Phil Lane
Sometimes
July 28, 2009
Sometimes they are across the street.
Sometimes they are across the desk.
Other times, they are across the country. They drop out of the sky and into your lap and you can touch them and feel them and see that they are real. And your eyes remain riveted to them for the brief moment you share so that you can remember their details and record them forever in your mind in case this road we do not pass again.
“Why can you not live in the moment and just enjoy me now?”
“Because,” said I, “I must hold my breath and whisper.” If I move too suddenly or speak too loudly you may be gone, never to return. For I am afraid the glass I hold in my palm may drop and shatter away into a million pieces and into a land far away and I might never see the spectrum of the rainbow there again. ROY G BIV. The colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. And like the rainbow, you are here for a moment. And I am forced to watch you evaporate before my eyes.
Why is there never enough time? Because we think tomorrow will always tap us on the shoulder. But it is in fact the past which taps us on the shoulder. And I must look back and collect the pieces before they are swept away by the assumption that tomorrow will come again.
“You are foolish,” some say.
“You must look ahead and not back. “
“But back is what I know.”
“So you take away from today, then,” they say.
“No,” “I prepare for tomorrow.”
I laughed with you. I cried with you. I heard your story, and you heard mine. And each time the mantle clock ticks, another second we won’t get back is gone.
“But why are you sad,” said he, “I am here now.”
“Perhaps,” said I, “The tears you now see are those of joy.”
“You are impossible,” said he.
“That may be, “ said I, “But my heart is true and deep is my soul.”
“And so, does that mean that we cannot now run through fields of joy, and celebrate the sun that shines on us today?”
No, indeed. I think that today we will celebrate the sun that reflects from the pool upon our glasses of wine. And in the comfort of two who did not know us at all. There is no threat; there is no danger. For how could there be in a friendship such as this?
They say a lover will come and go. Which, though, is the greater love?
Behind the glasses, the stoic front.
And sometimes, tears are, in fact, a sign of strength . Because I have been through hell, I am able to recognize heaven.
“But I am just me,” said he.
And how empty are the trees without the birds.
For what good shall it do either of us when the other is gone if we stand over a shell and weep. Give me my flowers while I am here to see them. Sing me my song while I can hear it sung from your lips. Dance with me while I can still feel your hand upon my soul. Over the keys or across the table. As long as we know the melody we can dance even if we cannot sing
And when my storybook is through
I will know
I read it to you.
What more could I do?
Sam
May 11, 2009
“Hey diddle, diddle
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed
To see such fun,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.”*
His name is Sam. His hair is blond, his eyes are brown. And maybe his mother’s name is Julie . She was one the first girls I ever knew that had a serious “crush” on me. She was short and blonde and her eyes crinkled up to the point of almost closing every time she smiled. And I knew that she really loved me. All these many years later I just don’t know why she did. Sadly, I couldn’t love her back the way she loved me. And so Sam was never born. And , I suppose that Julie overcame her sadness and these many years later I imagine her life is happy and complete when I think of her. For she and her husband, there was no Sam, but there must surely be other children for them.
I see my Sam in the faces at check-out lines and in the booster seat across from my table. The brown eyes, the runny noses and the scraped knees of innocence. I see him in the child on the surf sending his sailboat into the water as he yells and shakes his fists in the wind and watches the little boat rock in the ripple of the shallow waves. I know his voice in the squeal of delight that comes from feeding the gulls as they flock around this curly, golden-haired child that has awakened to seize the day in the early morning sunlight. And I think that only in suffering this loss, like any other, am I truly able to appreciate it’s magnitude.
Many years ago I thought of the name "Shawn." But what if his mother didn’t like that name? Or what if she liked "Shaun" or "Sean?" Much later, I thought of the name Rupert. "Ru" for short. A nickname used only between he and I. Rupert, after my maternal grandfather, one of the kindest, most genuine people I’ve ever known. So, actually I didn’t "think" of Rupert. I had him as a life experience; and recalled that as unique. And now, what of the name Sam? Sam doesn’t call into question multiple spellings or lend to teasing on the playground because your folks named you "what,?" "Rupert?!" But it is true, too, that the name Sam is ordinary and comfortable and non-threatening and not unique. These and others. All things life is not. Whatever this child might have been, he would have been mine. With no accepted advice on how to raise him because as my mother once so aptly put it, "You’ve seen the wrong way to do it." Rare insight that was shared infrequently, realized in a moment of lucid clarity. He would never have to clean up his own vomit because I was in a drunken stupor; never be made to feel anything less than whole and loved.
He’d be taken to church and encouraged to believe in a greater power on whom we can hope and in whose world we are able to find such indescribable beauty and happiness if we only choose to look for it. And perhaps his Sunday school teacher would have been like the earliest remembrance of my own Mr. Funderburke who passed out Dentyne each Sunday morning before the lesson while we all gathered around the table. Something about people like that you always remember; and I think this small gesture too, made him seem somehow so credible to us all as children. Maybe flip-flops in church would have been okay, but not advocated. Long hair would have been welcomed with open arms as long as it was clean and kept. Kissing would have been encouraged , even among the most distant of relatives; and hugs made mandatory. Silence to be tolerated only at bedtime because with silence,comes death. Most obviously death of communication, and most devastatingly, death of love. He would have been neither asked nor allowed to choose favorite relatives based on their being either maternal or paternal. Love and tolerance are to be taught, and the heart to follow these.
And if Sam had been Samantha she would have been no less loved,for gifts are not to be questioned in whatever form they may take. While walking through the children’s ward at Roper Hospital in Charleston years ago to visit a friend, I heard a child cry, “DADDY! ”as I walked by and I stopped frozen in my tracks turning in time to hear his mother say, “That’s not your daddy.” After a recent worship service at church, I felt the slightest touch in the small of my back and turned to see a brown-haired little boy with an outstretched hand extended to me. I don’t recall having seem him before, or since. Who’s child is this?………”It is I,” he said, “the angel of regret.”
And so Sam is my regret. In my mind, I can hear the hollow vibrato voice of one more fatherless son whose only difference from my own is that he was never born . A child with dirty bare feet, grass in his hair, and a dog by his side. He’d have stayed out until dark and come home with a dirty face, mosquito bites and poison ivy; spent of little boy energy and the wonder of just this one day. Flawed and imperfect, and full of wonder. And it would have been up to me to teach him right from wrong, self respect, respect for others, and about the unparalleled power of love. His gift to me would have been himself.
I learned one day long ago on the whisper of a dream to live life with as few regrets as possible. And so now I try to do a little better approaching regret. It still comes when I think of the people I’ve lost unnecessarily young. In a cat I could help live only seventeen years; not nearly long enough, and in leading innumerable horses to water only to have them refuse to drink. Somewhere along the way I learned that in trying to fix others we unawaringly neglect our own brokenness. And maybe it is because of this aching sense of loss that I sometimes listen a little more attentively, laugh a little longer and harder, and love a little more deeply. Or, maybe these are things I just think I do; and from me these attributes do not exude, at all. Even so, who really is to say? He is not here to tell me. And I am not really here to know.
“That’s not your daddy.”
But I might have been.
*Randalf Caldecott (1846-1886). British. "And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon", from Hey Diddle Diddle and Bye, Baby Bunting. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1882
 Phil Lane |
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