father's day

I wish I could say something nice about my father today. Bring up a cheery memory and bask in the warmth of it. Feel proud and noble, connected to an endless chain of fathers and sons stretching back to Adam. Something manifest. Something destined. Something good and true.

Really.

But I just sit here at the keyboard, and wonder what kind of sly sob story he's telling his new wife today, his new friends, his new church, anyone who will listen to and feel sorry for him. His sons have rejected him, especially his cruel, thoughtless, angry eldest son (the gay one? Really? Oh, that's such a shame), and on father's day, it's just so sad... Isn't that a sad thing, for a father to be alone on father's day? Isn't that the saddest thing in the whole fucking world? Can we do shots of his crocodile tears with some salt and a twist of lime?

If you feel sorry for him, he has you where he wants you. He'll slither up into your head along the silvery-slime trail of your pity, nesting in your brain pan, laying eggs in your compassion. And if you love him, well, that's a tether, bit and bridle that he'll yank you around with until you're broken, jawless, and then he'll just drag around your corpse, smearing the black rot of your love on his face like war paint. He's his own tribe, a tribe of one, and there's no room for others.

I made my decision. I won't be a trophy he can hang on the wall in the den, between the hunting rifles, above the zebra skin. I won't look good for him. I won't let him use me. I won't let him wear me like a glove, puppet strings making me bow and smile, mouthing his words and never wondering, never wondering what it's like... to be free.

I made my decision to be free.

No matter the scratchings at the door in the middle of the night, the mewling, the big eyes moist and full of pathos. I won't be a part of his passion play.

No matter the years of silence. He can bide his time. He can whisper things in my brother's ear, things that wend their way to mine, depth charges meant only for me. He can leave comments on the Internet like dung, like spoor, marking his territory with little piles of circular logic, hate masked as reason, lies masked as Divinity, shit and God mixed up together in the mud... would you like a mud pie? Oh, he can bide his sweet time.

I expose him to the light.

Forgive him again and again.

Let him fall to inconsequential dust in the back of my head, a daily mantra, an exorcising psalm, a mandala of protection, a prayer of absolution.

I can say something nice about my father today.

He didn't kill me, or my spirit, even though he tried every day for decades. He made me who I am, because I made the choice to never be like him. I made the choice to love. I made the choice to be exactly who God made me to be. I made the choice to never give up. I made the choice to take risks. I daily choose the path of mindfulness and not mindlessness.

He made me who I am today, and I couldn't have asked for a better anti-role model.

trojan

I delete his digits from my cellphone,
cut his name from my email with swift clicks,
sever the dedicated connection of his trojan
trust, remove the flickring pics of his face,
his smile, his eyes, his laugh, his fingers,
the feel of his skin to the recycle bin,
wipe his memory from my harddrive and
punch him in the software, block his handles
and avatars, his podcasts and profiles,
his webbed words and IMs, his voicemails
and texts, all the digital roads that led to my
analog heart.

February

You have to give yourself permission to stop, hold the breath in, hold the breath in until you know your lungs are wet bags of wind aching to gust, and then let it out. Let it all out.

You have to give yourself permission to stop, take a good look at how far you've run, the footsteps in the snow trailing off behind you into the distance, the footsteps in the grass dipping over the horizon, the footsteps, the holes in the ground, the peaks and valleys are all you have left to show where you've been.

You have to acknowledge the breath and the footsteps, the grief and joy and distance. You have to sit with the grief, read it from cover to cover, live with it until the sharp edges wear down, hold it in your hand until it's warm and the chill fades.

You have to acknowledge the joy too, creeping up behind you, stalking you, hunting, tracking you by the scent of your grief. You can weigh life down, tie it up with cement blocks and dump it in the river, but it will bubble back up. Life always finds a way to surface.

But sometimes you have to help the life along. Give it a nudge to set it in the right direction. Or set it back on the right track if it's gone astray.

blood oranges

blood oranges, sweet burnt setting suns,
stain my fingers amber and red;
I will dry the peels, thick citrus skins
thinned to tatters, bits, sticky strips
of rind and sky.

forsythia blooms in sprays, rockets, spring
fireworks of searing yellow, crazed graffiti
against retinas, afterimage upon afterimage,
unveiling layer upon layer, unbearably bright
after winter's brown and white.

unfurling bud and pendant bulge, crocus and
sparrow, heave and twitch, coil and tense,
snap and fuzz, soft and scent, burst and rush.

the green sap swell breaks the cold dam of April
and all is well again, all is well again.

green witth envy, green with guilt

It was a small staff meeting like any other I'd come to expect. Barbara* started with her notes from last week's meeting, then discussed the progress she'd made on a new employee handbook. She chirped along, energetically jumping from point to point, while the rest of us smiled and nodded mechanically.

Our manager, Chuck, leaned back in his chair and sighed. His middle-age spread strained against his too-tight leather belt and threatened to burst the lower buttons of his blue plaid shirt. Joe, the lead technician, leaned forward on his elbows and drummed the conference room table with his calloused fingers. He and Chuck both had big Ford trucks, and frequently traded tips on accessories and upgrades. Anna sat quietly, a nervous, tall woman with intense eyes; she knew all the juicy inter-company gossip and ferreted out new tidbits on a daily basis.

We discussed the finer points of processes and programs, line items and acceptable business language, internal company memorandums that no one really cared about but had to pay attention to. As the meeting drew to a close, we stacked our pads of lined paper and stapled hand-outs, clicked our ballpoint pens, talked about the upcoming company picnic.

Chuck sighed and stretched, clasping his hands behind his neck.

With a wry, knowing grin he said to everyone, "Is it just me, or are there more homos around every day?"

Laughter erupted around the long conference table.

Joe quickly chimed in, "No doubt man! Where do they all come from? They're like roaches, I swear..."

More spontaneous laughter filled the small room.

Anna said, "Well someone needs to find an exterminator then; if I can buy a roach bomb for my house, why can't I buy a fag bomb for my neighborhood?

Barbara chirped, "What they really need to do is round them all up and ship them off somewhere..."

Joe finished her sentence, "...and when they get there, blow them up."

Chuck and Joe laughed until they were practically crying, Anna's face tight and red with mirth, Barbara tittering like it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard in her life.

And I laughed too. Laughed as hard as any of them, hoping and praying that if there was a God, somehow, that they wouldn't find out, that they wouldn't quiet from their laughter and as one all turn and look at me. That they wouldn't all just suddenly KNOW. That I was one of the cockroaches, one of the homos they'd like to round up and ship off and exterminate. I was a young 'un too, just twenty-three, practically larval.

They bonded in their hatred. I could see the invisible ties, the primal, tribal strands that bound them tighter with each burst of laughter, their collective joining against a dangerous threat. A threat to their families, their schools, their workplaces, their way of thought, their way of life. They all took turns swinging at this big rainbow pinata in their heads, this garish caricature of real life; they wanted to kill it, kill it dead, burst it open and then wallow in the sweetness of its absence.

With each second more of laughter, something inside me fled deeper, pushed down into the shadows, held its breath and averted its eyes as the predator stalked by. If I don't look at them, they won't see me. If I act just like they do I can fit in, I can pass, I can blend. Really. If I act just like they do, I can die inside a little more with each chuckle and comment until it won't hurt anymore. Until one day I'll forget that I'm gay, right? You have to die to yourself, die to your sinful desires, die and die and die some more. Gorge yourself on death, forget as fast as you can, turn your face to the wall until your neck breaks. If you keep on stabbing the darkness, you'll let the light in. If I keep pretending... if I just keep repeating that I'm not gay, then eventually I'll believe the lie. And isn't that preferable to the truth?

Because that's what God wanted for me, right? To follow His path, I had to walk the straight and narrow, I had to trust that He knew what He was doing and that I'd eventually see the fruit of His promise. If I stuck to the program, I was guaranteed results. That's a promise in the Bible. I wasn't sure where exactly, but that's what all my good friends at church would say. That's what my pastor would say. They'd pray over me and praise God for my witness to them, and they just knew that good things were in store for me, God's rich store of blessings saved up for his children who were faithful. Maybe God would even send me a wife who would be understanding and overlook my weakness, wouldn't that be great? I should pray for God's will in that area, and He would raise up a Godly woman for me. Now wouldn't that be a phenomenal witness to all the unsaved homosexuals? What a ministry that would be, they'd say, a rich bounty for the Lord, and they'd get a far away and dreamy look in their eyes, counting homo converts like chickens before they'd hatched.

Whether chickens or cockroaches, in the hand or under foot, that still doesn't make me quite human though, does it? Not... exactly... normal. Saved for sure, but it's really more of a trial period; I better read the small print for the special terms and conditions of my salvation. I'm the black sheep, the pink sheep, the bride of Christ that needs a pre-nup. I mean, God is merciful but not *stupid*, right? Well, all Christians fall short of the glory of God, but Gay Christians need a fucking booster chair at the Lord's Table, don't they?

Barbara would send all her coworkers emails on the National Day of Prayer, inviting them to gather with her out in the parking lot to pray for our troubled world. Our troubled world so in need of saving from the gays, the gangs, the terrorists, and bad people who would take away our guns so we couldn't defend ourselves. Amen. I was so young then, so green with envy, green with guilt and their world seemed so straightforward, their path so uncluttered, while mine seemed to be a neverending obstacle course.

That Amen, that "so be it," was so full of yearning for me. I would have given anything for that road to be mine then, would have given up all the things that made me ME, just to live in their simple yet troubled world, wholly and completely. How comforting it would be to know everything for certain, to bisect the world into clearly defined black and white, good and evil, all questions answered in the Good Book. I would have sat under the Lord's Table and begged for scraps, old gristle and secondhand glory, if only they'd have truly let me in.



*all names have been changed

faces

From my early childhood, I remember a coffee table book that my parents owned. It was called "The Faces of Jesus," and it contained images of Jesus as interpreted through the art of myriad cultures and time periods. Jesus as many different ethnicities and ages; Jesus as infant, Jesus as old man, Jesus as corpse, Jesus resurrected. In wood and metal, paint and ink, gilt and glass, ceramic and bone. I loved all of the wonderful textures and colors and shapes. I had no concept of which was the "right" Jesus, the correct one. I didn't have to choose the proper and acceptable Jesus; I loved all of them.

I was told in Sunday school that Jesus loved little children. I saw drawings of him holding children, smiling and talking to them. He was strong and gentle, kind and smart. And yet, he didn't use these attributes to gain unfair advantage over others. I was puzzled. How could you be strong, and not use your strength to hurt others? How could you be gentle, and not use your gentleness to trick people into letting their guard down? How could you be smart, and not use your intelligence to humiliate and oppress?

Because in my small, young world, my father's strength and gentleness, kindness and intelligence were weapons used against his family. I had to guard against them. If I even left a crack, a smile, an openness behind my eyes, it was all over. I would have to pay for trusting. If I gave away my heart, all I got back was ashes. If I offered an outstretched hand, it got slammed in a door. If I spoke a kind word, I got a fat lip. See my beautiful necklace of bruises? These plum and amethyst jewels, set in skin fading to green and yellow, these are my prizes. They are hidden so no one can see them, but they are precious, they are hard won these trophies. They mean my father loves me, that he cares enough to notice me. I collect them, wrapped with care, here beneath my clothes. And when they disappear, past their expiration date, I have to go dig for more, mined from his anger.

I remember what Christ became to me, His perceived faces, the abusive, judgmental, all or nothing faces that drove me away from Christianity in my teens. There's a song by the band Nine Inch Nails that really encapsulated the impression of Jesus I had in high school. Jesus, God, Father, blind and indifferent to my pain, the impression that I had been fooled and lied to, that the joke was on me; "Terrible Lie"...

"Hey god, I really don't know what you mean.
Seems like salvation comes only in our dreams.
I feel my hatred grow all the more extreme.
Hey god, can this world really be as sad as it seems..."

How could all of the adults in my life be such complete and utter fools? What was the Church but a place for sociopaths to nest and move unhindered, the flock tended by wolves who ate the sick and the weak and the gullible? Sweet incense, smoke and mirrors. Hymns to lull and seduce. Sunday school and Vacation Bible Camp to reprogram and brainwash. But not me, suckers. Couldn't all the bleating sheep see what was behind the curtain? I had been cheated and lied to, and I was so angry I could spit, spit in all their saved, self-righteous, arrogant faces.

But it's not in me to be angry for years and years; outrage isn't fuel efficient. I come to a conclusion, give it its due, and then move past it. The Terrible Lie of the Church changed for me into a more aloof, distant understanding of God... why should I expend energy praying to an empty dream? Here was a new Jesus who didn't have the energy to lie, as He was so disinterested and detached from the world. Dragged along through history by word of mouth, a projection of people's desperate hopes and even more desperate fears. Powerless, mummified, a dry and desiccated God buried beneath the shifting sands, lost, lost, His angels blowing in the wind like dead moths, tumbleweeds, husks...

In college, I clearly remember reading the following excerpt by Walter Benjamin in the forward of the poet Carolyn Forche's collection "The Angel of History":

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."

A God of good intentions? Maybe. But still no horn to blow, no cavalry to call, no spine, no guts. Trapped behind a mirror, He can pound all He wants but we can't hear Him, can't see Him. When we scream into the wind, into the night, lost and wandering on the moor, why is there only deafening silence? Why do the crickets continue their periodic songs, the lightning bugs blink endless ellipses, the night birds sleep undisturbed? Down the path, between the olive trees, in the bruise-colored shadows of Gethsemane, God is either dead or indifferent. Up the path to Golgotha, between the rocks and dust, God either exists or does not.

What good is this Dry God, this figure bound and static between perfect covers? What good are the words, unchanged for millennia, black links in an endless chain binding us to paper? They can throw the book at me, hide behind verses that they grip like prison bars, flay me with phrases that they strip like birch bark, peel like skin from the pages, but convince me to believe?

How can our lives, all life, be the embodiment of change, adaptation, cycles, seasons, biorhythms, ebb and flow, birth and death, and yet we're asked to believe that this Word is immutable, infallible, unchanging, frozen. If every book ever written was burned, every psalm ever sung silenced, every verse on every tongue vanished, would God cease to exist?

I will not believe in a God so leashed, even for our love. I will not believe in a God so confined, even for our comfort. I will not believe in a spitty-wet thumbsucking God, even for our benefit.

I will not believe in the proper and acceptable God. Neither heavenfire nor hellfire, bookworm nor brimstone, fisherman nor fearmonger, megaphone nor megachurch.

I will not believe in a God who hikes up Her skirts and runs at the first sign of science, nor is frightened by doubt or dialogue. God needs no defense, no war with method and measure, no puppet, no scapegoat, no scarecrow to protect the harvest.

All of the Faces are and are not Jesus. Awful and awesome, terrible and terrific; the truth isn't any easier to winnow or swallow than the lie. Serendipity or premeditation? Metaphor or formula? Chance or choice? Mystery or mistake? Living fruit or dried fruit roll-up?

I choose to see Jesus as many different people, ethnicities and ages; Jesus as son and mother, fruit and father, tree and seed, root and resurrected. In wood and metal, ivory and ink, ceramic and glass, flesh and bone. I love all of His wonderful textures and colors and shapes. I have no concept of who is the "right" Jesus, the correct one. I don't have to choose the proper and acceptable Jesus; I love all of them.

fag

When I was in 7th grade, one of my male buddies told me that I walked like a fag.

"It's not your fault, you know, but you walk like a fag."

It was a really off-hand, nonchalant comment. In passing. In the same way someone would say "Looks like it's going to rain today" or "Gee, How about the Cubs this season?"

We'd been playing baseball across the street from my house, where there was a wide, open field and a worn baseball diamond. It was the field adjacent to the Middle School I was going to attend that Fall. I wasn't terribly athletic or coordinated, but the neighbor kids were playing and I'd joined them with my friend John.

I must have looked confused, so John explained it to me.

"I don't know, that's just how you walk. No one else walks like that. It's not a big deal or anything."

John was a pastor's kid who lived three or four blocks away. He routinely boasted that he knew everything there was to know about sex. All the kids in the neighborhood thought he was incredibly cool. He had piercing blue eyes, a constant, mischievous smirk, and a jean jacket with a big Def Leppard patch on the back.

I wanted to vanish into the ground. How could I take another step knowing that I walked like a fag? Who was watching me? Did that mean I ran like a fag? Played baseball like a fag? What *didn't* I do like a fag? How did fags walk exactly, anyway? Hundreds of terrifying questions flooded my mind, rendering me mute, paralyzed.

I stuttered and said that I was thirsty and had to go home and get something to drink. I made myself walk slowly and deliberately across the street back to my house. I imagined them examining each step I took, evaluating each placement of each foot as it fell, each bend of knee, every angle and movement of the complex formula that when solved, resulted in me walking like a fag. The boys continued playing baseball like nothing had happened.

Because nothing had happened. Not to their way of thinking, anyway. I think John was puzzled that I didn't know my place in the world, something so obvious to him that it should be obvious to me. Didn't I know my category, my classification?

When I started 8th grade that Fall, I looked at the jocks and the stoners and the preps. I studied all of them minutely, the popular guys, the tough guys, the real guys, and I taught myself to walk like they did. I saw how they leaned against lockers when they flirted with girls. I saw how they high-fived and mock-punched, talked and laughed. I saw how they tensed and sprawled in their plastic chairs during lunch period. I memorized the geometry of their saunters, the beautiful, spatial relationships between pelvis and swinging arms, the timing and shuffle of Nikes and Reeboks on the cold green linoleum of the school hallways.

I changed how I dressed. I changed the music I listened to. I changed the cadences of my speech. I started leaning against lockers with that nonchalant, assumed confidence and the girls noticed. I went to pizza parties at the roller-skating rink, I went to dances hosted in the school gymnasium, I went to the mall and to the movies and I followed. Driven into sheep's clothing, following the flock, I was swept along with everyone else.

When I first kissed a girl, it was because it was expected of me. I had to keep up appearances. I had to press down the terror of being exposed, back into the darkness at the base of my skull, the unthinking place behind my spine. I wish I could take that kiss back. And all the kisses that followed, different girls and different expectations, through middle school and on into high school, I would take them all back. I gave them away until all I had left was panic and emptiness, black anti-kisses that only increased my fear.

Wooden actions, hollow, automatic, who was I fooling? What was I trying to kill? If I racked up enough experiences on my Straight Score Board, would one of those experiences coax me back from the edge of that terror, that precipice, that fall into... I couldn't think or say the words.

My senior year of high school, heading out of my English class one morning, I felt a slap on my back. I whipped around, but no one was there that I knew. I kept walking down the hall, and started to hear laughing behind me, a rising swell of mirth and teenage guffaws. I turned around again and everyone behind me was laughing. Grinning. Shit-eating, toothy, wide-mouthed grins. Glittering eyes. Staring and pointing at me, smirking at my discomfort, and I knew.

I felt on my back and retrieved the piece of paper taped there. It said, simply,

I'M A FAG! FAG FAG FAG!

I kept on walking and didn't look back. It didn't matter how I walked, or how I spoke, or what music I listened too, or what girls I kissed.

For years, I died inside. There was no school or church or job or home that was safe. I did my best to ignore them. The fog of accusatory voices, storms of mocking comments, the punches, the stares, the nasty notes tucked into my locker, my bookbag, my briefcase, barbed emails slipped beneath my skin, whispers like splinters, needling and jagged and relentless.

I wanted to peel my skin off like an onion, molt out of my flesh, strip my bones down to their milky whiteness, filter my blood drop by drop, seep into the rock and the clay and the earth, return my life back to the point before that first gleam, the first spasm, the first divide.

In the blackness and the light, the sea of atoms, constellations of electrons, spangled particles unnamed and unknowable. My pattern sparked, my program crystallized, shocked into chemical being, rolled into the world tumbling and unfurling, breathed from the elements, all membranes and liquid, delicate organs and innocence.

Reborn, my bones are knit of shell and pearl, limestone and diatom, skeletons of words, sediments of memories. My skin is scaled, weighing words, my shoulders blades, sharp, hints of wings.

All of your words have dredged me, scooped me deep. All your hate was alchemy, transmuted in the fire, fed by the bellows of God's breath. Ash in the rain is earth again; the seeds of my heart are fertile after flame.

When I walk, I am who I am.

I hold so much water now, you could drown in me.

I hold so much love for the world now, I could flood.

Thank you.

best and endless

Carl and I were best friends, and the summer was endless. That summer is still endless. The memories have expanded, filling up the huge reservoir of childhood between the cold winters and the predictable monotony of school, between adults and their unfathomable cruelties and the grown-up world that we flirted with but never committed to.

In the afternoons we'd go collecting lizards and toads, salamanders and turtles, any slow creature living in the suburban caves of covered window wells, underneath potted plants or the slumped carcasses of deflated kiddie pools. We'd creep through the back yards of identical subdivisions, oblivious to angry homeowners, seeking only our wriggling bounty. We'd lug our plastic buckets of slithery-croaky friends back to Carl's dimly lit garage, back to their new home in The Glass Terrarium.

It was a nice, new home, better than under some kiddie pool. They had mud and leaves and sticks and rocks. They had all of these new friends. What was not to like?

We learned to hold toads carefully away and not to squeeze them, because toads always had to pee. The black salamanders with the yellow spots looked fake, like vinyl come to life, wind-up toys that blinked and jerked and nosed the mud with their snub snouts. The turtles kept to themselves, mostly hiding in their shells. Frogs were slimy, until they dried out. We tried not to let that happen, but there were accidents.

Carl's older sister Lisa was supposed to watch us sometimes, but she was more interested in her boyfriend who would always come over. His mom would leave us to go to the mall or to a church meeting, and 30 seconds later Lisa would be on the phone. Then she'd run and spray up her bangs with hairspray, realllllly high and crunchy, and put on blue eye shadow and pink lipstick. Smacking her watermelon Bubblicious gum and dancing with herself in the bathroom mirror, she'd turn up Duran Duran so loud that we'd almost go deaf. We thought she looked like a salamander wearing make-up, a mean, tone deaf salamander with frizzy hair. So Carl got back at her by taking an Exacto knife, going to her favorite Duran Duran poster, and he cut the eyes off of Simon Le Bon's geekoid face. I took a red marker and made Nick Rhodes look like a vampire, fangs and all. They both looked a lot cooler when we were done.

Then we had to run like heck because she found out and tried to kill us. We ran down the street and laughed so hard that Carl choked on his own snot, which just made us laugh harder. We walked all the way in the hot sun, with the cicadas buzzing in the trees. Grasshoppers would jump out of the way when we got too close. We kicked the same dusty stone 61 times; I'd kick it and then he'd kick it. For real. Then it went down a sewer drain.

We walked all the way to get french fries and a hot dog, and glass bottles of Dr. Pepper out of a vending machine. It tasted better than anything, better than the summer and the sun. Better than swimming and fireworks and barbeques. We didn't have to say anything, because whenever we started to we just laughed and he pretended to choke on his snot again and die. He was such a faker.

We started to walk back. There was a detour through this overgrown, vacant field, and I got burrs stuck all over my jeans. So we had to have a burr ball war, and I got him right in the side of the face. That hurt, I guess. And the brown burrs got stuck in his hair and on his shirt. We called a truce. So we made the biggest burr ball ever, the size of a basketball. It kept on sticking to our clothes, but we carried it home with us anyway.

Sneaking up to the back of the house, we crept quietly around to the front of the garage. That's when we saw what was in the driveway. Lisa had tipped The Glass Terrarium over onto the hot, sticky blacktop. I think some of the turtles got away, but the rest... the frogs and salamanders were baked crispy to the asphalt. The toads got a bit further, but they were really dry too, like toad prunes. It was really sad. It was carnage, total carnage. It was like the grossest thing ever, even worse than the scene in Indiana Jones where all the Nazi's get their faces melted off by God. It was... we just stood there and were so angry, so mad we didn't even know what to do.

Then his mom pulled into the driveway in her station wagon, and he started screaming and Lisa came out of the house and kicked him in the leg and started yelling even louder. He yanked on her crunchy, hairsprayed bangs. She clawed his arm with her fake nails. I just stood there and tried to be invisible.

Carl and Lisa were both grounded forever, and his mom drove me home. She was really disappointed in me, because vampires were Satanic and I should know better and I shouldn't go along with him when he did crazy stuff. She hoped I would think about things and be better behaved in the future. But I didn't want to think about the future. Why think about the future when you're living now?

That was okay. The next time I was over at his house, we ate all of the gum out of his mom's collection of antique gum dispenser machines. We had so much gum in our mouths we could barely chew and he almost choked. For real. Then we replaced the gum with bits of cardboard and rewrapped them, replacing them in the machines so it still looked like the original gum. We got really sick, because the gum was like sixty years old, but it was still the Best. Gum. Ever. Best and endless.

numbers

My relationship with numbers has always been problematic and mostly negative. I made mathematics more palatable as a child by relating to numbers through language, projecting personality traits and emotions onto them. I'm serviceable when it comes to basic math and bookkeeping, but my brain doesn't want to bend around equations and formulas and foreign symbols, teetering constructions of lines and numbers just waiting, hawk-like, sharp x's and y's perched to drop on their prey: me.

3, 5, 7, 9... icky and odd, dusty and dry. They are even numbers with an extra arm dangling, or a leg that's been hacked off, missing, lacking, spilling clacking abacus beads of numeral blood.

2, 4, 6, 8... lovely and even, whole and ripe. Enclosed systems, clasped hands, easy to split. Perfect like plump fruit. Seeds that grow and replicate, ruby-like, pomegranate, pleasurable.

Yet if I love the corundum of precious evens, I also love the conundrum of zero. Zero, that hole in space, place-holder, absence, nothing, yet infinitely full. Bowl of dreams, murky water from a deep, deep well, open mouth of magician's hat where white rabbits dwell.

And one; simple, complete, a single finger pressed to lips, shhh, or raised to point, look! Enough to hold, enough to cup, enough to satisfy. A wink, a cry, a single point I won't deny.

Yet one and one make two, the addition of me to you, balancing in first one and then a pair of shoes.

I remember hopscotch, scrawled numbers in colored chalk, cake walks, bingo, statistics, raffles of tumbling tickets, can you guess the number of jellybeans in the jar? The pennies in the piggy bank? Angels dancing on the head of a pin?

Three in One, One in Three, how can the Word also be the Trinity?

Finite loaves and fishes feeding crowds; walking on water; raising the dead; virgin births... miracles are bad math, physical laws running amok in the realm of writing, the land of language, not numbers.

Are Mystery and Math conjoined twins with minds of their own? Back to back they strain and groan, skin to skin, bone to bone, known to lonely unknown.

joy, beauty and cold peas

I've been trying to find ways to more fully experience joy and beauty again in a present, conscious and mindful way. Because I've realized that I've been fighting to regain that ability again over the past six years. Because it's been a tough six years. A lot of family loss and sadness and struggle.

Sure, there are moments of joy and beauty that spike through and jolt me into vibrant awareness. That remind me that the world is still luminous and mysterious, still unfathomably big. Not small and dim and all the same. Not the homogenous, suburban sprawl, not the strip mall world stripped of wonder, where curiosity is discouraged and the clean lines of efficiency rule.

You know, the "Real" world we're expected to accept as adults and responsible citizens here in America.

You'll never make it in the real world if you don't buckle down and get your head out of the clouds. You're nothing if you don't have a good job and a good salary and all the correct accessories of a proper, acceptable life.

Most people are happy and satisfied with this proper and acceptable life, once they achieve it. They find that sweet spot and balance there as long as they can, that comfort zone, that even keel hamster wheel. If they just keep the plates spinning and the money coming in and everything just right, just right, if they whisper softly and sing it lullabies, they think their life can be that way forever.

I am one of those weird people who doesn't find that kind of life appealing. I have to poke a stick between the spokes of the wheel and see what happens to the hamster. Sweet spot? Comfort zone? Boring. Where's the sour spot? The salty spot? What happens if I set the spot on fire?

I am compulsively curious and questioning, turning ideas over and over in my head, rough rocks tumbling in my stream, wearing them down to pebbles and sand. I just have to know. I have to see all the angles. Around the corner and down river and up skirts. I have to step sideways out of the mainstream.

I used to think that God didn't like people who asked questions, because DUH, that's what the Bible was there for. All the answers in black and white, you just had to puzzle them out. If I had a question about God I asked my dad, and he directed me to the proper chapter and verse. While I was reading, he stood over my shoulder and sighed impatiently. He also frowned, or looked stern. If you didn't understand the answer he gave you, then you just had to have faith that you were too stupid to understand the answer, and pray for accceptance of your stupidity. And then you sat back down and shut the fuck up and finished your peas. Or else.

Except the moment I had the chance, I slipped off to the library or the bookstore. I rummaged through forbidden stacks and hid volumes under the floorboards. I nibbled frantically at books like a furtive mouse stealing cheese from a trap, unable to help myself, but still waiting for the bar to snap down and break my back, bite off my questioning tongue. It was wrong to question, after all. I would have to pay, eventually. The Big Cat would catch me, The Giant would grind my bones to bake his bread, My Father would grind my curiosity to dust under his heel.

Six years ago, I had to sever the poisonous, debilitating relationship with my biological father, in order to begin to regain and heal a relationship with myself and God. This was made somewhat easier by his divorcing my mother and leaving our family to rot, but still: When your father masquerades as Absolute Truth your entire life, teaching your subconscious to unlearn that isn't easy.

With the source of infection gone, I could stop looking over my shoulder. I could ask questions without fear of retribution, divine or otherwise. I didn't have to finish my cold fucking peas under threat of physical violence.

I am not required to scurry through life now, head down, muscles tensed. I have permission to enjoy the questions, to live the questions, to allow myself the time to savor the answers. I am learning and relearning to experience joy and beauty again.