Not There


Dear Eugene,

Dropped off my daughter at school, an extra early day for her, and went for milk and banana.

At the grocery check-out I overheard a lady saying to a staff something obviously about the past weekend's municipal election, which way she leaned I didn't pick up, it doesn't matter.  She was talking about something bad that's bound to happen within five years and she would rather not see it in her lifetime.

I sure hope I won't be around by then, her words.

The thing is she's not that old. The thing is if she is to go to her doctor today and the doctor is to give her five years she'd roll in mud and curse high heaven.  Not fair at all, she'd wail.  Yet she had prophesied the fairness of her not having to suffer with anyone else.  Let alone for.

Yesterday morning a brother in Christ took us for a prayer walk before Sunday worship.  We walked a block, and then another.  Forget it Alex, it's Chinatown.  Nothing will make the smell go away.  Nothing.  Not pouring rain.  Not purifying snow.  You shut your nostrils from inside to protect your palate, your appetite for life.  How are the cardboard shelters going to hold up when the rain comes, in two days, as the weather man prophesied?

I was planning to take a long Sabbath walk after church, Before the rain comes, I said, and sure enough I did.  When it does I will try to stay indoor.  I will still try my best to go outdoor, with proper gears head to toe, make real my brief romanticism in the baptism of unholy elements of life.

I sure hope I won't be around by then.  I will try to be there.

But, no, not really.

Yours, Alex

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading