Ecdysis

House For Sale

2006-10-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

I've never kept my house so clean as I do now: now when I decide that I don't want it anymore. Strange that a person should polish, clean, and fuss over something that she does not love, does not care for. That is just what selling your house makes you do. You suddenly become so self-conscious about what other people see, and what your family was content to live in is no longer the acceptable standard. The standard becomes the model home down the street, the impeccable not-lived-in show home that you compete against and now suddenly I am keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, and the Joneses have a corporate marketing budget and a professional decorator and suddenly, frequently I feel small and harried and overwrought that I cannot seem to set a table properly, and the stains on my carpet that reminded me of a sweet memory of my child are again just stains that cannot be cleaned away. The poor dog is weary of his crate, and I am weary of being tossed out of my house by the strangers I eagerly long to hear from with mixed emotions; excitement, trepidation, irritation, dull realization that this one too will say that the back yard is too small after all...

Apple Cakes, Lemon Cakes and cousin Billie

2006-10-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

I’m in my kitchen, scrubbing gently at my non-stick baking pans, listening to the soft purr of the dishwasher and feeling the heat of the ovens wane in the room. The smell of apples and cinnamon wafts and settles gently around the room, a warm blanket to cozy me into the evening as my children drift off to sleep. My thoughts drift to another cake, this one lemon, sitting on my grandmother’s counter. I was about the same age as my youngest child – maybe six or seven – the first time I saw that lemon cake, and it was grand and high and just bursting with importance. I came racing around the corner hall to the kitchen, past the bright orange, red and green cock and hen decorative plates bearing the names of my Grandaddy and Grandmommy – unfamiliar nicknames that no one ever used, but something like the proper names that you sometimes heard people call them – and past the wall mounted rack of collectible salt and pepper shakers; little tea pots and kettles, odd figures of Aunt Jemima looking-black people that I somehow knew were inapropriate, but were never discussed, and more roosters and hens (how I always wanted to play with those salt and pepper shakers, but was never allowed to touch them until after she died, my Grandmommy, and then I sold them one by one to collectors on behalf of the estate, except for one piece, a pewter set made in occupied Japan which I kept for reasons I still cannot explain). I raced around the counter and came face to face with this cake. I forgot about my pursuit of my sister, which angered her greatly, as the sheer heavenly scent of lightly sugared lemon frosting washed over me in waves. I stared. I knew I would not be allowed to touch this cake. It was for some friend, some church gathering, some anything that I had not yet heard of; whatever the case, the cake would be leaving and I would never touch it. My Grandmother bid goodbye to someone at the door, and she turned to me and said, “would you like a piece of birthday cake?”

I was confused. “Whose birthday is it?” I asked. It had been my birthday almost a month before, but no one else’s was due for some time – at least several months. “It is yours. My cousin Billie made it for you when she heard you were coming down to visit.” A whole cake made just for me by a cousin I did not know, a strange benefactor who reached out of my abject boredom into this strange world of antique oddities and somehow created the one perfect delicacy I had never thought to crave. How incredibly perfect. I didn’t know who Billie was and for years I couldn’t fathom the relationship. All I knew was that once a year, when it was somewhat close to my birthday, if we visited my Grandmommy’s house, her cousin Billie would make me a lemon cake. She never delivered it to me in person and I never got to thank her for it. She lived in the same town and she must have been close, but her life was kept completely separate from mine – I never knew why. I grew to love the lemon cakes as a sort of intrigue. My sister never got a lemon cake or anything special from anyone. No other cousin of ours received any special attention from an absent relative either. Just me – the youngest of the grandchildren; the one most likely to be tormented, most likely to squeal, and, as it turns out, the one least liked by my grandmother.

As an adult, I have later learned that my grandmother liked me about as much as I liked her. I have few fond memories of her and these are mostly greetings and goodbyes. My cousins tell me that she found me to be whiny and a pain. I did complain more than the others, but I was the smallest and therefore always the one sleeping on the floor, always the last to get the soft spot, always the one without the pillow and always the one whose input was considered the least. You might complain too. My Grandmother, by the time I was old enough to be a pain in the rear, suffered from Parkinsons disease, although I never knew this until I was well into my teen years and after my beloved Granddaddy had passed away from another equally horrible debilitating illness. Suffice to say, she had been fighting a losing battle for her own health and her husband's health for some time by the time I was a little snot, and I must have been a bit much to take. Children, even well behaved children, can be difficult for the infirm. They are excruciating for the infirm who prefer children to behave like adults to begin with. As the fifth grandchild, I had come to the end of her tolerance limits, I suppose. As everyone else was growing up and supposed to behave better, so I was expected to behave better. I spent a lot of time outdoors when visiting, although what I really wanted to do was rummage through her closets to look in those wonderful hat boxes that tempted me from the guest room closet. I just knew that a whole world of dress up clothes awaited; quiet, patient, whispering to me in the night like the little red shoes that belonged to the girl in the story that my Granddaddy would read to me with his Grover puppet, "come and see, let's go dancing together!" I was right, you know. When my grandmother passed away, my father could not bear to go through her things so I came down and stayed in the house and catalogued everything in it. I saved many things that he would have thrown away, including my Grandaddy's bus driver hat with its badges that looked like police badges, his keys that were always so interesting and clangy, and those lovely, lonely old hats in their crumbly old hat boxes. Sometimes, just to make sure they are still there, I get them out and show them to my daughters and put them on to show them how they were worn. I would have loved to see them on my grandmother's head.

In any event, I begin to understand my cousin Billie’s sympathy a bit more in context. You see, my cousin Billie was my Grandmother’s first cousin and they grew up together as best friends. They were friends and fellow troublemakers, although my grandmother chose the life of family and respectability, while her cousin chose a life of glamour and adventure. Billie was a model. She modeled hats and furs and I have many pictures that she gave me once (when I visited her as an adult) as well as velour swimsuits, lingere and other niceties. She was quite the item for a time, even traveling to Paris to model. She married and divorced no less than five times, and to this day is unmarried and living alone. She was shockingly beautiful, as was my grandmother. My grandmother was shockingly proper, although as I read in her diary (after she passed) she was also rather depressed and perhaps suffering from a sort of bi-polar disorder. Billie never had children. I think they may have lived through each other to an extent, keeping in contact, living close to one another in their older years, and loving each other like sisters the whole time. There may have been more to it than that, but I will never know.

I went to see Billie again when my Grandmother died. My father and I spent some time with her and we tried to give her my grandmother’s house because her own house was literally falling down around her. She wouldn’t have it. Liz’s house was too fine, and too lonely without her in it. She couldn’t bear to live there without Liz.

After that visit, she started to send me lemon cakes again. She couldn’t cook anymore – she was almost blind and very nearly deaf and her stove doesn’t work in her house. She won’t let anyone replace it because she says she doesn’t need one. There is a couple who looks after her, and my father checks on her often and makes sure that her financial affairs are kept in order. He won't let her go unaided if she needed anything, I know. My father loves her because his mother loved her. She is family. She ordered a very fine lemon cake from a store and had it mailed to me that year for Christmas. It was beautiful – it made me cry. I didn’t even want to eat it – I just wanted to look at it and know that she was still alive and wonder what I needed to do. She was my angel my whole life, and now I didn’t know what to do for her. Every now and then I send her pictures of my kids, although I admit to failing her more often than not. My father called once and told me that she was in the hospital and I felt panicky – like I needed to go and see her. I didn’t feel that way about my own grandmother. He said not to go – she didn’t like a fuss. I sent her a bouquet of flowers instead, and a nice card. The woman who cares for her called to let me know how surprised she was and how much it had meant to her.

This year, cousin Billie turned 100 years old. A week before her birthday, she sent me a check for $25 and a note asking me to get gifts for my girls for their birthdays. I was in tears. She is in poverty and she is giving me gifts? What have I ever done for her? I didn’t know what to do, but called my parents again to ask how to receive such a precious gift. They said to deny it would break her heart – just send pictures of the girls and thank you. I sent her four 5x7s of my very favorite photos of my girls with her 100th birthday card and notes about what the girls are doing. I also promised to follow up with pictures of what they got with their birthday money from her and thanked her for her gift. I still felt like I was falling short. How do you honor someone like Billie? For me, she has been a ray of sunshine, a hope, a beacon of light. I don’t know why she decided to make me that first lemon cake. I don’t know if she just had a cake made and decided to drop by one day and said to herself “I’ll just call it a birthday cake for this one” or if she set out to brighten my day at the outset. Whatever the case, she stuck to it. She persisted. She did it out of love, and she did it to stay connected. She reminded me every time she baked that cake that there was someone out there who knew who I was – me – the little one who sometimes got left behind, or lost a shoe, or had to sit on the floor because there weren’t any seats left. She made sure that even the least of these had lemon cake.

This is what I am thinking as I wrap up from my baking tonight. I’ve been baking a lot of apple cakes lately. I started baking apple cakes because we had a lot of apples and they were going to go bad. My mother had this family recipe that she gave me when we first got married and it was one of my favorites from childhood. It was easy to make, but you have to use your hands to squish the apples into the batter. I like to think that there is more love in that cake because you have to really reach into it yourself and grapple with it. I pray over my cakes when I make them. I am a little bit like my Grandmommy and a little bit like Billie. Part of me is a little wild, and part of me is very proper. So when I make my cakes, I pray that God will bless the person who eats it and that he will show me who to give it to. Do you know what? He does.

Chapter one - A Ghost Story...

2006-09-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

I had sat through four end-of-the year award ceremonies in that room before I told anyone the story. Even then it was to my own children. I swore them to secrecy. Since no one believes stories that children tell, I figured it was safe to tell it like a fairy tale, or ghost story. If they spilled it, no one would believe them. It happened in the CMA building on the University of Texas at Austin campus; a large, industrial looking building with not much curb appeal, except that it does have a nice outside courtyard connecting it to CMB and CMC that gives it a kind of community feel. When someone comes into the building for the first time and steps into the elevator, one of the first things they notice is that the building has no first floor. In fact, the elevator buttons run 2-7, and the second floor is the basement garage. The first level of the building, the main lobby level, is the third floor. One might find that odd, and yet no one seems to question it. Students are occasionally confused and end up on the wrong floor. It happens when they take the stairs and count floors rather than ride up the elevator, but after a bit of practice the floor number discrepancy fades into the mindless meaninglessness of busyness and everyone forgets. Except my children. Which is why I had to tell them. They were never going to let it go. It was driving me crazy too, year after year, watching people casually walking back and forth over the trap door in the second floor auditorium knowing what was there; knowing what had happened and what had to be done and wondering if the proper measures were being taken.
I did not dare tell anyone while I was working my way through graduate school. If someone else knew, I might be exposed and sent away; getting rid of me so I could not tell anyone else. These kinds of things can kill the reputation of a school, and that would mean no more students, no brilliant Profs, and the sudden death of the program that had built to a national stronghold. If they didn’t know (I couldn’t think of which would be worse, really) then they might think I was cracking under the pressure of grad school, and they would probably send me away on medical leave or something – I couldn’t let that happen. I had to finish. I was driven to finish: for my own sake, and and for my family.

Now that they are going to tear the building down and put up a new one, I have no choice. The story has to be told. You have to know what dangers are hidden in that building.

The road to hell, and the foundation of that building, are laid with the best of intentions. Good intentions rarely are enough to compensate for evil. You see, there was a time before this one when graduate students and senior faculty members in the College of Communication mingled together in a rather collegial manner. This was 1965, and although there were many who wished for the old Ivory tower to remain the way it had always been (with great separation between the professors and the students) the new guard of Communication scholars believed that graduate students needed close mentoring and training. They thought that graduat students should be working with their Professors closely and should be guided through collegial relationships rather than the former crushing relationships of the 'master and bondservant' model. To facilitate this new enlightened collegiality, the college of communication building, the Jesse Jones Communication building (also known as CMA), was built on the UT Austin campus. It had a basement level full of offices and meeting rooms surrounding a large, open lounge that was accessible to both graduate students and faculty alike. The idea was that graduate students assisting the faculty would be able to pop their heads into offices at a moments notice, and would be able to sit down and chat with faculty members casually about complex subjects over coffee in the lounges. It was an academic utopia.

It wasn't everyone's Utopia. There was one professor, Dr. Evan B. Simien, who refused to adapt. He was not particularly older than the other professors, on average. Nor was he particularly more conservative or liberal, or particularly more or less anything, other than stuck in his ways. He simply did not think it was a good idea to fraternize with ones students. How could you fault him, really? Here he was going about his business building a comfortable reputation for himself at a University he believes he can really make a name for himself, and suddenly the playing field shifts in a way that is not just huge, it is seismic! It was not just bad for Dr. Simien; it was bad for his graduate students. For awhile, they acted as if everything was fine and that he would come around; wearing pasted on smiles in the common room and walking a little more quietly around their mentor. Then, after a few months, it became clear that the situation was worsening. The few graduate students working with Dr. Simien began to come to the graduate dean one at a time, in secret, begging for reassignment. One transferred to another University. Rumors began to surface of abuses, although nothing was substantiated. The graduate dean, deeply unsettled by what he was seeing and hearing from these graduate students called Dr. Simien aside for a private meeting one morning to discuss the accusations and his concerns. After an hour, both men emerged, Simien looking gaunt and resigned and the dean appearing shaken and pale. Nothing changed. Nothing was ever shared about the meeting that transpired between the two, but the Dean kept his distance from Simien after that meeting and most of Simien's graduate students were reassigned.

Just past the holidays that year, Dr. Simien had only one graduate student left under his care. She had been a bright and promising young woman with a lot of determination, but she was showing great strain and barely holding up under what had become constant belligerence. Other professors had approached her with offers to take her under their wing, but she prided herself in being able to handle the worst, and the worst she handled. Her name was Helen, and she had just returned from a refreshing two days of Christmas holidays to come back to campus and work on another of Dr. Simien’s endless projects. She was in a relatively good mood, and was pouring herself a cup of coffee. The way I understand it, Dr. Simien entered the lounge from another door just as she was exiting to her office. Apparently, he saw the empty coffee pot, became enraged that she had not thought to make a new pot of coffee in the expectation that he would be there and want his coffee. In the few seconds before she had completely exited the room, he ran to the coffee pot, grabbed the empty carafe and lobbed it across the room where it exploded with a loud POP against the back of her head.

Helen, momentarily stunned, stumbled out of the lounge and then turned around to see what had happened. She turned to see her advisor, apoplectic, screaming something about her stealing his coffee, and she did what any sensible girl would do. She ran. She did not wait for the elevator. She ran up two flights of stairs to the pay telephones in the garage and called the police in a barely controlled panic. She then ran to her car, locked the doors, and waited there until they arrived.

When the police arrived about ten minutes later, they found a frightened, coffee stained graduate student with glass from the coffee carafe embedded in the back of her head and matted into her hair with drying blood. They found Dr. Simien where she had left him, in the lounge, quite dead. Apparently, his enraged act had been his last. He had died of an aneurism on the spot.

But that is not the end of the story. That is just where the story begins....

The dog, the paper, and the sorry master

2006-06-10T15:18:00.000-07:00

Once there was a sweet little dog who loved to play fetch, but had no one to play with. Then, one lovely morning, the little dog found a pleasant little house on a hill where there was a kind-looking old lady who rose early each morning to come out of the house in her bathrobe to get the paper. The little dog thought to herself, "I will fetch her paper, and she will love me. Then she will play fetch with me every day, and she will be my master, and I will be her dog." The little dog ran to the front of the house, fetched the paper, and sat down obediently in front of the lady with her tiny tail wiggling excitedly. The old lady was not pleased. "Bad dog!" She said. "Give me my paper!" The little dog's tail stopped wagging and her mouth dropped open in surprise. The old lady snatched the paper out of the dog's mouth and popped her on the head with it. As the dog ran away in confusion and fear, she wondered what she had done wrong. "I must have picked it up incorrectly," she thought. "I will try again tomorrow." The next morning she tried again, a little differently, but with the same result. Each day for a week she tried to please the kind-looking old woman by bringing her the paper, and each time she ran away, tail between her legs from a newspaper whipping. At the end of the week, the little dog was beginning to think that she was not very good at fetch. After all, all that was required was getting the paper into the hands of the person, and she had done that very well all week, but the person was clearly not happy with her. What was she doing wrong. She sat by the sidewalk, tail drooping, head on her paws, whimpering to herself. "What's the matter little one?" said a sweet little voice. She looked up to see a little girl walking down the curb like it was a balance beam. The girl knelt down and clapped her hands together, holding them out a bit so that she could smell them. "Come here puppy. Here little one!" The little dog was curious - she walked slowly over to the little girl and sniffed her hands in greeting. She looked into her eyes - they were kind and playful. "Hey," said the little girl, "wanna play fetch? do you know how to play fetch?" she picked up a stick off the ground and waved it in front of the dog, who looked at her excitedly. She threw it.

2006-04-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

Dancing on the DC1100

2005-09-11T23:34:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I've been walking around with this old punctuation/grammar thing in my head that I read about somewhere (probably reader's digest) about how easy it is to mess up the meaning if you put punctuation in the wrong place - the example was "Eats, shoots and leaves." Of course, the sentence is supposed to be describing a Giant Panda bear rather than gunslinger, but the real puzzle to me is why I've been carrying this bamboo munching panda around in my head for a week like a sidekick to a guilty conscience. After all, pandas aren't that concerned with anyone else's business. They aren't into your business or mine - they just go about their jobs (presumably stripping bamboo and eating it, shoots and leaves all) as methodically as possible, and hardly give us the time of day.

Then why is it, I suggest, we find panda's so darn fascinating? They aren't near as interesting as your average person, for example. For one thing, pandas only come in your standard black and white models. Very little variation there. People come in so many different colors that even my children can't agree on the appropriate word to describe the shade of peachy-tan-brown of their skin. God forbid you should enter the discussion after they start to label the new color that creeps up their arms and legs in the summer time. All they know is that mommy is definately on one end of the spectrum, and daddy is on the other. They run the sliding scale in between, depending on sun exposure and which one of us they like best at the moment.

But people are fascinating for another reason too. We DO things. Really funny, unexpected things. Just yesterday, as we were driving out of town through that mess of construction traffic that seems to have been going on forever, we passed the obligatory hunk of orange machinery. The kids don't even look anymore, but out of a practiced mother habit, I looked to see what new and interesting thing I could point out on the construction site to keep them interested. My husband was driving, so I had the priveledge of staring as I saw two men atop the large orange rig in their brightly colored reflective vests, yellow hard hats in place, talking.

One of the men leaned toward the other as if to say something and then did the strangest thing I have ever seen on a construction site. He began to dance. Not just any dance. It was a jig. No lie - it had to be a jig. OK, so I don't know what a jig actually looks like, but I have seen cartoon renderings of jigs, where the character pumps the hands up and down washboard style and kicks the feet out side to side, sort of rocking back and forth? That was this dance. Right there on top of this DC1100 rig. And he had the biggest smile on his face, like it was the coolest thing in the world, and he just didn't give a flyin' leap if anyone in that long line of traffic saw him. Do you know what his partner did? He started dancing too!

I started laughing, and yanking on my husbands sleeve - "look at that - are those guys DANCING up there?" I swear he never even looked away from the road, never changed his tone of voice, and as if it is the most natural thing in the world he said, "yep. Dancin' on the DC1100."

Now, I don't know why those guys were dancing on the DC1100 - I can only speculate. All I know is that it looked like they were having a good day. It made me think that maybe they really loved their jobs. Maybe they loved building highways, and they were just really happy to be out there on a Saturday morning earning a living making something really big and doing something really cool. Maybe it is really fun to operate that giant machine. Or maybe it is just really fun to have a big orange stage, a great bright yellow and orange florescent costume, and a captive audience. It doesn't matter, I guess. For me, all that matters is that these two cowboys shot that leaf munching panda right out of my head.

Thank you, gentlemen.

The Iris

2005-06-30T22:23:00.000-07:00

I saw this Iris blooming in the garden, its brilliant gold and purple eye set deep among lush green lashes; winking at me from the ground so unexpectedly. It should have been taller, I thought - they usually are, Irises. But this one flowered beautifully close to the ground, as if impatient to throw its eye wide open to gaze upon the beauty of the sky. Two sisters stand beside it, one just taller, hesitant to follow suit, the other raising a clenched fist high into the air, her grace not lost beneath the spent blooms, curling inward to leave only silvery traces of her former beauty on the back of lacy purple ruffles. What a lovely plant, I thought. It looks as if it were arranged in a vase just now, poised so perfectly there. How kind of the gardener to leave it here for me to see. I paused a moment to drink in her beauty, and then went on to the rest of the garden, humming to myself, my mind wandering peacefully in and out of thoughts of the tender gardener and his lovely garden.

Midnight prowler

2005-06-27T01:30:00.000-07:00

It is after midnight, and here I am suddenly wide awake. It is a strange sensation, since most of my days feel like so much of a challenge to keep my head above water; a fight to focus, snapping back to clarity here and there like a student daydreaming in class. "What?" I will say, and the person talking to me will give me the blank stare of the fully annoyed, who has just spoken for the last half hour without an audience only to just discover that frustrating fact. Each morning I drag myself out of bed, exhausted beyond words, occasionally bruised from toddler size nine footprints climbing up my body to avoid God-only-knows what horror I was unable to protect her from in her dreams. Occasionally, I am awakened by my own stiff neck, having fallen asleep in the wrong position, only to jerk awake to the call of the child in the middle of the night, inflaming the muscles along the back of my ear, ripping down the neck to the shoulder, festering in the night until my whole back, neck and shoulder is sore. Sometimes, I sleep rather well, and I wake cautiously in the morning as the sun's early rays peer in early through the sheer curtains stealthily, as if not to wake anyone else but me, and I notice that for once, no one has interrupted my sleep in the night; no mid-sized visitors have joined my husband and I, no curious dog who I forgot to put to bed, no child in a panic or in need of a drink, and wonder of wonders, I have slept IN. And it is these mornings, jumping out of bed in a panic, reaching for my glasses with the practiced hand of the near blind, that I discover the secret joke of the pleasant peace - it is Saturday morning, and my day to sleep late. I always wake early on my day to sleep late. So I must creep back into the covers and pretend to sleep long enough, hard enough that I believe it; and they believe it too, so that when they come they will wake my husband for their breakfast and leave me awash in the sun's early rays a bit longer to have some modicum of peace.

But it is always this time of night that steals the sleep from me. If I remain awake past eleven PM, I can be assured that sleep will not come easily. It is almost as if the dreams I am meant to dream will come whether I close my eyes and rest or not, and if they be pleasant, I may sit and daydream and write for ages. If they be nightmares, no manner of television or warm milk will assuage the fears that will assail.; it must be meditation and scriptiure. For once midnight is apon me, I walk with the other night-guests, and the dreams that haunt the house are my company. I hear every whimper that visits the lips of the children, and notice every change in the sound of the crickets outside.

The house has a sound when people are dreaming that comforts me, and it is the sound of rest. It is as if time itself were suspended, and no manner of hurry or fury or worry can take that rest away from me. My soul rests in the presence of the dreams of others, and I can almost hear them whisper as I walk the halls of my home. If there is a nightmare, it can often be tamed with the whisper of a suggestion - a word of comfort, a loving touch. I walk from room to room, and look and listen at the doors of my angels for signs that they are not finding rest in their dreams, and in these moments, I too am a guardian of dreams.

It is hard for me to give up these moments, because they are devoid of time and separate from the everyday world. I remember when my oldest child was an infant, and I would get up at 3am to respond to her cries in the night. I remember rocking her for hours after she would go to sleep, and willing myself to remember every detail of those moments; how she felt pressed against my chest, her little head tucked up underneath my chin - how she fit so perfectly there that when she sucked her thumb, her little fingers would tap gently on my chin and when they got longer, would touch my lips just so. I remember thinking how precious those sensations were, and how quickly I would lose them - that one day she would no longer fit in my lap, and soon she would not want to get into my lap anymore, because she would be a grown up kid, and not my baby anymore. In the night, when I prowl my home, I see my family like that - pressing their memories, their faces, their scents into my mind so that I will not forget. I picture them there, resting comfortably, and if they are not resting well, I fix it, because someday I won't be there to fix it anymore.

Beyond anything else, I want them to know how precious they are to me - my husband, my girls. I want them to know how beautiful they are to me just as they are, even when they don't know I am looking, and how much I long for them inside and want everything to be perfect for them. I am just a wife and a mother, so I pray. I pray that God will bless them with courage and grace, and I pray that He will guide them and give them strength. I pray that He will give them knowledge of Him and that they will come to know Him as I have. Most nights, I pray that He will give them rest and peace, and that He will draw them ever closer to Him each day. I pray these things now, and knowing that my family rests safely in His hands, I can let go. It is time for me to go to bed. Good night, my loves.

Lament of adulthood

2005-06-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

People are much the same wherever you are. Once you pass high school, all the wonderful uniqueness of youth dissipates into oblivion leaving only the tell-tale legacies of jealousy and partisanism of adulthood. Even Plato’s utopian republic was not free of the petty squabblings of adulthood when it came to pure matters of taste – his taste in literature – he devalued an entire genre. Had his society come to pass, he might have denied us Keats and Browning, Dickenson and a myriad of fledgling Poe’s who give us much in the way of shaped perceptions and nudged societal expectations. No adult is as wise as a child, as we well know but refuse to understand. It is the child’s ability to question and wonder that we lack. Instead, as we grow older we long for the comfort of an absolute and hide our fears in the cacophony of shouted dogma, willing to fight anyone to the death rather than take a second look at ourselves. It is heresy, we say, to question God’s Will in this situation. Is it truly His voice we listen for? Or isn’t it true that many times we listen to the easiest voice to hear, which is our will (which bears little resemblance to His, most often).
Truth is never hard to find, it is only hard to look for. It is unbelievably difficult to take one’s eyes off of what we choose to see in order to focus on something we will not to recognize. This is the curse of choice. Society can never rest in its search for the truth because it does not choose to find it. Far from the utopia we dream of and engineer our society toward, the truth is garbled and confusing, like the mumbled ramblings of a very old, very sad man. The truth is made of memories too distant to remember, written down by someone who only wishes to forget.

Passion, or something else?

2005-06-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

I have no rhymes with which to tease you -
no words or pictures that you can see that will explain
what burns inside of me.
It isn’t love or hate or even passion,
but some unfathomable disease of the spirit
which only God can destroy
and only God can infect you with.
It is a curse you fall in love with –
or maybe a dependency.
What do I care?
In this present day of labels and pronouncements
we need only to identify a psychosis to ignore it.
It is the thing we see that we must never find –
that “admitting it is the end of the battle,” when really
it is the start and there is never any end.
That is truth.