Whirl

Within a block, I melted into my email.  We rode for a while in pleasant, bumpy silence.  Lost in email, I didn’t bother looking up until I felt someone brush my knee.  We were just south of North Broadway and starting to take on ballast-college students headed for OSU. 

The knee bump came from a tired looking lady, maybe faculty or staff.  She takes a seat across the aisle from and gives me a disapproving glance.  She’s about 30 with short, dark brown hair.  She’s dressed well and looks good in her professional cloths.  It’s apparent she knows that.

Returning to my phone I see that Yahoo is still fighting with Microsoft.  There was a day when no one dared such a thing.  I’m a Microsoft bitch, and so the idea seems inconceivable to me-biting the hand that feeds you.  But of course, I don’t really code anymore and the people who work for me are java guys.  I decide to keep my Microsoft days under wraps.

The kids are really piling on.  One of them is DreadlockJunkie.  I’ve been watching him for weeks.  He’s not really a student, at least not anymore.  His messenger bag is still in good shape, so he can’t have been in this state for long.  Just a suburban kid who fell off a cliff.  He’s very skinny, of course.  His dreads are long and blondish brown, falling well beyond his shoulders.  He’s really young and very strung out.  He plops down next to me and buries his head in his hands.  I hardly feel him take his seat, he can’t be over 100 pounds.  I turn back to my phone but I can’t get into it.  I wonder about my son.  He’s about the same age and I haven’t seen him in a while.  How thin is the line between his comfortable existence and DreadlockJunkie’s troubled morning?  Or between DreadlockJunkie’s troubled morning and my sleepless nights? 

I return to my news feed.  The bus is my chance to catch up with industry reading and my phone is my enabler.  I love my enabler.      

A bright yellow flash hits my peripheral vision.  It’s LakerMan. 

Today he’s in full trademarked, Rodman regalia: Elton John Glasses (star shaped with glitter borders), bright yellow canary shorts, the LA Lakers jersey and a matching yellow felt fedora.  I call him LakerMan because of this outfit.  But he has others.    

He’s a very tall, thin, middle aged man.  He’s too big to fit in the narrow seat beside me so he stands just across the aisle.  Casually hanging onto the pole, he places himself at an oblique angle which faces me, DreadlockJunkie and the driver.  He takes a deep breath and launches into a stream of conscious ramble, directed in the general direction of the driver, but clearly fishing for a response from us as well.

We have the good sense to return to our own respective miseries.  Actually, DreadlockJunkie never surfaced anyway. I’m tempted to reach over and check his pulse.

As always, LakerMan starts with b-ball: “You know you never talk trash before the game, especially when they got someone like LeBron on the team.” He says. “Now they going to be sitting at home, watching the playoffs and eating cookies.”

The role of listener falls to the driver by default.  He takes it in stride.  It’s clear he’s been here before. He seems to have a knack for it.  He’s a professional.

“Yeah…uh…huh.”  He says, his eyes never leave the road ahead.

Now I remember why I don’t sit up front-random talkers.  They like the front of the bus for some reason.  I look around for an escape but the buss is packed.  Thankfully this is LakerMan and not ReligiousDuo, those two could push me to homicide.  But LakerMan is harmless.  FacultyLady doesn’t seem to think so, she’s now split her disapproving glare between the two of us.

The gentle melody of LakerMan’s ramble harmonizes well with the metallic whine of the gear box.   He seems to allow his voice to ebb and flow with rumble of the street.  Together, it’s a smooth, almost comforting effect. 

“It’s not a cash problem, you understand I’ve got plenty of green” he tells the driver, “I’m just biding my time and waiting for someone with those deep pockets.”

“hmmmmm.” says the driver. 

A young lady takes the final seat to my right.  A couple of other students are now standing behind LakerMan.  I’m starting to pay attention to him.  The man has a story to sell.

“I sent Oprah her package, talked to Connie Chung too”, he continues “I’m just checking it all out, looking for the deepest pockets”.

My reverie is broken by the pungent smell of sulfur and methane.  It comes suddenly; rising from the floor.  I look across at FacultyLady and by the look on her face, I can see it’s moving fast. 

My first suspect is DreadlockJunkie.  But I quickly rule him out.  These are not the emissions of a young man.  These are day openers, morning farts.  And morning farts cannot be rendered  from a young digestive track.  This is the output of ancient, established, bacteria-village elders of the microbial world.  The booze washed intestines of a college student are too spastic for these guys.    They expect to be treated with respect; preferring a comfortable home with room to grow.  No, morning farts are the primordial stew of a middle aged, male gut.

Excluding me, there are only two men on the bus who could accomplish such a feat-LakerMan and the driver.  FacultyLady dam sure thinks I did it.  Why she’s zeroed in on me I’ve no idea, but now I’m making it worse. I can feel my face growing red.  Partially from holding my breath, but also because I’m embarrassed she thinks it’s me. 

We hit the first stop on campus and FacultyLady bails.  In fact almost every student up front bolts for the door.  The vehicle is disgorging.

LakerMan takes a seat facing me.  He’s to the left of the seat abandoned by faculty lady.  He keeps talking.  Both men appear to be  oblivious to the poisonous fumes. 

Who is doing this?  The back of the bus is still full and I’m late to work so I can’t duck out and wait for the next ride.  I have to stay.  I resolve to solve this mystery.

The rhythm returns.  Only now the sing song of LakerMan’s voice is punctuated by the occasional olfactory assault.  Someone is playing rhythm with nary a sound.

“Now McCain he done started taking shots at Obama.” LakerMan continues, “You know you never talk trash before the election.”

At the next stop, a young woman boards.  She pauses at the front.  “She smells it” I thought, “now she’ll blame me”.  My face starts to redden even before I get the stare.  But the stare never comes. 

She’s running her seating algorithm.  “Should I take the seat next to the basketball player, or beside the fat guy with a red face.”  She goes with LakerMan, demurely taking FalcultyLady’s seat.

I construct a little experiment.  I’ll watch the girl’s face-concentrating on her nose.  If I smell it first, then it’s the driver, if she gets it first, it has to be LakerMan.  This experiment would not have worked with FacultyLady because LakerMan was standing at the time; thus his ass was equidistant from both of us.  God I love science!

My eyes are fixed squarely on her cute button nose.  I dare not even blink.  In a few seconds I feel the familiar burning of my nasal hairs.  I wait for her reaction but it never comes.  Maybe it’s the driver.  But the guy two seats behind her is now turning blue and coughing.  She hasn’t even wrinkled her cute little brow.  She’s either completely without smell or a very, very controlled person. 

My mind stretches back to NATO exercises in the Air Force.  The alarm would sound and we’d have to don our gas mask.  I’d have to work at the keyboard, sometimes for hours, wearing thick rubber gloves and gas mask.  The only advantage was that you could fart with impunity-our worls was carbon filtered.

Deep in thought and half conscious from oxygen deprivation.  I notice the young lady is turning red.  She can smell!

But why is she blushing.  Then it occurs to me, I’m still staring at her nose.  She must be interpreting this as accusation.  She thinks that I think she did it!

Imagine that.

My stop is next.  The case no longer intrigues me and I need air.  Stumbling to the door, I mutter my thanks the driver as I fall through.

“Uh…huh”, he nods. 

LakerMan pauses, and takes a deep breath.

 
© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

“Oh yeah, we’d snort gasoline, paint thinner, any kind of get high”

At this moment I knew I was in over my head.

We were in Jacob’s crappy little apartment, in a crappy little subdivision, about a three miles from the base.

Jacob, (the guy talking), Sam and I were snorting speed. Well at least they were. I was watching and peppering them with questions.

I’d arrived in the PI about five months ago. By now it was all old hat, my tuition was complete.

Prior to reaching my teens I’d set an absolute, dogmatic rule with regard to drugs, including cigarettes and alcohol–I would never use them. My thinking did not stem from any sort of moral code, instead it came from fear. As a result of this self imposed policy, most of my adolescence was dedicated to finding a middle ground. One where I could keep the friends I had and yet not take on their expanding habits. That worked well until I left home.

When I arrived in Denver for tech school, I found myself isolated. The straight kids were the people whom I seemed to have the least in common. Many of them loved, even craved, power and authority. Their thinking was even more rigid than mine, their sense of humor was crippled, and half of them were jesus freaks.

So after 2 years of self-inflicted solitude, I’d decided to use this new assignment as a chance to re-set my lifestyle; to taste a few forbidden fruits.

At this moment I wasn’t so sure I’d made the right call.

Another friend arrived and we left for the bars. We were a long way from Fields Avenue, and there were no jeepneys around, so we started walking.

The weather was nice that night, not too hot (meaning under 90 degrees) and dry, very dry. It was nearing dusk. The road wound through some pretty bare stretches; places with no street lights; areas where the land was too low and hilly to build. But people lived here, uninvited.

Of the road, down in the gulley’s, you could see candles burning through cracks in the thin walls of several little shacks. These were fairly nice, as squatter’s shacks go. In Manila I’d seen families living under cardboard and garbage bags. These shacks were solid, made of plywood and tin.

The mothers were putting their children to bed. The coal fires, where they had cooked their dinner, were dying off. The men were sitting around them, smoking cigarettes and silently watching us pass.

I could feel their dark eyes on me. I wondered what it must be like to lay on the ground late at night, in a little tin shack with your children on one side of you and your wife on the other. Did every car or motorcycle passing on the road above remind you of what you could not give them? How do you keep them clean and safe? How do you keep them dry and warm when the rains come? How do you give them comfort when they are sick?

A jeepney passed and Sam flagged it down. I was glad to scurry off.

“Why?” I thought, “why did I feel anxious back there.”

I didn’t fear for my safety–I’d walked that road many times in the dark of night—so where did this uneasiness come from?

A few bumpy minutes later we disgorged ourselves from the jeepney in front of the main gate. Children swarmed us begging for money and offering to help us find entertainment for the evening.

In suburban America, kids this age would be in bed. Safe and content in their cartooned underwear, surrounded by plastic accessories. But these boys were on the streets, working hard to scrape up a few coins. Most of them were the children of bar girls, who were also working right now. It didn’t strike me as ironic that I may be chatting up their mother in just a few minutes. This was normalcy in Angeles City.

The four of us wandered into a bar we liked. The place was named Oliver’s at the time, but bar names in Angeles changed from month to month. It was a small dive. Maybe 25 feet wide and 40 deep. The bar ran lengthwise along the room. It looked much like any American bar might have looked in 1980. Dingy and smoke filled. There was a pool table in the back and a few tables towards the front of the place.

We were the only customers. We sat down at the bar and ordered San Miguel. At the time, this was the only brand of beer you could get in the PI. That would change.

As my friends talked, I sat back, nursed my beer, and took in the view. For some reason, all of the bar girls were lined up on the other side. I counted 18 young women. Eighteen of them to four of us; those were pretty good odds.

“Is this were the children in the gulley shacks will end up?” I thought. “Stuck on the wrong side of a ratio, in a dive best known as a good place to buy dope?”

I realized were my earlier discomfort came from.

A few hours ago, I’d walked into a pharmacy, parted with three dollars, and walked out with a few hits of Ionamin. A legal transaction in the eyes of the Philippine government (not the U.S. Air Force) conducted for purely recreational means. By American standards, I was not well off. Yet my disposable income was enough to keep a couple of Filipino families healthy and educated. I could not plead ignorance to that. I witnessed it every day.

Looking back tonight it would be wonderful if I could tell you that this moment of realization led to a major change in my behavior. But that’s not what happened. Instead I chose to turn back to the bar and order another beer. I chose short term pleasure over long term effect.

It’s easy enough to say this was an individual choice and it was. But despite our cherished individuality, our single choices mold the values held to by our society.

Uncle Sam was the most powerful nation on earth in 1980, maybe we still are today. We could have done so much with what we had. But the choices our nation made in that decade were not much different than the small moral choice I made that evening.

We chose to pour several hundred million dollars a year into the pockets of Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies. All so we could hold to a pair of military bases we really didn’t need. So our young airmen could strut their stuff on dusty streets, never bothering to look beneath their heels.

All so we could shoot the heady drug of imperialism into our leathered veins.

Any kind of get high.

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

I reckon he had it coming. I don’t really know why he came back here in the first place. Why didn’t he just go on and leave the country?

Maybe he could have gone off to California and lived with the other heathens. Though it wouldn’t have lasted long. The reverend says we are about to drive the unrighteous right out of California, that it will soon be Christian again. I dunno. The reverend says a lot of things like that, which is one of the reasons I can’t wait to finish school for good this summer. Working in the fields will be a lot better than sitting around listening to him six days a week.

But when he got out of prison, he came right back here—back to Paradise. When I say this is paradise, I mean Paradise, Ohio of course. Not the heavenly paradise that’s waiting for all who obey the Lord God.

And mama just took him in with no questions asked. I don’t know why. Mama said he was an old friend of Uncle Jim’s who was down on his luck, and that this was the Christian thing to do. But he didn’t seem to get along too good with uncle Jim. He wanted no part of him at first. I remember Uncle Jim telling her, “He’s no good for you now Clara, just tell him to move on out of here”. But she didn’t listen. I think she knew it was wrong, but she was determined.

I asked mama what he did to land in jail. She said it warn’t nothing mean spirited or anything, and then she wouldn’t talk no more about it. But uncle Jim wasn’t so reluctant to say what he thought. He said he had taken part in the Columbus riots…that he was a blasphemer, and deserved to rot in prison.

She said, “He’s all we have now Jim. We can get this farm going again, and you know you could use his help.” It ended right there. She gave him a place to sleep in that shed out back.

Now this was a long time back. I’m going on 14 now, but all of this started when I was eight. Everything’s changed now, but at the time we lived on the old farm that had been my Granddad’s. Mama told me we’d been there since my daddy had been killed in the Columbus riots when I was only two. I don’t remember my daddy.

Course now I know that everything mama said back then wasn’t always the true word. The reverend says that Satan will put a lie on your lips and make you think it’s the best thing to say. I reckon he’s right, but I think mama could have let me decide for myself, instead of twisting the truth all around like she did.

Mama really didn’t farm the land. Not much people do a lot of farming, and she couldn’t have done it without a man and all. So she worked as a lunch waitress down at the Dairy Dell on most days. Uncle Jim farmed what he could of his land, which was right next door. But it was a big place, and did all he could just to keep a few acres going.

And mama was right. He started working the next day and pretty soon we had the farm going again.

He was a big man, and he was old–maybe as old as mama, but it was hard to tell. His time in prison had left him pretty quiet. That’s what mama said. But even though he was a stranger and all, he took a real shining to me.

And he did what he was supposed to do at first. He reported in. He let the sheriff know he was here, and he even reported to the church once a day for prayers; just like he was supposed to.

It seemed to me he was making an effort. I guess I was easy to fool. I guess everybody in town was. That’s probably normal cause he was awful good at fooling people.

It might seem strange to you, me saying this and all, but I really took to him. I really did. He treated me nice. Really nice. He would take me fishing, and talk to me about all kinds of stuff.

I always liked numbers and math, and he seemed to know a lot about that kind of stuff. Why he would talk for hours about math and shapes. He showed me how to figure things like the amount of cement we needed to mix up to fix the hog trough, and how to set angle of a roof so it would shed off the snow.

And he seemed pretty good with words too. Course, he had that uppity way of talking, most people hated that. But he was really good at explaining things.

I guess that’s what tripped me up. Set me off my guard. Sometimes the things he was saying sounded so much like common sense, it was hard to see how he was twisting the Lord’s words around.

He’d start out with something we all could agree on—like how good it is to have a forgiving Christian heart. But he would take this, and twist it up, and make it sound as though the blaspheming Muslims who started the war, and the unrighteous heathens that broke up the country should be forgiven as well.

To tell the truth, I really got mixed up cause I really thought I liked him, and he seemed to make sense at the time.

But now it seems plain as day. Everyone knows God can’t forgive a Muslim. Why every school kid gets taught that in the first grade. If we forgave the Muslims it would be like forgetting about New York, and Washington, and Atlanta, and Israel. The reverend says we can’t never forget those places. That Muslim people ain’t like us. We may be at peace now, but pretty soon they will go back to killing Christians again for sure.

But back then, something about the way he spoke his words seemed to make sense. I liked to listen to him, even if half the time I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

Mama seemed to like having him around too.

She smiled a lot when he was around. In the evenings, she’d make us all dinner, and then we’d sit in the living room, and he’d wind up the radio and we’d listen to the shows. Sometimes we’d listen to some of the Canadian shows too. They were pretty funny. But mama would never let him listen to the Canadian news. “I won’t have you breaking the law and dragging my son into it” she said.

Sometimes he would start talking about the days before the war, and mama would get mad at him. But most of the time, we would all set there, real quiet, and listen to the show, and laugh.

I reckon those nights were the only times I’d ever seen her with a grin on her face. We’d listen late some nights, at least they would. I always had to go to bed at 8 o’clock back then. She’d rush me up the stairs, and scrub me down and get me settled into the bed, and then rush back down to listen to the radio some more. She was always in such a hurry to get back to her program.

In the mornings, I’d stop by the shed and wake him up, as I left for school. He always seemed happy to see me. Sometimes he’d already be awake. His cloths would be on crooked but his bed would be so well made, you’d a thought he’d never even slept there at all. I never could figure out how a man could make a bed so perfect, yet couldn’t get his shirttail in straight.

During the winter, when there was no fieldwork to do, he’d work on tractors out in the barn. Men would bring them in from as far as Mendon. On warm days, he’d be crawling around under that old Massey Ferguson combine. He never did get it working, but he told me it would be something we would someday do together, when I was old enough to help him figure it out.

But he was real handy with the tractors. Even though all of them had been built before the war.

I think it was cause of that, why they let him stay here in the first place. Uncle Jim say’s now that we lost sight of the Lord for the wheat. That it was wrong to allow a blasphemer live with us just because he could reason his way around a tractor. But most of the farmers here were desperate to get some wheat in the ground, and even the reverend felt it was good for Paradise to have the machines running again.

After a while, they started letting him make the run up north, past the Canadian border, into Michigan territory. He’d take the town truck, and the sheriff would give him the papers, and he’d be gone for two or three days and then come back with a load of parts.

Of course one of the town aldermen would go with him. They wouldn’t have trusted him with the farmer’s money if he went by himself. And they never let him go past Detroit. They didn’t have to worry about that, Detroit was enough for him to get into trouble and take my mamma down with him.

When I wasn’t in school, I used to sit there in the barn and help him work. He knew were all the tools were, like he’d been there before. So he’d tell me where to find the tools and I’d run fetch them for him. He’d show me all kind of things—having to do with engines and all. I remember a lot of it. I know how to check for fuel and see if you have a spark. I can keep the lawn mower running. Course we can’t afford no gas, but at I know how to make it work.

They say that when he was young—before the big war—he had helped build big machines. Now he just kept them running.

I spent my mornings in school and then would either walk back to the farm or wait for mama to walk with me. Sometimes we’d get a ride on a wagon. We had been living that way for nigh on two years. Mama was happy, and I was sure happy. Things were going good. We had almost saved enough to get a truck for the farm.

The first time I realized something was wrong is when I stopped into the old McDonalds for a milk shake. I was on my way home from school and I was jumping with joy, cause he’d come back from a trip the day before and had given me a Canadian dollar that morning.

We don’t much take to the heathen Canadians here in Ohio, but we sure do like their money for some reason. Uncle Jim say’s it more “powerful” than Ohio money, but I don’t see how that could be…it looks kinda the same to me. Uncle Jim says that when it comes to buyin’ things, it’s better than both the Ohio and the US dollar put together.

So I had this dollar in my pocket, and I figured I’d go into the McDonalds hangout and show it off. I go into the store and there is Cindy McGuffy and a bunch of her friends off in the corner booth. I didn’t really know her that well, seeing how she’s rich, and older than me, and all that. Her daddy is a deacon in the church, so she’s from one of the town’s most uppity families—plus her being a girl wasn’t such a great thing either. I mean I like girls now and all, but they really didn’t know all that much about having fun back then.

So anyways, I walk up to the counter to get my milkshake, and I was pretty lucky to get one cause they don’t always have the stuff for the machine. I give the man my dollar and I notice Cindy is looking at me and whispering to all her friends. They’re all laughing, but I didn’t know they was laughing at me, not yet anyway.

Cindy calls me over there, and of course; I went, though I don’t think I would of if I’d a known what she was going to say.

“How’s it feel to be a bastard, Hobie? That’s what you are you know.”

I really didn’t know back then what a bastard was, but I could tell from the way her friends was laughing that is wasn’t nothing good. So I just hightailed it out of there as fast as I could. I wish I’d a thought of something smart to say, but I was kinda embarrassed about being a bastard and all. So I ran out so fast that I even left my milkshake.

I headed straight home and asked mama what a bastard was. She turned all sorts of red and asked me where in the world I had heard that word. So I told her all about it. By then I was crying and Mama, bless her soul, was real good to me. She hugged me and told me to just ignore all of that cause it was evil gossip.

Now I reckon by then she’d already taken the devil’s path, and that what she was saying, even the tears in her eyes, were just the falsehoods that the devil wanted me to hear. That’s what uncle Jim says now. But it really did feel good to have her comfort me like that. Sometimes life is just real hard to understand.

There’s kind of a feeling you get when you know things are different. When you know that people don’t see you the same as you was before. And after that day, I always had that feeling.

We’d go to town and I’d feel the people staring at us. And if I was in town by myself, old lady Murphy would sometimes pull me into her store and give me candy. Then she’d ask me all kinds of questions about mama and him—always about him. “Where’d he lived? Where’d he sleep?” The same old stuff every time.

My schoolteacher was also interested. She would take me aside during recess and ask me if we were reading the bible and if he was sleeping in his shed like he was supposed to. I pretty much told her about most of it, though I don’t think I mentioned the radio.

After the second year, we was making enough fixing tractors that mama was able to hire a man to plow the fields. After that, he could work on the tractors year round. Of course, that meant I had to help.

Summertime is awful hot around here, and it sure was hard to sit out there in the barn helping him when I could have been swimming in the pond. But I liked talking to him and he was sure good at explaining things. One day, he was talking about Columbus before the war, and how they had a big school of some sort there. And I got real excited about that, cause I knew my daddy had been to that school. I asked him if he knew my daddy, and he got real, quiet for a few minutes.

After a long time he spoke up and said “yes, Hobie, I knew him”.

He said my daddy had been a good man and that he had defended what was right and true, and that I should always be proud of him. I had to ask him to speak up a bit cause his voice was breaking. He must have been real close to my daddy. At the time, I took what he said to mean that daddy had died defending the Lord’s word against the heathens. Now a days I’m not as sure that’s what he meant.

We went through a period where mama was kind of down. He stopped coming in to listen to the radio as often. He’d still come in for dinner, if mama had time to cook, but after that, he’d just light the lamps and head back out to the shed.

And now she always wanted to know who I talked to and what they said. I didn’t like that very much. It was like getting dragged through the brambles on both ends of the street; what with answering questions in town and then answering questions about the questions when I got home.

Sometimes I’d hear them talking at night, after I’d gone to bed, so I knew he was coming back into the house. But I kept that to myself.

Gradually, things seemed to settle back into the way they’d been before. We were able to afford better cloths and other things now. It seemed he’d have something new in the truck every time he came back from Detroit.

When I found them I thought they were balloons. Mama had sent me into her room to fetch some scissors and I looked into her drawer. I saw the packages in her dresser drawer at the time, but didn’t take one. I waited a few days and then curiosity got the best of me.

So one afternoon, before mama got home from the work, I went upstairs and grabbed a couple of them. I took them out into the field, and opened one up. I could tell it was a balloon right away, though it was kind of plain looking—nothing like any of the balloons I’d ever seen before. And it was big! You could blow it up way passed the size of a regular balloon. Balloons are pretty special around here; you can’t find them in the stores. I figured he had picked them up for her in Detroit, and that she was saving them for my birthday. Canadian balloons were something to see!

I couldn’t wait for my birthday to show my friends. So I took one off to school the next day. At recess, we had blown it up and were kind of batting it around when my teacher, Miss Simpson, spotted us. Her face turned all sorts of red. Course I had to fess up to it being mine. I didn’t see where having a balloon would be all that bad, but she hauled me off to the office.

I’ve thought about this a hundred times. Uncle Jim and the reverend have said I did the right thing. I think maybe I could have settled for not being such a hero and just leaving those things in the drawer.

But I didn’t. And I couldn’t keep my mouth shut either. I told her and the principle where I got it. He called the sheriff and from there it all went downhill. They arrested Mama in the diner and arrested him out in the barn. They hauled off the radio and a whole bunch of other stuff. And they used some of it, including the rubbers, for the trial. He was sent to prison for 20 years. Ten for corrupting a minor (me) and ten for smuggling immoral contraband. The reverend say’s they let him off too easy, and that they will probably kick him out of the country when they let him out.

Good. That’s where he should have went in the first place.

Mama had to go away too—that’s the hardest part. She’s been in a ladies reformatory now for the last year; before that she spent two years in prison. I get to visit with her every month, and she says it’s going to be a lot different when she comes back to Paradise.

As for me, I live with uncle Jim and aunt Ruth these days. I help him work the fields. I still go to church, but my schooling days will end this year when I graduate from the 6th grade. I’m sure glad to have all that behind me.

Sometimes, when I’m working the fields, I see that combine standing out behind the barn. It looks like some big old crippled giant. The wind and rain have started to chip away at it, but it hangs on. I reckon I’ll be looking at it for another 20 years.

Copyright 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn.

Our dog Parker is an old soul. When he looks at you, his eyes speak of depth, kindness and limitless, gentle, patience. Not wisdom mind you, he has little of that.

But his simple love is stunning.

In his novel ‘Galapagos‘, Kurt Vonnegut imagined a world in which humans had devolved themselves into sea going mammals. A world where a smaller brain meant prosperity and peaceful co-existence with our planet. Our former glory rusted away, we led happy lives as both hunter and prey—spending our days surfing the restored coral reefs and our evenings basking on the ragged shore.

Simplicity is the siren call of my life these days and it splits me in two. On one hand, I love the complexity that my job brings me, the opportunity to build things that compel and attract. To help organize a team and strive towards a shared passion. But sometimes when I look into Parker’s eyes, I long to de-evolve myself away from the work-a-day world. I long to simplify, to boil it all down to the essential relationships that nurture me: my wife, my children, her children, our grand kids and our friends.

If you’ve ever seen ravens somersaulting in the breeze or martins skimming inches above the lake then you know. If you still delight in the sight of puppies at play then it’s not too late. It’s not too late to yield yourself to nature, to the dance of life, to love.

Parker is blissfully ignorant of this new new-found status I’ve conferred upon him. My smelly spiritual sherpa goes on doing his job and taking great pleasure in it: he barks at phantom intruders, he plays ball, he sleeps, he eats, and he farts. But mostly he loves, he simply loves.

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

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