery.  In Tikrit there was a stand of symmetrically planted trees near his clinic that were either half dead or shattered from mortar fire.  There was still evidence of irrigation ditches between the rows and some rusted pipes sticking up above the dirt that had eroded away.  One evening, while walking on the road to the chow hall, the sun had just disappeared leaving a blaze of colors on the horizon.  He noticed one of the intact trees was forming a beautiful silhouette, so he ran back to the clinic to retrieve his camera to capture it.

The grounds of the mosque within the walls was overgrown.  Bushes were bulging upwards and outwards, losing their symmetry and crowding the main walkway.  Lamp posts sat askew with shattered glass panes and broken light bulbs.  Birds were everywhere flitting from roof to tree to wall, fully aware of the importance of this patch of green to their ecosystem.  There were no signs forbidding entrance to the grounds and so he entered the forgotten place and forgot himself, becoming the eye of a camera taking pictures and fighting the temptation to enter the minaret which he knew could be dangerous and might get him reprimanded.

The mosque itself was small and in the shape of an octagon, constructed of white stone blocks with painted line patterns embellishing it.  The top of the dome was bare of the faded and peeling green paint that still clung to its rounded base.  He approached the front door and found a padlock dangling from a broken clasp that had been used to secure the door.  He was hidden from view on the mosque porch due to the overgrown bushes which emboldened him to grasp the door handle and give it a tug.  It opened with a creak and a sigh.  He thought he heard a scurrying sound from within which froze him to the spot, unsure of what to do.

It's not like he had a choice, yet he did have a choice though it didn't feel that way.  He felt drawn into the roundish room though he was not Muslim and did not feel like he belonged in this place, let alone in this country.  He could see light slanting downwards from the high windows illuminating swaths of the gloomy interior.  Thoughts of taking off his boots crossed his mind, but was dismissed as impractical if not foolish in this unknown place.  A flash of shadows and dark shapes startled him and had him reflexively reaching for his sidearm.  The movements were frantic, but then settled into shadows of birds landing on the outside window sills.

This was more than enough excitement for one day for Captain Love.  He scanned the room once more before leaving, but caught sight of a slight movement across the room.  This time he did pull out his sidearm and pointed it towards the interior of the building.  On the opposite side of the room was a niche that he had not seen before his eyes had adjusted to the mix of light and dark.  It was within that recessed space that he'd seen something move.  He did not know of any animals on the base beyond a dog that one of the units kept as a mascot.  He was most concerned for the possibility of an enemy combatant holing up in the place to evade detection.

It was a quandary.  If he left to get help the presumed person could escape and make mischief of some sort or other.  If he checked it out himself there would be no backup if something went wrong.  He decided to proceed with caution and called out to the dark shape.  There was no answer and so he advanced with his sidearm thrust in front of him, flipping off the safety.  Halfway across the room he could see it was, in fact, a huddled human form in the niche but smaller than he expected.  He remembered he had a small tactical flashlight clipped to his flak jacket and trained it on the spot.  Two impossibly large eyes stared intensely back at him.

It was a boy of no more than six years of age, the same age as his son.  His hair stuck out from his head and had bits of dirt and leaves stuck in it.  Captain Love crouched down to his level and laid his flashlight down where it could illuminate them both.  "Hey little guy, where'd you come from?"  The boy continued to stare, frozen in place.  He holstered his gun and removed his flak jacket to try and look less intimidating, more human.  He removed his hat as well and continued to talk in a voice he used to soothe his son.  The boy was starting to shiver and Captain Love resisted the temptation to pull the child into a hug.

He patted his various pockets feeling for something he could offer the boy to eat.  He found some candy that he'd stashed from an old MRE and held out the brightly colored pieces to the boy.  The boy's eyes flicked from the officer to the candy and back, still frozen in his crouched position.  Captain Love leaned in further which triggered the boy to spring forward, knocking the candy from his hand and causing him to fall back on his butt.  The sensation he felt was as if he were a balloon that someone had popped.  He watched in slow motion as the candies hit the floor and scattered in the beam of light.  His hand found a small knife protruding from between his ribs.

The boy was running for the door while the Captain's hand reached out to assure him he was not angry, even as he fell over onto the floor and sent the flashlight spinning.  He felt a wetness covering his hand and it suddenly became very hard to breathe.  The room was now spinning like a top and he tried to yell out for help, but he could not get any air to go out through his voice box.  He saw the silhouette of the boy standing in the doorway for a moment and then it was gone.  His only thought was for the boy's safety.  He did not blame him for what was his own intrusion into this place where he did not belong.  Blackness blanketed his mind.

Captain Love found himself back home in his bed and rolled over to see the silhouette of his son standing in their bedroom doorway through bleary eyes.  He did not yet have command of his voice, still caught between the worlds of sleep and wakefulness, so he gestured for the boy to come and lay with him.  The boy snuggled into his Dad's side and they watched the paddles of the ceiling fan rotate in silence above them.  His thoughts roamed through memories of shared moments like this until he noticed the ceiling slowing becoming transparent and gray skies beginning to form above the whirling blades of a helicopter.  He felt himself being lifted off the ground.

The Whale

Prince Namor was a loner and that is why Billy loved him: half human, half Atlantean with little wings at his ankles that allowed him to fly.  He was holding his own in a battle against the Incredible Hulk which is more than can be expected from someone less than half the Hulk's size.  Namor, aka "The Submariner," was also known for his quick temper and thirst for vengeance for his people.  Billy did not have a people, but he knew of that deep down anger that could come rising up out of the ocean like a new volcano.

"Billy!  Did you feed Mick-mick?" His Mom yelled from another part of the trailer.  There was no place to hide in a place so small and with walls so thin.  Billy could even hear when people used the bathroom which he thought was super gross.

"Yeah, I did!" he lied.  It was a little miserable rat dog that he thought must be his Mom's only friend in the world.  The little turd had ripped up some comic books he had stashed under his bed while he was at school and he'd never forgiven it.  They included his prized Wolverine four part series that was irreplaceable.  It was as if Wolverine himself had come slashing out of the pages with his retractable claws.  His Mom's love for the dog was the only thing that kept him from clubbing it with his baseball bat and burying it under the trailer.  He was not a monster, after all.

"Don't you have school today?" She stood in the doorway of his room with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips, hand on hip.  She was wearing a bathrobe and her hair was wrapped in a Holiday Inn towel looking like a weathered swami.

"No, it's one of those teacher day things," he lied again without looking at her over the comic book.

She lit the cigarette and then headed back down the hallway in a huff.  "Just stay out of my hair.  Rick's coming over later and you need to be somewhere else, got it?"  Her voice seemed to echo in his head in a way that was hard to explain, like it was coming from a different place.  He considered the possibility she'd somehow crossed over into the Negative Zone at the end of the hall, the walls between worlds as thin as those of their trailer.  But that was a bit too dramatic, even for him.  Maybe just wishful thinking.

"Yeah, whatever."  He felt his anger rising at the thought of Rick coming over with his condescending smile and snide remarks that made Billy feel small and inadequate.  His hands clenched into fists and his breathing quickened as he noticed them swelling up and taking on a greenish hue.  He caught himself and unclenched them, slowed his breathing, and relaxed back into his clothes.

***

It was Friday and he was playing hooky despite it being only the second month of his sixth grade year.  Middle school was a pain and he had already missed more than a few days, but no one seemed to care.

There was a chilly breeze blowing when he stepped out of the trailer and descended the rickety metal frame steps.  He pulled a frayed knit hat over his substantial head to cover the tops of his ears, but not before a chill shot through his thin frame.  The smell of burning leaves was in the air and the neighbor's St. Bernard immediately jumped up to bark at him, pulling hard at its chain.

"Shut up, Smokem!"  The matted hulk of a dog had terrified him when he was younger, but now he was just an annoyance.  As long as he avoided the packed dirt circle that indicated the range of Smokem's chain he was safe.  He drug his bike out from under the end of the trailer and hopped on, wobbling through the loose gravel until he reached the road.

To his right a scattering of rundown houses and trailers rolled by, trees at their backs demarcating the line between town and country.  Some of the yards were overgrown, littered with trash and a random assortment of rusting machines.  Even as a twelve year old he sensed it was not even really considered a neighborhood as much as a forgotten spot that most people of the town tried to pretend wasn't there.  Billy felt eyes on him from the dirty windows between slots of broken blinds.  They belonged to people who judged him harshly, he was sure of it.  He flipped the bird in that general direction, then hit the road that led into the town proper.

He scanned the street to find opportunities to pop wheelies or ramp his bike up into the air.  A fallen branch provided the first opportunity and he hit it bringing the front tire up off the ground.  It quickly came back down when the back tire hit the branch in turn.  He then veered off of the road and up onto the sidewalk via someone's driveway and pumped the pedals until flying off the end of the curb, nearly clipping the stop sign on the corner in the process.

Down a side street he caught sight of a UPS truck making its deliveries.  It was just pulling away from a house when he caught up to it and paralleled the driver sitting perched by his open sliding door.

"Hey kid, why aren't you at school?" The driver shouted over the rumble of the engine.

"I'm too cool for school, man!"  Billy thought he was being clever with his word play and was satisfied when the driver gave him a grin.  He peeled off left and made a u-turn to see what had been dropped off after he was sure the driver could no longer see him in his side mirrors.

The house looked to be a rundown cottage with high grass and gutters full of maple shoots and weeds.  He had never seen anyone at this particular house and had assumed it was abandoned.  He laid his bike down on the sidewalk and approached the covered porch while looking left and right to make sure no one was watching him.  His eye caught sight of an overturned row boat that lay in the side yard and he briefly forgot about the UPS package.  The boat was an old wooden affair with something painted in large pealing letters on the flat back side.  By turning his head sideways he was able to make out the upside down name, "CM Ishmael."  He placed his foot under a space at its point and applied upward pressure to lift it a bit and gauge if he could flip it upright.  A rustling noise underneath sent him scurrying back to the porch like a startled cat.

He waited for his heart beat to slow down, then once again scanned the immediate area to make sure he was not being observed before kneeling in front of the package.  He thought it odd that there was no writing on it, no address, no name, nothing.  He pulled a butterfly knife out of his pocket and did the flick-spin-flick motion necessary to open it.  It was one of many martial arts type weapons that he collected and practiced on regularly in order to one day defend himself or maybe even kill a small menacing animal if needs be.  His eyes flicked over to the boat to make sure nothing had emerged from underneath it.

The package covering yielded easily to his knife and he found a box with a picture of an odd device on it with the words "The Pocket Fisherman! by Ronco" emblazoned across it.  A small red square in the corner indicated "as seen on TV."  He did not have a TV.  He removed it from the box and looked to find some instructions to guide him.  It had a short folding pole connected to a plastic box with a winding reel on the side, a handle, and compartment with a bobber and some extra hooks in it.  It was a portable fishing pole, but could hardly fit in your pocket, he thought.

He heard a voice from under the boat whisper, "you are not worthy of it."

His fingers clinched around the fishing pole's handle as he bolted for his bike, not looking back.  He tried to get his bike upright and on it, but with only one hand available the bike went up and over taking him with it.  He sprawled out into the street but never let go of the handle.  With a skip, a jump, and a few wobbles he was back up on his bike and peddling away as fast as his legs would let him.

The distinctive sight of his Mom's mustard yellow Ford Pinto was disappearing over a hill going  the opposite direction when he careened around the corner and onto his road.  He dropped his bike in the yard and leapt onto the landing skipping the first two steps.  The screen door was missing its spring and slammed against the side of the trailer as he pushed though the main door and stumbled inside.  It took him a few minutes to catch his breath, hands on knees, before retreating to his room with the stolen fishing pole.

He shut his door, plopped onto the bed, and stared at the large water stain on his ceiling while waiting for his breathing to slow.  Like watching cloud formations, the stain appeared to take on various shapes the longer he lay there looking at it and it calmed him.  A school of fish circled the ceiling fan before coalescing into the shape of a whale whose mouth arced downwards, expanding, reaching for him, encircling him.  He slept.

***

When Billy awakened he knew what he had to do.  His room was dark, but some light was trickling in between the curtains.  He thought it must be some time in the early evening, having slept the day away.  He gathered up some clothes, his nunchucks, a few comic books, and shoved them all into an Army surplus backpack.  Rummaging in the back of his closet he found his stash of Halloween candy and packed that as well.  Last of all he added the pocket fisherman.

He crept out into the hallway moving quietly, but his foot immediately made contact with an empty can in the semi-darkness and sent it clanging into another.  He froze and listened for movement in the trailer.  Someone was snoring and briefly stopped.  He heard them roll over before resuming again.  Beer cans were strewn on the floor making his progress to the front door like navigating a mine field.  In the kitchen he was confronted by Mick-mick who came over to sniff his foot and then began to make a low growling noise that threatened to escalate into barking.  Billy quickly reached into a side pocket of his backpack and pulled out a beef jerky strip and pulled off a piece to give to the dog.  Micky snatched it greedily and retreated behind the couch.

The air outside was moist and a layer of fog was clinging to the ground.  It made little swirls around him as he pushed his bike to the road and then headed in the direction away from town.  The fog was thick enough to obscure the ground so that he needed to use the telephone poles and tree line to maintain himself in the middle of the road and away from the ditches on either side.  Billy marveled at the fact it was slowly getting lighter instead of darker until he realized that he must have slept all day and through the night as well.

The country road he was looking for was at least a few miles from his house and obscured by trees and overgrown brush.  The fog had lifted by the time he reached it and some sun was streaming down through the trees.  Two metal poles marked the width of its entrance, but were hard to see due to a covering of rust.  It was only their unnatural straightness that gave them away in the underbrush.  A thin chain ran between poles with a sign dangling from the center obscured by a clump of roadside weeds that he quickly stomped flat, "Town Reservoir - no swimming, fishing, or dumping."

He maneuvered his bike around one of the poles, then dropped it in the underbrush.  The trail led upwards until reaching its highest point where a visual break in the trees opened up and he found himself looking down upon a body of water a hundred or so feet farther along sitting in a natural bowl.  Near the spot where the path hit the water sat a small pump house with some pipes leading out into the water that did not look like it had functioned in quite some time.  The reservoir's size was something between a smallish lake and a largish pond.  The water was always cold, fed by water pouring out from a rocky opening that led into a cave on the far side.  Billy had discovered it the year before and it had become a place of refuge for him.

He circled around to a flattened area that sat nestled between the water and a steep hillside with a flat rock face from the cave making up the third side.  Some old wooden pallets lay in a pile against the rock that he'd collected in the past year, found in the underbrush of the surrounding forest.  They were remnants of a primitive civilization that he had stumbled upon, wooden koans of indeterminate use and purpose, or so he had convinced himself.

The cave mouth exhaled its bitter cold breath into the sunlight, murmuring in agreement.

***

The sun was directly overhead by the time Billy finished putting together his makeshift hovel.  He wrapped a bandana around his head to protect his ears and wide forehead from the sun and found perch on a boulder that sat at the water's edge.  The water was smooth and mirror-like, interrupted only by the speckling of brightly colored leaves which swirled in patterns from an unseen current that emanated from the cave's small mouth.  He thought of the swirl of fish that had formed from the water stain on his ceiling and remembered the pocket fisherman in his backpack.

Part of his packed equipment included an Army entrenching tool that had been his Dad's before he'd left for god-knows-where and never came back.  At least he'd been good for something, thought Billy.  He walked into the tree line and dug a cat hole a foot or so deep for his latrine.  The effort also yielded a few worms for a try at fishing.

Back on the boulder he hooked his worm and adjusted the bobber for a depth of a few feet.  It took him several tries to get used to the truncated rod and its stiff release button.  He was finally able to get it out about twenty feet or so and had to be content with that.  This was the hardest part, waiting for a bite and trying not to let his mind wander too far afield so that he wouldn't miss a hit on his worm.  His past experience had taught him that if you missed the first hit or two your worm was likely gone.  If you were alert and paying attention, a bounce of the bobber could trigger a twitch that might set the hook whether the fish bit it or not.

This was all well and good, but his mind was not one that could remain fixed for even a minute or two.  The Submariner was once again battling the Hulk in his mind's eye, an epic pitting of wills and brute strength.  He could almost feel the rock shake underneath him with their blows.  His mind suddenly snapped back to reality when he realized the rock had actually shook underneath him.  Not only that, but his arm holding the fishing pole was being pulled out and away from his body.

The line was not only unwinding at a high rate of speed, but it was angling downwards, not outwards.  Billy wondered at how deep this pondish lake might be and a knot of fear began to form in the pit of his stomach.  When the line reached its end, the pocket fisherman leapt from his hand and disappeared under the water.  Easy come easy go, he thought.

He scanned the surface of the water trying to make sense of what had just happened.  All sound was being drowned out by the pounding of his heart and a kind of ringing in his ears.  For the first time that day it occurred to him that his perception of reality had been fraying, but now he wondered if it hadn't snapped altogether.

Somewhere in the middle of the reservoir bubbles began to break the surface with a swell raising the contour of the water.  Billy stood transfixed, focusing on the spot, not knowing what to make of it.

An explosion of water sent him sprawling off of the boulder and face down onto the ground.  He rolled over in time to see a massive white object the size of a boxcar hurtling up out of the water, peaking, then flopping back into the water sending a tremendous wave washing over him.  The cold water sent his senses into overdrive.  The sky took on a greenish cast to Billy's eye as he felt himself changing, growing, rippling with surprise and anger.

The object resurfaced and revealed itself to be a sperm whale with its massive squared off head and small backset beady eyes.  It thrashed its back fin and sped towards Billy who could feel his clothes constricting around him and splitting as his muscles expanded and his shoes exploded off of his feet.  With the monster bearing down on him he snatched up the boulder and hurled it at its approaching head.  The impact stunned the whale and it flopped over on its side in the shallow water.  Billy-thing was immediately upon it, pounding it with his oversized fists until he was sure it was dead.

The rage coursing through him was intoxicating. Billy-thing waded farther out into the water and got ahold of the whale's back fin and drug it up onto the shore where he swept it over his head and smashed it onto the ground obliterating his hovel.  The creature's lower jaw hung open revealing its large cone-shaped teeth.  He got ahold of the jaw near its base and ripped it free from the body, then snapped it in half to form an improbable handsaw that Billy-thing used to denude its flesh until all that was left was a skeleton.  Next he lumbered into the tree line and pulled up some trees from their roots and used them to prop up the skeleton's spine.

Billy-thing was exhausted.  His massive shoulders drooped in on himself as he sat under the morbid frame of his newly constructed shelter.  He felt his body shrinking, his mind shrinking, his heart shrinking.  He felt things going black as he plopped over to the ground and fell into a deep sleep.

***

"What the hell was that?"  The two boys looked at each other in amused disbelief.

"Man!  Ol' Batty Bill went ape shit, didn't he?" The second boy laughed, but still kept his voice down for fear of waking him.  They were crouched behind some trees overlooking the reservoir and had witnessed the tattered and homeless man splashing in the water, throwing his things around, and dragging fallen branches out from the forest before lying down and seemingly falling asleep.

"Let's get out of here before he wakes up and goes berserk again."  They made their way back to the path and ran up over the hill to the road.  The smaller of the two tripped and fell, rolling over and grabbing his shin.  His friend knelt down to check on him.

"What happened?  Did you trip over something, numb nuts?"

The injured boy pushed him over and went back to rubbing his shin vigorously.  "It was something sticking out of the bushes, man."

When the pain had subsided they investigated the presumed spot and found a rusted pedal sticking up from the ground.  With some digging and tugging they pulled the deteriorating remains of an old bike out from under the dirt and undergrowth.

Life Teaches Us

Life teaches us
what we need to know if
we're willing to look and listen.
The problem with sermons, whether
from preachers, friends, or strangers
is that they are too on the nose.
It's not like we can avoid life.
Living leads to suffering &
that is the only teacher 

worth listening to.


***

The Benefits of Writing

The story lays out like bricking a path,
memories & images plucked from the past,
laid side by side and end to end without
need for mortar or any other glue, just
the weight of gravity pushing gently
downwards, squeezing out the pain.

***

A Lennon Seder

Throughout my ten years of practice as a psychiatrist I've had opportunity to work in a variety of settings and attend conferences in various parts of the United States.  I am oftentimes asked by people I've just met if I am Jewish.  I guess with my profession, having the name Aaron, sporting a beard, and wearing roundish spectacles all plays into a particular stereotype.

This afternoon I was alone for a few hours after getting home from call at the hospital.  I changed into shorts, a t-shirt, and a heavy long-sleeved shirt before realizing at some point that it was unseasonably warm for late October.  After taking the heavy shirt off and drooping it around my shoulders I walked by a mirror in our dining room and it struck me that it looked like a kind of prayer shawl.

The dining room table had been cleared during the day by my wife and a nice table cloth laid on it for her father's birthday.  They were all at a local farm for some combined family fun while I'd been working and would be coming back with the kids for dinner and cake.  There was something about the table, the shouldered shirt, the quiet house... thus was born "A Lennon Seder."


***

The Eye of the Camera

Always the spectator, director of the movie, eye of the camera.

Everyone has their role to play, some lines to say, and Action!

They break character, destroy the fourth wall, look in my eyes.

Cut!  Please pretend that I am not here, act natural, stay calm.

To be involved is to be responsible, to influence outcomes,  no,

I cannot bear that, I cannot share that, I cannot repair that so

I want to remain the spectator, director, the eye of the camera.

***

Franklin

Driving to work this morning I passed an exit sign for Franklin University which triggered thoughts of a young Nigerian-American man who attends our parish named Franklin.  I see him almost every week we are able to attend, standing quietly near the back of the church during Liturgy.

He is from the local urban community: poor, family free, and looking to do odd jobs to make a living.  I have a worn strip of paper in my wallet that he gave me a year or two ago with his name and phone number printed on it.  "General Purpose Handyman Services Offered" it reads.

My five year old loves to talk to him at Coffee Hour because his outlook is so child-like and without calculation or rancor.  My son likes him because he wears "cool clothes" that are athletic and Franklin treats him like an equal.  He is not like any other adult my son has met.

I told Franklin once that our kids look up to him and he has a responsibility to maintain their confidence in him as a role model.  He looked slightly taken aback, like he had to think about that for a bit. Then a kind of meek smile came across his face and he said, "Wow, that is really something to say.  I will try my best."

I knew very little about him, only that he was born in Nigeria and his family was not around.  I never learned why he is living here alone.  I never learned why he chose to come to our church so faithfully as a quiet presence.  The only thing I know for sure about him now is that he died on Friday at thirty years of age.

May his memory be eternal.

***

My Personal Apocalypse

When the end of days arrives 

so much 

that seems to mean 

so much

will be revealed to mean 

so little. 

Amen, amen, and amen.

***

Serenade

The curtain rises on Balanchine's "Serenade"

revealing rows of pale blue ballerinas, each

with an extended arm and outward facing palm

looking as if to shield their eyes from the sun.

Their alabaster limbs are frozen in place and

no one has moved even a solitary finger when

the scene starts to blur, a glowing cloud-like

opacity that melts the stage into formless colors.

It's not until I feel the solitary drop of water

rolling down my cheek that I realize it is neither

a cloud, nor rain, nor any other meteorological

phenomenon, but simply a middle-aged man

overcome by a sense of beauty that he cannot

describe or explain, but simply feels and reacts.

***

The Inner Universe

I used to love to find a quiet place and read for at least an hour or two when I was younger.  It was pure escapism, and in many ways indistinguishable in purpose from abusing drugs.  It differed in that it allowed for the natural flow of thoughts and emotions without force or biochemical violence.  I could plow through books of six, seven, or even eight hundred pages in a relatively short amount of time.  What a trip!

But then life came along and started adding time constraints and responsibilities that ate into my reading time until now, in my forties with a wife, two kids, and a demanding job I just enjoy being in a library or bookstore even though I know that most all of these books will likely be forever out of my reach.

To resume the drug analogy, there is a rush of sorts in the addict's brain by just thinking about drugs, having the paraphernalia at hand, and being in the place where using it happens.  It's not that I won't eventually have more time again, but my attention span has shrunk with age and I am increasingly dependent on coffee to muster the kind of sustained focus I had as a kid.

As a kind of end run I am now trying to use some of my time to write.  Ultimately I would love to unpack my sizable collection of books that I've been collecting since before Middle School from their boxes and surround myself with them, maybe taking over one of the kids' rooms after they've left home to start their own lives.  A writing desk at the window might not be a bad idea either.  It is all a part of exploring the inner universe that most spiritual traditions insists is bigger than the external one.

***

The Apotheosis of E. Kramer

He'd always been a consistent pitcher,

good for several strike outs if the kids
were prone to watch and not swing,
but maybe that underestimates him.
Starting in third grade he was known
for his accuracy if not his speed due
to his diminutive size among his peers.
At ten years old he had started to speed
things up a bit to outwit even the swingers.
But then he turned eleven and a capper
of sorts happened on the last game of
the season against a team with 12 and
13 year old giants as tall as his Dad.

He somehow found a new gear without
disrupting his affinity for the strike zone.
He was in his fourth straight inning of
pitching and the score was tied one all.
Bases were loaded with no outs in an
inning that looked to be a blow out.
Nine pitches were thrown, nine strikes
called, and parents from the opposing
team were grumbling about "fairness."
The catcher had called "time out" twice to
take off his mitt and shake out his hand.
It was the apotheosis of E. Kramer,
the shortest kid in the sixth grade.

***

I was working at the hospital today and missed my son's last game of the season.  I could have caught the last few innings, but instead I'd set up a family meeting to participate in an intervention with a patient that turned out to be one of the most fulfilling things I've done in my career.  I caught the fam at Dairy Queen afterwards where the coach was treating the team.  This poem came from information I gathered from my son, my wife, and his coach about what had transpired during the game.

***

Fishing Trip

We loaded the motorcycles into my Dad's van
and headed to my sister's boyfriend's trailer
on the edge of the Hoosier National Forest.

His mother and step-father were poor as dirt,
building what they needed, drinking from a
spring, hunting for food in the deep woods.

It was almost an hour drive from our small town.
We rolled the bikes down out of the van on a two
by six and duct taped fishing poles to the bikes.

We rode on isolated roads past countless trees,
parked, and made our way through a quarter mile
of thicket to a crystal clear pond full of fish.

We could see the fish and the fish could see us,
the element of surprise and the bait trick lost,
resulting in no bites and so we moved on.

The second pond was bigger and murkier,
sitting on a farmer's land so that we had to hide our
bikes and sneak around the back of it on high alert.

I caught a large bass but my line got tangled.
My sister's BF had to help untangle it to get the
fish in, later taking credit for the catch with my pole.

On the way back we were flying down a country
road and a curve came up that was too much for
the speed I was traveling and I backed off the gas.

I was suspended in the space between road and fence,
coasting, because braking in gravel would have broke
traction and sent me into the fence line for sure.

I held my breath, terrified, riding the line between
life and death, or at the very least severe injury, in
the middle of nowhere, no help for miles and miles.

I slowed enough to eventually pull out of it, the seconds
seeming like several minutes, my sister's BF riding in front
of me oblivious to the averted disaster in his side mirror.

We rolled the motorcycles back up into the van and
headed back to my house with the big fish and a
realization that life can be short in a small town.


***

Dedicated to Benjy, a bright-eyed and beautiful boy who died after being thrown from a motorcycle in the country when I was a teen.  I somehow avoided a similar fate.


***

The City Sleeps

A Journey of Encounters and Memories

I remember hitchhiking in the summer of '90 from my home in Southern Indiana to a town in Northern Indiana where I was attending college at the time.  It began with me sitting at my desk in my room on a Friday night listening to the music of Keith Green through headphones and thinking about my Grandpa, Poppy, who had been a wanderer of the West in his late teens/early twenties during the great Depression.  He had jumped freight cars and used the railroads to take him from Ohio to most every state in the American West.  I do not remember exactly what my thoughts were at the time, but I do remember my mood and the sense of a crushing melancholy that hit me while sitting in that largish closet I'd converted into my office, sucking all of the air out of it and making it hard to breathe.

It was some time after 11pm and my parents and sisters had gone to bed, the house completely dark.  I suddenly found myself sobbing while listening to that music that had always touched me so deeply and carried me through some dark times in High School.  It was a feeling that could not be contained in so small a space and with thoughts of Poppy on my mind I determined to take a journey into the wider world.

I wrote a note to my parents, gathered up a few dollars and some change, then found an old wool coat in a closet that had been my Dad's not worn since the 70's.  It was a kind of blue and white tartan pattern with a matching wide belt and buckle.  It was a bit preposterous and I considered it a costume of sorts for the road along with my holiest t-shirt.  The shoes I grabbed were cheap dock shoes that were half falling apart and completed the homeless look.  Finally, I put a couple of small tracts in my pocket that said something to the effect "Do you want to be a good person?"  In retrospect, this is something that Poppy would have done as he was known to leave these kind of small Christian pamphlets in public places for people to find.

***

I snuck out the back door and into the chilly night air of Mitchell, Indiana.  I had no idea where I would go or how I would get there.  I heard the sound of a train coming from the direction of the downtown area of our small town and set off in that direction.  When I arrived at the tracks the train was heading southward and moving much too fast to jump on.  I considered where it was headed, which was  likely Louisville through rural Southern Indiana, and decided that was not the path I would take this evening.

At that point I considered going back home and going to bed, but I still had that terrible itch to make an adventure of it and decided instead to hitchhike north on the main highway that was on the west side of town.  The next town north of us was about nine miles away and my plan was to thumb a ride to that town and then decide what to do from there.  About five miles into the trip with no rides to be found I was having some serious second thoughts.  My PayLess shoes were rubbing my toes raw and so I stopped and sat in the grass at the roadside to take them off and rip the toe of the shoe away from the sole to allow for some more room.  A few miles more and I was regretting it as gravel was finding its way into my shoe through the open front.

***

I was practically to Bedford and a fog was starting to set in.  Just when I was about to give up hope and head back home, a car pulled over to pick me up.  The guy was a twenty-something Caucasian male and looked a little rough around the edges.  With a kind of bewildered tone he enquired as to what I was doing walking this time of night and to where I was going.  That is the translated and abridged version.  In reality, every other word out of his mouth was a cuss word.  I had never heard anything like it or met anyone who laced their speech so densely with profanity.  No one in my family used cuss words.  I'll always remember the time my Dad hit his thumb while driving a nail into my bedroom wall when I was a kid.  He yelled out "Dadgummit!" and my Mom instantly appeared in the doorway and chided him for using such language.  He quickly calmed down and apologized.

I told this good Samaritan that I was headed into Bedford and joined him in the front seat.  We made small talk about how expensive driving had become in recent months as it was a time when the price of gas had started to make a precipitous climb.  He continued to show a tremendous amount of empathy for my plight while unknowingly burning my conservative Christian ears with his foul language.  It was quite a lesson for me as I had never before equated a "clean" heart with a "dirty" mouth.  In my limited experience and exposure I'd thought they were somehow mutually exclusive.  He dropped me off near Denny's and then sped off into the night, but not before I'd left a tract on the seat for him to find later.  His act of kindness and concern trumped my little paper pamphlet, but I only vaguely understood that at the time.

***

As I stood in the glow of the Denny's sign the thought occurred to me that it would be nice to go in and sit down with a cup of coffee and find someone to talk to or at the very least be able to chit chat with a friendly waitress.  I didn't have any money to spare if I wanted to eat later and I was eager to continue my journey.  It was at this point that I had the audacious idea to hitchhike to Marion, Indiana a hundred and fifty miles from where I stood.  It was home to the college I was attending at the time, Indiana Wesleyan University.  I had some friends who lived off campus and might be around over the summer.

Lost in these thoughts, a car pulled over and another guy offered me a ride.  This guy was probably in his early thirties and quiet.  He asked me where I was headed and I told him I wanted to head north on Highway 37.  At some point, after getting into his car, I shared that my ultimate destination was Marion.  Within a mile or two he propositioned me for a particular act that caught me by surprise and made me realize I was swimming in some strange and unfamiliar waters.  I did not let it show in my voice and simply told him I was not into that kind of thing.  He offered to take me all the way to Marion if I complied.  When he could not change my mind he pulled over to the side of the highway to let me off.  I discreetly fished another tract out of my pocket and placed it underneath me on the seat before exiting the car.

The fog was very thick by now as I walked somewhere between Bedford and Bloomington.  It would be almost impossible for a car to see me under these conditions and so I walked invisibly through the heavy mist for at least a few miles.  This kind of wandering while lost in thought is something I was prone to do after leaving home for college, mostly driven by a kind of uneasy angst.  In retrospect, I think it acted as a buffer against despair and included free floating prayers that I was sure were heard by a deity who listened to lonely people.

Having a destination made the wandering a little less aimless in my mind and gave me the motivation to keep going.  I passed between some sheer rock walls where the road had been cut through a very large hill.  On the other side of it a car came from behind me.  It was driving slow as if looking for something.  When it passed me it slowed further and then pulled over.  I jogged up to the car and opened the door.  It was the man who had propositioned me earlier and I said, "Oh, not you again" in a kind of mock exasperation.  He assured me he wouldn't bother me about anything this time, but was headed to Bloomington now and could give me a lift.  I hesitated, but then got in knowing that with the fog and at this time of night I would not likely get another ride for quite a long time if at all.  He was even quieter this time, but he did say a few things that made me think he'd found the tract and at least glanced through it a bit.

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” he asked.  His tone struck me as someone who is feeling a good deal of guilt and self-loathing.  I wasn’t sure how to respond, but finally told him that only God can judge him.  He dropped me off at one of the Bloomington exits and headed east into the city to look for something he couldn’t seem to find as I continued to head north.

***

The next ride came quicker than I expected.  I could hear it before I could see it.  The car was big and wide, pimped out a bit with some chrome hub caps and long vinyl bench seats with a  stereo designed to rattle the teeth in your head.  His windows were down and cigarette smoke wafted out, thickening as it hit the cool night air heavy with moisture.  He asked me where I was headed over the loud heavy metal music which he'd turned down only slightly.  When I told him he said he could take me as far as Muncie which is just south of Marion.  I could not believe my good fortune.  I had been worried about how I would navigate my way around the Indianapolis beltway with its myriad exits.  It would be the trickiest part of the journey, but now almost the entirety of the trip had been handed to me in one two-hour car ride.

Within the first mile or two I realized why he had his windows down and his music blasting.  He kept drifting over the lines and was trying to keep himself awake with the cold air and vibrations of his subwoofers.  The second or third time he'd swerved back onto the road after his head nodded, I proposed to him that I could drive and knew how to get to Muncie.  He thought about it for a minute or two and then pulled off the side of the road and we switched places.  He fell asleep almost immediately and I quieted the radio and rolled up the windows.  I watched the white hash marks flicker by in the darkness and felt my place in the oddness of the universe, cruising up Highway 37 in the middle of the night in a stranger's car.

We made our way up through Martinsville, a boy wearing his father's coat and a snoring headbanger, then hit the ramp to the 465 beltway around Indianapolis.  I would hitchhike my way back down to Mitchell through this stretch from the Indianapolis airport four years later in 1994.  The intervening years would include a two year stent in the Army, finishing my last year of college, and then spending a few months in Europe.  I flew from Frankfort, Germany to Chicago and then to Indianapolis.  I had not told anyone I was coming home and wanted to surprise them.  At the airport I bought a newspaper, a black marker and some tape.  I wrote "37 South" in large script and taped it to my tattered army surplus backpack that had carried my worldly possessions the past few months across Europe.  A scraggly looking man in a rusty red pickup truck picked me up and ended up taking me all the way to the doorstep of my sister's house.  It was once again an exercise in learning not to judge a book by its cover as I talked with this man and got to appreciate his struggles and good heart.

Back to 1990, I circled Indianapolis on its east side and then took Interstate 69 heading northwest.  The Muncie exit came up about 45 minutes later and I pulled into the gravel of an abandoned gas station and left the car running.  My passenger was still sleeping and so I poked him to wake him up.  "We're here", I said and exited the car.  He groggily scooted over to the get behind the wheel and lit a cigarette.  "Thanks for the ride," I said.  He nodded, then drove away.

***

I made my way back up the ramp to I-69 and headed northwards again to continue my hitchhiking  journey.  It was now twilight and the birds were singing their morning songs.  I felt tired, cold and hungry, but also thankful to be able to experience this moment of peace on a quiet stretch of road at sunrise.

A car pulled over in front of me and as I opened the passenger side door some familiar music greeted me.  Even more inviting was the heat coming out of the vents.  It was the first bit of comfort to be had on this all-nighter.  The driver was a middle-aged man in shirt and tie.  He asked me where I was going and I told him Marion.  He told me he could get me to a Marion exit, but would not be able to take me into town.  As we drove up the interstate I made comment about his music and named the artist.  I could tell by his expression that he had not expected me to know that he was playing a song by a Contemporary Christian singer.  It was that book and cover thing again, but with me as the object of scrutiny this time.

I shared with him some bits of my life, being a student at Indiana Wesleyan University, and other such information as the conversation unfolded over about a twenty minute period.  He was the first person to fully engage me in this way and it was obvious that he had not expected this particular encounter when he offered me a ride.  I seem to remember him saying a prayer with me when he stopped to drop me off at the exit on the outskirts of Marion.

***

The last leg in my northward journey was spent in the pickup truck of an elderly farmer who dropped me off at the corner of campus.  I made my way into a gas station convenience mart and rummaged in my pockets to find the two dollars and some odd cents that I'd stashed there. The donuts looked tempting, but I did not know how much longer this journey would last and so I went for the sausage and cheese biscuit breakfast sandwich sealed in plastic.  The microwave melted the cheese in a way that made it difficult to get out of the wrapper.  It tasted bland and artificial, but it was a warm and welcome visitor to my stomach nonetheless.

I sat at a booth by the window and looked out towards the college campus planning my next move.  There was no itinerary.  First it was Bedford, then Bloomington, then Marion frickin' Indiana for goodness' sake.  Who knows why I did what I did at that time in my life?  My mother certainly didn't know and my father and I might as well have been living on different planets by the time I hit college.

I spent an hour or so roaming the campus and may have even wandered into the Christian Ministries building where Art Professor Rod Crossman was painting a magnificent mural of the Apocalypse of John while suspended on some scaffolding.  The center of the massive canvas was commanded by a giant lion's face, probably ten feet tall or so.  There was also a woman with a crown of stars holding a newborn baby while a serpentine dragon loomed over her, waiting.  The four horseman may have been in it too, but I cannot see them clearly in my mind's eye and they may simply be a product of my imagination and fractured memory.  Under the lion's head was the silhouette of a shepherd holding a staff on a hill overlooking a modern city of gridded street lights that stretch out underneath these apocalyptic scenes suspended in a starry sky.  He is pointing them out to a modern figure next to him who is also in silhouette.

He took a break from his work and we talked for awhile.  I told him I was a fan of C.S. Lewis's stories and wanted to write things like that some day, and by "that" I meant fantasy-style fiction that would have a deeper layer of meaning glimpsed only by the sincere and attentive reader.  He was very gracious to spend that time with me and he encouraged me to follow that dream.  It sounds cliche now, but at that time in my life it was very meaningful to me.  And now that I have written out this memory I realize this meeting happened the previous summer, when I was traveling with a recruiting team for the university.  At that time we had occasion to stay on campus a few weekends of the summer while traveling all over the Midwest.  During those few weekends on campus we had stayed in an old house with white pealing paint that had a kitchen, common room, and a few bedrooms.  It was used by a variety of student groups that traveled for the university in various capacities.

It was that house that I found vacant and locked.  I walked around trying the windows and found one that had not been locked or could be jimmied in some way to get it open.  I crawled in conscious of the fact if campus security caught sight of me I could be in some serious doo-doo.  It was uncomfortably warm inside, but I was so exhausted I didn't care and laid down on the worn couch to take a nap.  I probably slept an hour or so before the heat got unbearable and I could no longer sleep.  I got up and went through the cabinets in the kitchen looking for food.  I found some packets of ramen and ate them raw like a cow munching on dry straw.  I lapped up water from the faucet with my hand.  I noticed a phone on the wall and thought to call my parents and let them know my whereabouts.  My Dad answered and asked where I was.  I told him I was in Marion and that I would be spending the day hitchhiking back to Mitchell.  He told me to stay put and he would come and pick me up.  I convinced him instead to meet me at my Grandma's house in Anderson which was about a 45 minute drive from Marion.  I walked to Highway 9 to extend my thumb one last time on this journey.

***

A man who looked to be in his fifties picked me up just outside of town and agreed to take me into Anderson.  He asked a few perfunctory questions and then commenced to bitch about his ungrateful daughter for the entire 45 minute ride.  He went on and on about how he'd been wronged, taken advantage of, mistreated and misused.  It was a torrent of toxicity and self-justification that was absolutely nauseating.  He had his captive audience and was going to exact his pound of flesh as the cost for the ride.

I did not know the exact location of my Grandma's house, but I knew it was on Main Street.  We passed Mounds Mall and my mind dove deep into memories from when I was probably four or five and we would visit Grandma and "Grampy John," as we called our step-grandpa.  She would take us to this mall where there was a play area with huge concrete turtles that we could crawl over and under.  It was a very simple set up, but thrilling to me nonetheless.  The less-than-thrilling memory from that mall was when my Mom did not have a dime to open the stall door in the lady's restroom and made me crawl under the door to open it from the inside.  These memories helped me detach from the man droning on in self-consuming anger and find a much needed mental respite.

I saw the sign for Main Street and latched onto it like a drowning person grabbing at a life preserver.  "Here, let me off here," I gestured to the side of the road a little too enthusiastically.  He pulled over and I thanked him for the ride, though I would have almost preferred to have walked the entire distance if I'd known what I was getting myself into.  I headed south on Main Street knowing that I'd eventually run into my Grandma's house.  It was an odd perspective kind of thing because we had always approached her house from the south and turned before the house itself to access the shared driveway in the back.  I was practically in front of it before I recognized her front porch and made my way around back.

The back yard was small and surrounded by a waist high chainlink fence.  I entered the covered back porch through the screen door and knocked on the back door of the house proper that opened into her kitchen.  No one was home so I rummaged through a sack of wooden clothespins that hung on the wall where I knew she sometimes hid their house key that looked like those old skeleton keys from a bygone era.  It was not there and I wondered where they were and how long it would be before they returned this hot Saturday morning.  I tried to catch a nap under their picnic table, lying on the grass in the shade, avoiding the direct heat of the sun.

They did not seem wholly surprised to see me when they arrived and they asked no questions as to how I'd come to be there.  In retrospect, my Dad must have called them and told them I'd be coming.  I seem to remember she had some groceries with her and maybe she'd gone out with Grampy John to get some food for my arrival.  None of this was mentioned at the time and we simply went inside together and she made some lunch while we chit-chatted waiting for Dad to arrive.  When he got there he joined us for lunch and we talked a bit more, the four of us around her metal kitchen table.  The fact that we were all together because of my impromptu journeying was the elephant in the room that remained unacknowledged and unspoken.

***

We said our goodbyes and gave our hugs and kisses before getting back on the road.  It was a very long drive home with almost no talking, both of us just staring out at the houses and cornfields whipping by as we progressed southward.  I guess at that time I just took my parents for granted in my solipsistic way of viewing the world and had no real understanding of how this might affect them.  I had had my adventure at their expense and six months later I would once again blindside them with my decision to join the Army at the outset of the first Gulf War, dropping out of my senior year of college and ending up in Korea for two years as an infantryman.

As is the case with many of the memories I've written about in the past few years, whether in poems or prose, I only seem to really appreciate these things now because I have a son of my own and can finally relate to what it might have been like for them.  All of those times I thought they'd been impatient with me growing up when, in reality, they'd been long suffering.  It's the difference between looking through the eyes of a kid and the eyes of an adult.

Rider of Chariots

Rider of Chariots,

Bringer of Light,

Farseer with Spectacles,

and 

Giver of Hugs.

He is Simeon.

Watch him roll.


***