A little something found in my files recently. I edited it down, but hopefully it's near enough to the original to be enjoyed. Without further ado--
Blue Poles
(Mar, 2008)
“Something has to change,” I thought as I lay on the bathroom floor barely conscious, right cheek throbbing.
I could feel my eyes blinking like a caution light only faster and more erratic, like our political leaders when they try to explain why we’re still in Iraq or that TV preacher from the big church in Texas as he proclaims a castrated gospel. “Does blinking really blind us from the inconsistencies spewed forth from our churning souls?” It seems to work for most of them. Light, dark, light, dark, light, dark, my eyelids opened
and closed sticking as they did. It never worked for me.
I guess it started in 1969, the year I turned my back on the New York Mets for losing the only home game my cub scout pack attended. The year I become my own God at age six.
It was the first day of school and I can still see it. It took only six minutes but it impacted me deeply, like the first time I peered into an airplane cockpit on a field trip in the third grade. I knew it was complicated and important, beyond my understanding.
“I’m moving out. Your mother and I are getting a divorce. Do you need lunch money?” my father said all in one breath.
I don’t remember saying anything but I do remember the warm and lifeless disks he placed in my hand. I remember becoming an observer. Peering in, like the gods of old, I watched myself open the powder-blue chevy van door, slowly emerge, and shut it. I watched myself, head down, walk into the navy blue pole that supported the canopy. I could feel the collision in my teeth. I took one step to the right and continued walking, head down. I walked into another pole. Numbed by the awakening, I picked my head up and promised “never again”.
Did Jesus himself stand perplexed as he watched himself at age 12 confound the religious leaders of his day in the temple? Did he recognize the riddles as his own or did he walk away wondering?
Did Jesus stand, like me at age seven, numb-faced and deep after being hit in the face by a selfish classmate's softball, torn between the ‘I forgive you’ resonating in his soul and the wetness of mortality running down his face?
