This place more than any other
helps us see what is always present
but seldom seen, or so I believe.
Like a Midwesterner who has never been to the ocean
but sees a painting of it and recognizes
on some limited level its power and beauty.
Except the ocean is truly everywhere and we only
occasionally catch a whiff of salt on the breeze
or hear the cry of a sea gull and...
doesn’t our heart long for it in those moments?
***
There was a time when things seemed relatively normal
and we could ignore the accumulation of pollutants in
our environment (whether social, cultural, or material) which
at its core is a spiritual sickness belching a metaphysical fog.
It was like the gum we were chewing was losing its flavor
until we choked on it, turning blue and gasping for air, looking
for someone to wrap their arms around us and squeeze
but there was no one to be found in the thick haze of indifference.
So we died but kept on living nonetheless with new hungers.
The pollution was our sustenance but what it sustained
was hardly human and we continue on in our fear and alarm
at the sight of others who are not like us, or so we imagine.
***
A tin can came rolling across the road blown by the wind causing me to swerve to avoid crushing it on the way home from the hospital. It got me thinking about the patient I’d just seen, blown into my path as it were by way of a psychiatric consult.
She was in her mid-twenties, admitted for a large abscess on her arm from shooting heroin. She was showing signs of premature aging after years of use. She assured me she was a hopeless case, multiple rehab failures, never able to finish a program before being kicked out.
She was abrasive and sarcastic, quick to pounce on any stutter or redundant question with ridicule. I felt the stings but left them unattended, not allowing irritation to enter my voice. I would not be like most everyone else: caught up in her anger, frustration, and impotence. I was there to help if I could.
My lack of responding in kind wore her down. Useful information began to trickle out. Her first memory of childhood was of being raped. Chronic insomnia, nightmares, and flashbacks from smells plagued her. She used drugs to self-medicate when outpatient treatment was scarce between rehabs.
Subtle signs of warmth began to escape from her at unexpected times, furtive glances becoming more sustained eye contact. There was a connection forming on a basic human level, hope and love still in there echoing about, maybe even a bit of faith rattling around like a pebble in a tin can.
***
Back in 1987 I was a senior in high school and one of my best friends was turning 18. For his birthday his Dad bought him and a few of us friends tickets to the Invisible Touch Tour in the Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis. He drove us up on a Saturday and we checked in to the Union Station Hotel just across the street from the Hoosier Dome, all expenses paid. We be-bopped around the hotel for a bit, ate dinner, and then made our way over to the concert.
The stage was set up on one end of what was typically the Indianapolis Colt’s football field and our seats were just behind the stage and up several rows. When Phil Collins was singing at the front of the stage his touring drummer Chester Thompson would be beating and banging away closest to us, but at one point Phil joined him at a second set of drums.
The stadium went black and the sound of African-like percussive sounds started to echo through the place. Crowd noises began to swell and then Phil and Chester started their blazing fast synchronized runs of The Brazilian. The light show was spectacular as banks of multicolored flood lights moved in 3 dimensional space and rotated 360 degrees in synch to the music. It was entertainment at its finest with bodies pulsating and our senses being overwhelmed as we looked at each other like “are you kidding me?!”
So back to tonight, we’re driving along and the song “In too Deep” comes on. Anya is digging the ballads a bit more than the trippy prog-rock stuff and when Phil goes into his falsetto voice she expertly inserts her own falsetto (a la the Dr. Pepper commercial guy) with “It’s the sweet one!” It fit in so well we all burst out laughing. When we arrived home Anya jumped out of the car exclaiming “I just love everything 80’s! The clothes, the music, the hair styles...”
***
The trek through the wilderness had been interminable as day had frozen into night and night had thawed into day in an endless cycle. It was a matter of one foot in front of the other but he was growing increasingly tired. And as he tired and slowed he sensed the presence of predators patiently plodding nearby following his progress.
He found a path to ease his way and lessen the stumbling brought on by exhaustion. It wound around and down through shrinking hills eventually taking him into a pine forest. The quiet there was striking. Pine needles softened the ground and the birds had ceased to flit and call to one another. He seemed at the end of himself, but then he saw the clearing ahead.
It gave him a bit of a bump and he sped up to meet it, stopping at the edge and peering about the space. At the far edge he spied an abandoned bus and he wondered how it had found this improbable spot to retire. It was white and green, top and bottom, with a yellow undercoat peeking out in various places that had been worn away by sun and rain.
Strange as it was, it was a welcome sight after an eternity of walking. As he approached the bus he noticed a rusty chair beckoning him. “Come, rest yourself” it seemed to say as it creaked under his weight. Some of the cares of his journey fell from his shoulders into the overgrown grass and were strangled amongst the choking weeds with nary a cry.
His chin found his chest and sleep was not far away when a fast moving shadow on the ground startled him back to wakefulness. A large owl swept down out of the trees to perch on the hood of the bus. It swiveled its magnificent head to take in the weary traveler and queried him. “Who?” Nonplussed the man replied “Why?” The owl blinked thrice and then flew away.
The sun was falling below the horizon and stars were beginning to wink into existence in a pale blue sky purpling by the minute. The traveler made his way around the bus and into its darkening interior where he found a rusty barrel furnace and a bed. He did not bother to remove his coat before lying down and falling off into a dreamless sleep.
The loud popping sound of a burning log suddenly brought him out of sleep. His eyes remained closed and an inventory of his body indicated he could not feel his feet or the ends of his fingers. He waited for fear to find him but it remained bashfully at the edges of his awareness. Instead he was feeling the sensation of warmth emanating from what may or may not have been a fire.
Through his slightly opened lids he could make out the blurred form of a man undulating in flame and shadow. He forced himself to sit up in the bed, rubbed his eyes, and found he was facing another man sitting in the rusty chair. The man was young and bearded with a mischievous grin and knowing eyes deeply set. They sat in silence looking at each other.
The only thing the traveler could eventually think to say was “Where did you come from?” The man put his palms together in front of his face and then moved them outward in a big circle. “Uh, you’re from around here?” The man smiled and looked around the bus in a kind of exaggerated manner. “Sooo, right here, right here?” And he nodded his head in agreement.
This silent man confused the traveler but he did not make him feel uneasy. The man gestured for him to lean forward and when he did he placed his palm on the traveler’s heart. He felt a popping sensation and everything seemed to stop as the roof of the bus suddenly became transparent. The stars burned brighter overhead than he’d ever seen before. Tears came.
“Who?” he choked out...“Why?” a whisper. The man got up and went to sit in the driver’s seat. He pulled the throttle and pumped the gas while turning the key. The bus roared to life vibrating the furnace and the bed so that the traveler thought the whole vehicle would simply shake into pieces. The driver flicked with his flattened hand the sign for “forward!”
Expecting the bus to lurch forward
the traveler braced himself, but instead it lurched upwards. The tops of the trees quickly came on level
with the windows as the bus paused in its ascent. The bottom of the bus became transparent as
well and the traveler experienced a kind of existential vertigo as it resumed
climbing at an accelerating rate of speed.
The trees fell away. The hills fell away. The mountains fell away. And the earth spun blue in the abyss becoming just one more point of light in a limitless expanse full of radiant silence. “Where?” asked the traveler. “Home” answered the bus driver. And he knew it was true.
When humility awakens
and the ego sleeps
the world opens up
like a beautiful book.
What was once separated
is now connected in a
dizzying number of ways
never before dreamed of.
But until the ego sleeps
and humility is awakened
the isolation continues
unabated in blindness.
***
May the peaceful sweep of a broom
empty violence from my room,
breeze blowing the scent of doom
from this place that’s been a tomb.
***
It was the first time I realized I could create something beautiful.
In elementary school the world was full of mystery and there was nothing more mysterious to me than the ability of people to create something beautiful. I was thinking mostly about music and the visual arts at the time as I was not yet able to read well enough to grasp what might be beautiful in literature. This stirring inside was new to my growing awareness of the world.
To hear someone play something beautifully or create a piece of art with their very hands was nothing short of miraculous to me. My immature brain could not comprehend the time and effort that lay behind those abilities, only that I saw them fully formed and naively believed it must simply be something innate to that person. The possibility of sustained attention and self-discipline was a black box to me. My failings at both in a classroom setting was a perennial problem and oftentimes the focus of parent-teacher meetings.
Until that day in art class when I made something I couldn’t explain.
We were working with clay to fashion sculptures that would be painted and then fired in a kiln. I chose to make a disk shaped moonscape with a rocket ship. I was sitting at a table with another boy who was known to be a bit of a pill and was always looking to turn everything into a competition. He decided to make his version of the same thing which may or may not have been his attempt to annoy me.
I flattened out the clay and formed it into a thick disk about four inches across that looked like a pancake but was tapered at the edges. Pushing my thumb into it I made a few deep impressions and formed up low thin walls around their edges to create craters. Next I rolled some clay into a boulder or two to disperse amongst the three craters. Unsurprisingly the boy at my table was following suit.
Next was the rocket ship which I made by rolling the clay into a fine spire pointing skyward which bulged out in the middle as it descended and then tapered again at the bottom. Then I fashioned three curving fins that came out from the rocket’s body and formed a tripod where they met the moon’s surface. I placed the ship off-center next to the biggest crater. It was a kind of rule-of-thirds placement that was more intuition than any knowledge of aesthetics.
The next step was to paint it.
I looked over to check on my neighbor’s progress and his rocket was thicker than mine with a cylindrical shape which had a nubby point, like a fat crayon. The fins were not curved but thick triangles. He quickly painted his with a dark muddy gray for the moon’s surface, blue for the rocket’s body, and red for the fins.
I was more deliberate in my thought process and came to the conclusion if I only clear-glazed the moon’s surface and didn’t use a color the firing process would give me a more accurate lunar-like shading and texture. The rocket itself was painted a uniform silver-gray in the classic Bradbury style. I carefully transferred the slender rocket-on-moonscape into the kiln and enquired of the teacher how long it would take to fire it and get it back. She said it wouldn’t be that day and class didn’t meet again for another few days besides.
I thought about that sculpture in the meantime and how it might turn out. I was excited because I was really pleased with how it had all come together regardless of my neighbor’s boorish attempts to copy it.
When the day finally came and my art teacher placed the sculpture on the table in front of me I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. The fired glaze gave the rocket ship a rich shiny glow and the unpainted moon color was spot on. It was beautiful! The art teacher gave me a little grin and said it was “pretty good”. I couldn’t quite grasp the fact that I’d made it with my very hands and had sustained such laser-like focus throughout the process. I guess you could say I was “over the moon”.
***
It was the strangest thing. I was on a walk with Anya and our dog yesterday when I heard a kind of aggressive grunt-bark coming from somewhere above our heads in the trees. Anya just kept talking away but I was swiveling my head all about trying to find the source of the disconcerting sound.
My eye finally caught some movement at the top of a large tree where it appeared some birds were darting in and out of the leaves. And then I saw the crow. It was at least twice the size of the two smaller birds and sitting on a branch. The two birds kept diving at the crow and then swerving away to circle back and then repeat the process. I was captivated and suddenly remembered something that had happened at our old house.
Every year robins would make a nest under the eaves of our gazebo to lay their blue eggs. We’d sneak out at times to see the mother sitting there but if we were too loud or too close she would swoop down to the railing and make loud chirps until we retreated (see photo). When they hatched I would lift Anya up to see their little beaks just over the rim of the nest and if we made a noise they would think the mother was back and start loudly chirping for food.
One particular year after the eggs were laid we came home to find pieces of those beautiful eggs littered in the gutter. Elias and I tried unsuccessfully to hide them before little Anya could see it but curiosity got the best of her. She was quite upset and thought the squirrel was the culprit. We somehow figured out that a crow had destroyed and devoured those eggs.
It made sense, then, what I was seeing. It was highly likely that the crow had discovered the birds’ nest and they were desperately trying to force it to leave the eggs alone. The crow was standing its ground letting out these strange guttural noises and I thought of that line from a Tennyson poem which speaks of Nature as “red in tooth and claw”.
***
I saw the sun return to me
in the flickers of the fire pit well
staving off the chill of the night.
By day its rays assist the tree
in separating carbon from oxygen
building a majestic lattice-work.
But when the day is done
and the tree has dropped its pieces
I gather them up and apply the work
of reconnecting oxygen to carbon
and the sun returns to me to warm
my old bones and frozen toes.
***
I was young once, and loved jazz. I didn’t really know anyone growing up who shared this love of mine, so I reserved it as a personal corner of musical taste that I felt set me apart. It could be considered an elitist attitude I guess, except I was a preacher’s son living on the edge of a tiny Midwestern town and aren’t most teens simply self-centered in their desire to differentiate themselves and learn what makes them unique? Jazz was that thing for me and a bulwark against insecurities which were plentiful.
When compact disk players entered the market in the mid-eighties I pooled my meager resources to buy one. It was the promise of a more pure and unadulterated sound using a laser beam straight out of Science Fiction. Jazz, like Classical, had the potential to be a great benefactor of this new technology with its perceived complexities and instrumentation.
I went to Kmart which was in a larger town north of us and the closest place to find these new compact disks or “CD’s”. At that time there were literally only a handful of offerings and they were packaged in thin rectangular boxes that I would cut up and use to decorate my walls. The CD that caught my eye on that first foray into the world of digital sound was one by Grover Washington, Jr.
And this briefly brings me forward in time to my current location which is a hotel in downtown Indianapolis. Just a block away is the Indiana Roof Ballroom. It was there in 1986 that a high school friend and I met up with two girls we’d befriended in the summer at a Chemistry Honors Seminar at Indiana State University. They lived in the Indianapolis area but my friend and I had to drive up from our small town 2 hours away.
We all “dressed up” which for me was gray khaki’s and a t-shirt with suspenders covered by a tweed blazer. It was supposed to be “cool” but please, no. When we entered the Indiana Roof Ballroom it was like we’d stepped into a completely different world with its own rules and reality that we had not hither-to been privy to. It was a Grover Washington, Jr. concert and we looked to be the only non-African Americans in attendance. And not only that, we were the only teenagers as well. Everyone was dressed in jaw-dropping attire with flashes of gold and silver winking in the darkness. I suddenly felt silly in my sneakers as nearby eyes fell on my peculiar appearance.
The experience was unforgettable and possibly even unfathomable. The ballroom had a high smooth curved ceiling on which were projected the moon and stars along with moving clouds. Grover was on stage with his band exuding coolness at amplitudes that I could hardly comprehend. I was entranced by his quiet swaying motion as he patiently waited to enter the flow with his saxophone. The tone of his instrument is rich and warm on a CD, but hearing it as it was being exhaled from his very lungs in that relatively intimate setting was a whole other thing. It was a time outside of time and I wasn’t sure that I was “supposed” to be there but there I was nonetheless: a wonder-filled oddity caught up in his love of jazz.
***
It’s the creep that is so disconcerting,
a slow inexorable tide of falling eyes.
Where once, maybe only a few years back,
there was the movement of people in public places
taking in their surroundings, making eye contact
here and there, maybe an exchange of smiles,
a knowing glance between parents with energetic kids,
or the flirtatious batting of eyelashes amongst
the young and potentially procreative.
But little by little, two by two, these eyeballs have fallen
to the little rectangular box glowing in their hands,
real world connections winking out
like dying fireflies on a poisoned lawn.
***
It’s the rare morning I get to sleep in. When I do there is invariably a panoply of dreams that pull me along into the odd and wondrous places of my unconscious mind. This morning was no different in this regard but then something happened to bring my dreaming to an end that has never happened before.
As I started to surface into wakefulness I suddenly saw an elderly man in a tuxedo with tails standing between two large red doors. Behind him was a magnificent theater with rows and rows of crushed velvet seats facing a large wooden stage with the curtains closed. He bowed to me as his arms reached out to bring the doors together, closing the theater and leaving me alone in the foyer.
I understood that he was telling me that dream time was over and it was time to wake up. And then I woke up.
***
What is there to say about Theo
alone in his room but full in his heart
repeating a phrase with the name
of the One he loves and who connects
him to the wider world of lost souls
looking to finally come home
“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God
have mercy on me, a sinner”
***
She was a bit of a recluse and an artist whose husband had passed away well before I met her back in 1995. He had been a professor at IU and they lived in a lovely home designed by a local architect known for his unique use of windows. The hallways were lined with bookshelves full of books and she rented a few rooms to university students to make ends meet.
The large living room was used as an art studio with tables, easels, and cabinets filled with and covered by art supplies and painter’s paraphernalia. She had taken up icon painting in her latter years and there was evidence of them as photographs clipped up in clumps to provide examples and types to paint from. The two main icons on the iconostasis of the local Orthodox Church where I was a catechumen at the time were painted by Bara. I remember the moment she showed them to me in that living room in a nearly finished state and we discussed their various elements as I excitedly asked her questions. It was probably her being an artist that drew me to her.
In retrospect, the connection makes sense as my dear friend Kevin McCarty was also an artist and I’d hung out with him in his studio apartment in Marion, Indiana on many an occasion. The “studio” part of his apartment was in fact a studio with paint and oil staining the beat up hard wood floors and partially finished canvas’s hanging on the walls and stacked all around the room. He had two full mattresses standing on end in the corner behind the front door that were lowered into the middle of the room for sleeping when needed. I was not an artist but something Kevin said back then has always stuck with me. “Aaron, you have the eye of an artist.” I don’t know why that meant so much to me, but it struck something deep inside that I had not been aware of until that moment. It is like a precious jewel that I keep tucked away in my memory and pull out from time to time to contemplate, especially now that Kevin has passed away.
Visiting Bara and sitting on her enclosed back porch was a time apart. I was new to the Faith and hungry for knowledge. We spent most of the time talking about spiritual stuff of the Orthodox variety. I guess that is appropriate considering she had agreed to be my godmother in ‘95 and stood with me at All Saints in the ceremony to make it official during Pascha of ‘96.
Between my first and second years of medical school I had the summer off and ended up using the time to visit a friend in Russia and stayed with him on the outskirts of Moscow. Upon my return I was full of stories of visits to various churches and monasteries from Sergiev-Posad to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Pechory, and even up to the isolated island of Valaam with its ancient monastery that is nearly a thousand years old.
She was particularly interested in my visit to the relics of St. Xenia of St. Petersburg which lie in a small blue chapel at the heart of a cemetery there. She knew the details of her life and had a lot of appreciation for her and her struggles. St. Xenia had lost her husband and became a bit of an eccentric which I am sure Bara could relate to. In the Orthodox Church she was a kind of saint known as a “Fool for Christ.” Intriguingly, this was how Bishop Paul described Kevin at his funeral years later. In the intervening time Kevin had come into the Orthodox Church and chosen me as his godfather. This made it a spiritual family of eccentric artists running through me as a sort of nexus.
So there we sat on her back porch after my return from Russia and I presented her with a vial of oil from a lampada hanging at St. Xenia’s relics. In pious tradition this is considered holy oil that can be used to anoint the sick and suffering for healing. Bara was really taken aback by this unexpected gift and though she was not one to smile much, she was beaming. Soon thereafter she was clearing weeds and trimming bushes in her yard when she inadvertently stepped into a sharp broken branch on a bush that punctured a hole in her leg to the bone. She went to the doctor but over time it was not healing adequately and some osteomyelitis began to set in to the point she was told they may need to amputate. She was extremely upset and in her gruff way she told the doctor she would die before letting anyone cut her leg off. I don’t remember if I mentioned it or if she herself remembered she had the oil from St. Xenia. She applied it to the wound and the next time I saw her at church she told me the wound had completely healed. She was adamant that the oil and St. Xenia’s prayers had been instrumental in her healing.
A lot of time has gone by since I last saw her at All Saints. I would get occasional stories from my parents who subsequently converted and became parishioners there. They would talk with her at coffee hour after the Liturgy on the rare occasions she could make it. I did not know her well, but well enough to know that I am indebted to her decision to take on the role of being my godmother all those years ago. May her memory be eternal.
***
His name is Joe.
He moved here from Idaho
dreaming of being a poet
though he did not know it
to work a newspaper stand
for a portly man named Fran.
He scribbles rhymes on a receipt,
his life on perpetual repeat.
“That will be three seventy five.”
I’m not sure what keeps him alive.
But keep your chin up, Joe.
Meaning comes, only real slow.
***
Since the first time I cracked a book about robots and spaceships I have had a sweet tooth for Science Fiction. The first book was “Rivets & Sprockets” by Alexander Key in elementary school. And over time there were the big three SciFi franchises of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica which took some of the images off the page and put them onto screens both big and small. In those younger years I was particularly drawn to the spaceships as concrete concepts of wonder and imagination.
In my middle school years I had a grid paper notebook that I used to design my own spacecraft with pencil and ruler, from imposing battleships to the more diminutive fighters with all sizes and types in between. In the corner of each page I drew a box in which I gave the name of the ship, its class, and all its “specs”. I also remember having arguments with friends about things like which fighters were the best and why. I was partial to the one from BSG, but my favorite (at least for a time) was the Draconian Marauder used by the bad guys in “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”.
Just in the past year I have discovered “The Expanse” on Netflix which is chock-full of spacecraft. For me it has been a kind of comfort food, though I focus more on the storyline and character development than I did as a kid with the spacecraft as a kind of cherry on top. My favorite from that show is probably “The Behemoth” which was repurposed from an intergalactic Mormon missionary ark, oddly enough.
Last night I watched the movie “Passengers” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The opening scene was absolutely captivating and reacquainted me with the wonder of spacecraft I felt most acutely as a kid. In one scene later in the movie the ship slingshots around a star and the spectacle is breathtaking. If I were to get into an argument now about the most elegantly designed spaceship in SciFi movies I’d probably have to stand solidly behind the Avalon starship from this movie.
***
Purely out of a sense of nostalgia I watched the first Ghost Rider movie starring Nicholas Cage on Netflix this week. In elementary school I was fascinated with this dark and mysterious “superhero” who wore leather and had a flaming skull for a head. He apparently had made some kind of deal with the devil and become his champion of sorts, imbued with powers that included wielding hell fire and riding a magical motorcycle, except he double-crossed the devil and became a punisher of evil-doers. This somehow made him a good guy, or not-a-bad guy maybe? Like “the enemy of your enemy is your friend” perhaps? Regardless, it was not a comic my parents would have approved of so I kept my Ghost Rider fandom very much on the down low.
***
In the mid-90’s Carl Sagan wrote a book called THE DEMON HAUNTED WORLD: SCIENCE AS A CANDLE IN THE DARK. I’m not sure the significance of the ALL CAPS but its aim was to explain the scientific method to laypeople and encourage them to learn critical and skeptical thinking. I did not read it but I don’t imagine it was talking about demons per se and seems to have set up a false dichotomy between spirituality and science in the title, but I digress.
The first half of that title takes me back to the 70’s growing up in a fundamentalist Protestant home where my Dad was a preacher and the Second Coming of Christ was going to happen at any moment whisking believers up into heaven “in the twinkling of an eye”. This was in the wider context of a world seemingly split between freedom loving peoples and the soul-destroying Communists. From this Manichaean perspective flowed a great river of paranoia and manipulation justifying any number of egregious actions on our behalf at home and abroad, but also had its manifestations in individual hearts and minds.
And in the midst of this potentially terrifying portent of apocalyptic prophecy and mutually assured destruction was the existence of demons. They were everywhere! They were in Sunday sermons, my Christian comic books, movies shown at churches, and books written by charlatans like Mike Warnke who lied about being a satanic priest who converted to Christ (the latter assertion being even more preposterous than the former).
There were nights as a kid when trying to go to sleep I was convinced a demon was at the foot of my bed reaching out to grab me. I’d read about it in a Christian publication where someone had dabbled in the occult and suffered the consequences. At these moments I felt an abject terror which was proof enough that I was in the presence of something diabolic. I had a comic entitled “Somebody Goofed!” in which an older man befriends a younger man and convinces him to ignore God and simply enjoy himself in life. When that younger man dies unexpectedly he confronts the older man who he finds in Hell only to have that man pull his face off to reveal he is a horned demon who cackles “You goofed!”
Another time in my elementary school years we were at a gathering with church members at someone’s house for “food and fellowship”. I remember them filling the room with conversation and laughter while I sat in the corner of a couch bored and tired from running around and playing outside with the other kids. Knowing my younger self I’d probably done something to get into trouble and was in a time out. I nodded off to sleep and when I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later the room was completely empty. In a growing panic I realized the Rapture had come and I had been left behind. It was the only feasible explanation to my young mind. I wandered around inside the house looking out the windows and sobbing. I went outside and called for my parents without reply. My mischievous behavior and disobedience had caught up with me. I sat back down on the couch where my father had just been seated seemingly only moments before and “listened” for him to talk to me from that other world and I asked him to come back and get me... that I was sorry... that I would change.
And then in high school I wrote a short story about someone who gets hit by a car and is knocked out but awakens to find he can see demons attached to people. He eventually stumbles into a mega-church looking for a respite from this terrifying new ability only to find the biggest demon of all sitting on the shoulders of the preacher at the podium. I submitted it to Christianity Today magazine for a C.S. Lewis writing contest for young writers. I did not win the prize money or get published but I did get a letter saying my story was a runner-up. For all I know everyone who submitted a story got a similar letter (it was not very good) but it signaled a change in my thoughts that looked to be a little less concrete and a bit more nuanced. It was the 80’s by that time after all.
***
Coming full circle back to the Ghost Rider I have another distinct memory from when I was 10 years old and we were visiting my Grandparents in northern Indiana. Grandpa Haney had a large farm with barns full of animals, tractors, and hay surrounded by hundreds of acres of corn. He was a quiet person and I never really talked with him as a kid, but on this one occasion I was with him at a grocery store. We stood in the checkout line and there was a comic book rack where I found a Ghost Rider comic and guiltily flipped through it while trying to be small and invisible. My Grandpa turned in my direction at which point I thought I was totally busted. Instead of chastising me he asked if I wanted that comic and I said “yes?” and he had me throw it up on the counter (face down of course). He had absolutely no idea what he’d just agreed to and I now owned my first and only Ghost Rider comic book.
In that particular comic Ghost Rider is racing Death himself who, strangely enough, is a fellow motorcycle rider with a flaming skull-head that is green. It was yet another deal or wager he’d agreed to (had he not learned his lesson with the devil?). At the end of the story they are racing up a mountainside road and as they ascend Ghost Rider kicks Death’s front tire sending him careening off a cliff and he goes on to win the race. I feel like I am in that very race even now and I have a strong suspicion I am not going to win no matter who or what I kick. But hopefully I can make a good showing of it without fear... or cheating.
***
to reclaim the glove
that fell down the hole
of encircling stairs
like Alice, but
no Wonderland.
***
The Thing in your dreams
is orange and obnoxious.
In a time when healing is
essential he simply hollers
“IT’S CLOBBERIN’ TIME!”
I am standing sideways in the ocean and feeling the warmish water lap over my legs just above my knees. It is a pulsing of the planet as the waves continually form to my oceanward side. I am looking at my children as they play in the surf several yards away from me.
This has happened twice now in the month of June on a family vacation in Hilton Head. On both occasions I suddenly understand I am standing there in that spot and there is no future and there is no past. There is only now and I am untethered from the tyranny of time.
The second time it happened I immediately remembered the first and knew I was inhabiting that same space though a year had passed. I wonder if this is how hypnosis works, dissociating from the confines of one’s self? In that moment I did not want to move, to breathe, only to be.
***
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