the envelope

All is dark as I lay in bed two pillows for my head, favoring my right side in the direction of the door. With effort I breathe deeply trying to quiet my mind so that the rest of me can find some sleep. Help! I need a jailor to arrest the torrent of thoughts, rolling thunder in my head. Manacles for my mind. Better yet let’s consider a couple of these deliberations, and then perhaps sweet slumber.

Two equations. First: Never equate education with intelligence. Opportunity yes, intellect no. The turnstile of higher education (a reference only to the cost) is a incubator and revolving door for captive minds. Knees tight like a cloistered nun, a paramour molded to ingratiate the masters of modernity; high rises, tailored suits, and looks to kill. Are your papers in order? Degree, diploma, and documents (letters of recommendation) directed to domiciles of lifelong incarceration…..your vocation and career. Now you just piss in a puddle of your chamber pot of gold, the cistern for the cloned colony of the hive mind. My, you are busy little bees in a vast repository of analog archives.

Saw the results of the contemptuous educated mind as the president of a major corporation parted the waters of the Red Sea of Suits on a promenade above, the common man (uneducated) below. Told all the workers to go home and come up with an idea to improve the process before ever coming to work again. Once again it was profit before people. He never walked among them, never knew a single name.

Now granite, a pun expressing a rock hard implacable mind set, I do know some extraordinary educated people who strive to be a blessing to this world, rising above the mundane like cream to the top, the creme de la creme at your favorite pie shop.

Our second renumeration is due to the complex and constantly evolving nature of lawmaking on all levels, federal, state, and local, and the ‘impossibilite’ de savoir’ the total number of laws, rules, and regulations that exist in the land of the slave and the home of the afraid, now ranked seventeenth among freedom espousing nations. It is estimated there are hundred’s of thousands of mandates that regulate. Never equate the law with justice written primarily to benefit a few……justice for just-us, enacted for me not for thee.

When a government is out of control it institutes greater control. From ten commandments to no definitive count of the actual number of manacles for the mesmerized mind. And remember ten works for only a truly freedom loving people.

Laying there I’m a victim of Aunt Sally and her whisk of skirts, old thoughts and maybe some new with a fresh wrinkle. Suddenly a light appeared beneath my door and then a shadow. Immediately my feet where on the floor anticipating an intruder when I heard the faint sound of an object being shuffled on the wood floor underneath the door. Then the light was gone and I jumped up to turn on the light switch, sliding the envelope away with my foot and opening the door. No one was there. There was no light, there was no sound. There had been no break-in. The doors were all locked, and London my Lab/Bull Mastiff lay quietly in her place of ever awareness on a rug in front of the door. Nothing could penetrate her wireless security sensors and bark alarm. Until tonight.

Standing hushed and still there was a presence, an unmistakable presence. I returned to my room and with extra pillows I propped myself up in bed holding the envelope in my hands. Like a ship on a long journey the contents (cargo) just arrived on shore with a special delivery. Only when I was ready would I open its contents to see what it contained. Presently a curious heaviness assaulted my mind. I could not resist. I awoke to early morning light, hands folded over the envelope held close to my heart. And I dreamed of the Tablet of Destinies, Lights and Perfection, the Urim and Thummim. It was an oracle of things to come and an arbiter of things in the present.

When fully persuaded in my mind I began to open the envelope when great radiant shafts of light projected forth. I turned my head and shielded my eyes blinded by this great light, light always capable of blinding more than darkness. Then brilliant colors shone forth; among them red, green, blue, and purple. I sat mesmerized by this sight until a still quietness prevailed. Out of the germination of light and color an embryo of thought and understanding appeared like an ancient path in a garden of trees, flowers, and pre-eminent beauty. And for the first time I saw people and things as they really are. There was no intention unrevealed. I was gripped with sadness and a gloomy melancholy as people and events from creations dawn were all exposed in the great radiance of the contents of the light in the envelope.

All things are as they were from the beginning. And we never realized we lived only the image, not the actual. Like a giant ‘green screen’ everything we know is a projection of the ‘screen play’ of our life, a simulation made to look, feel, and behave like something else. We teach our babies to say and recognize their eyes, ears nose, and mouth, Momma and Daddy. We anchor them to the imitation from birth to funerary box. We don’t know or recognize any other way. Alas, we can only teach what we know.

On the surface, the stability of normalcy and acceptability demands we never call anything by its real name, and plausible deniability is the mistress that shields us from the jarring disturbing mirror of our own image and reflection. If the foundation is not solid, then eventually the structure will collapse. Mesmerized by ubiquitous control and the behavior of destructive dependencies we live our lives never knowing their is a better way.

Juxtaposed to the life we live is the life offered in the envelope. You say no such life exists. I don’t say. I simply stand before you holding the envelope. It is unsealed and its contents delivered.

Now time is a convenience like a MacDonald’s Big Mac or a Taco Bell Luxe cravings box. What is the image on your screen? What secrets are written on the wheel of time in your name? The weaver weaves a tapestry of our lives. We provide the thread. Each strand a thought, action, choice woven together to form a strong chord not easily broken or one stout enough to hang ourselves. Each of us living an illusion but still accountable for our actions.

So we spend our years as a tale that is told. In the morning we are as grass that flourishes and by evening cut down and withered. We cannot escape the light of His countenance, our secret sins unfurled. So satisfy us early oh God with thy mercy and may thy beauty rest upon us. Establish the work of our hands, and make us glad according to the days of our sojourn and the years wherein we have seen evil.

And so I was sent like the Savior and the prophets to select homes and circumstance. This time to a poor family in Muhlenberg Co. Western Kentucky along the Green River where Paradise lay. Well, they tortured the timber and ‘Big Hog’ standin’ twenty stories high stripped the land diggin’ for coal until the land was forsaken and then wrote it all down to the progress of man. The men who didn’t die from cave-ins or explosions died from the dust that clung like rust to their lungs. Many escaped living life quickly. For others it just wasn’t that easy. Many a fatherless family was left languishing while black slack settled low over the valley below. It was to such a family as this that I was sent to with nothing left but their faith. Even among other po folks they was poer still. It was the 1930’s. They called it ‘The Great Depression’.

Daddy’s been gone since afore Loretta age three came along. Then there was Carli Mae aged five and Micah age six. Walkin’ up to the house, gray, battered, and standin’ out of pure stubbornness, I looked like a pilgrim on the way. I wore old worn out and faded clothes, a floppy hat, crooked grin, and a pole with a small bag attached at the end. Standin’ careful like on the porch I knocked and waited, before knockin’ again. Finally the door opened only wide enough for a woman’s face to appear. At first gander she appeared old and worn with stringy blond hair springled with gray. Her eyes were dark, sunken deep in her face with perioral wrinkles around her mouth. In her short sojourn she had not aged well. She was only twenty-six. ‘Pardon Ma’am. I noticed walkin’ up yer husband could use a little help with some repairs and I wouldn’t mind lendin’ a hand. If you could see fit for a morsel of food, well It would surely be appreciated’. Standin’ and jest starin’ at me she finally said, ‘all I can offer you is a cup of cold water, but your offer of help would be gratefully received. And then bowing her head she finally looked up again with tear filled eyes. ‘It’s jest me and three youngin’s. My man passed nearly three years now’. ‘Well Ma’am’ I replied, ‘I am truly sorry for yer loss‘. Then smiling ‘but a cup of cold water will surely do’.

I sat on the porch steps and waited for the cup of cold water. A couple of minutes passed before a tremblin’ Carlie Mae came out opening a battered screen door with the water in an old tin cup. She was very timid with dark circles under her dull blue eyes, thin stringy blond hair, and clothes that would not stand another warshin’ hangin’ loosely on a thin fragile frame’. Lookin’ up I smiled and received the cup. ‘Well thank ye little lady. This is mighty appreciated’. She jest stood there pawin’ the porch with her bare foot before speakin’. ‘Ma said there is tools, a ladder. and shingles in the shed. Our roof commences to leakin’ ever rain. ‘Well alright. I’ll get things from the shed and git to work. Maybe whiles I’s a lookin’ I can find some screen for yer front door’.

I worked through out the day repairing the roof, screen door, front porch and steps. The children stood the porch and watched wide eyed with curiosity and a sense of wonder. What they didn’t see was all the help from invisible hands. By the end of the day all the repairs on the house, barn, other out building, gates and fencing that were needed were all done. I sat the porch steps waitin’ to say goodbye with my pole and bindle watchin’ the sun slowly lose the battle with darkness for the control of the day. Maggie the mother stepped out and looked about. ‘I don’t know what to say’, her chin trembling with emotion, ‘how could you have possibly gotten all this done in just one day’? ‘I had help from heaven where time as we know it is simply a paradox’, I said. ‘Besides, I had the beautiful company of your lovely children’. Overcome with emotion she sobbed a ‘thankyou’ before stepping back inside the house asking me to wait. After a brief interlude enjoying the first floral array of Fall, Micah stepped out with a small plate and a dried crusty meager morsel of bread. ‘Mister’ he paused handing me the plate. ‘Ma always said sharin’ multiplies the gift. I want you to have it. This is my gift to you. It is the only food left in the house’. Now it was my turn to dip my head wiping my tears before turning back to receive so great a gift. Knowing Maggie and the other children were watching from the screen door I told Micah, ‘keep the faith. Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning’. ‘Thankyou for sharing all that you have’.

The next mornin’ Maggie shuffled into the kitchen and robotically opened the kitchen cupboard doors and looked at the empty bare shelves. Then she turned and slowly lowered her ladder-back spine covered only with thin skin until her jacksie hit the floor. Drawing up her legs with her knees bent tight to her sagging breast she wrapped her arms around her legs and what remained of her thread bare dress with holes and wispy threads hanging from the hem. ‘Oh God’ she wept buryin’ her face, ‘Remember thy handmaiden in my distress. I ask not for myself, but for the children’, realizing it took more courage to live than to die. One by one all the children entered the small kitchen and seein’ Ma went to hold and comfort her, speaking softly words of affection. Then in unison their little heads popped up as a most tantalizing smell permeated the air. Turning to the table their eyes barely stayed in their sockets. For there in the middle of their barren table top sitting on a tray was a large loaf of steaming freshly baked bread with a crock of butter, peach preserves and a jar of honey. ‘Momma Momma look’ they shouted jumping up and down. Shaking her head the full consciousness of what she was seein’ began to dawn like the first rays of a new day. The children then helped Ma slowly to her feet and to a kitchen chair. If her eyes were unbelieving her nose was not. It was the most profound smell she had ever imagined. ‘Micah go to the cupboard honey and get us four plates and knifes’ she said sitting stunned in unbelief. Jumping up he opened the cupboard and stared his mouth a gasp. ‘Momma, Momma you jest got ta look’. Slowly turning she looked spell-bound as Micah excitedly opened cupboard after cupboard and every one positutely crammed with food. And when he came to the old empty coin jar, he took it down and handed it to his Mother. It still had no coins, but it was stuffed with large denomination dollar bills.

And there was such laughter, the kind rarely heard on earth, with joy and dancing and hands lifted in praise. Sticky fingers and faces ruled the day. And the energy in this bread so rejuvenating their vitality was restored ‘tout de suite’. No matter how much they shared, Maggie would cover the remains at nightfall and was always welcomed with a fresh loaf of steaming hot bread next mornin’ with all the fixin’s. If possible each new loaf tasted even better than the first. Word spread and hungry folks came from all over the hills to git a slice of Maggie’s ‘Legendary Loaf’.

Now, Kokomo Indiana is known as ‘the city of firsts’. Among them the pioneering of pneumatic rubber tires, push button car radios and carburetors, a mechanical corn picker, stainless steel flatware, and canned tomato juice. But in 1870 it was a city of lasts. Last in the milk of human kindness.

The little farm house had ignited in flames, a waking Conor O’Brien forced to escape out his bedroom window. It resisted his efforts to open wide enough for a fast retreat but eventually conceded due to Conor’s frantic efforts. Climbing out he rushed to the front of the house and after hearing his parents screams ignored the heat and stepped through the front door trying with all his might to drag them both to safety as they lay on the floor. When he grabbed his mother’s arms he fell backwards holding her skin in his hands as it peeled right off her limbs. You don’t have to be in the inferno of the fire, just to close to the heat to receive horrible burns. Driven back he was forced to retreat and was found next morning unconscious laying on the ground. The charred remains of the bodies of his parents, his father clinging to the young twins could be seen amongst the ashes, smoke, and debris, still smoldering with a hot auburn glow.

In Indianapolis where tales of the young boy’s tragedy were carried by the press, an anonymous benefactor sent specialists to assist the town’s doctor, Dr. Horass Swimshorter. Their best efforts could not remove the hideous scars. Their surgeries though helped open the lid on his right eye to improve his sight, the eye forever colored red and to open his mouth where the fire melted his lips together. The melted skin between his fingers had cooled and created a web that was also corrected with surgery. But there was no mending his nostril and scalp, his skin an appalling twisted mass of tortured flesh. His face and arms the prime target of the inferno’s wrath.

As I lay here bandaged and in darkness, I see fire. Those last moments seared forever in my body and brain, playing over and over in my mind again. Will we all burn together as the flames climb high into the night sky? I call out Father. If we should all die tonight let us all die together. Please don’t leave me alone condemned to bear the scars and to tell the tale on my own. But I see fire, there is blood on the breeze. I see flames, burning brightly reflected on the trees. I see fire, we got to close to the flame. And as the sky is falling down it crashed with thunderous sound lifting my shadowy form from off the ground. I feel heat upon my skin. All is dark. Only desolation remains. All else is consumed.

Who watches over my family and the flames? Tell me who? Such devastation such pain. How is it that heaven can look upon this sordid scene with apparent indifference I wonder. Ah, just another crisis in this small specter of the cosmos. What the bother. As a whole they are just a PITA (pain in the ass) anyway. I don’t think so. I hope it is not so.

It seems my soul has fled. It cannot stand the stench. The city fathers debate what to do with me. Maybe sell me to a traveling circus as part of their freak show or used as a gimmick by the parson to raise money for the disenfranchised and famine starved in Africa, or for the local orphanage. There was no orphanage. In the end after all the Old Fitzgerald, flippancy, and frivolous conversatin were finally abated, a childless Claus and Greta Grobschmidt were cajoled and coercd into takin’ me after certain indiscretions about Claus were exposed to the light. Claus reluctantly agreed but not without first demanding a stipend for his efforts. Looking at me once I was delivered under the cover of darkness Claus said, ‘You’re too ugly to sit table or sleep in the house. You will bed in the barn. Greta will bring food to you. And you will work and do as you’re told. You are here only because of our good graces’.

I am now eighteen years old. It has been seven years since the fire. As a mule, draft horse, or farm implement I am used to slave and work from dusk to dawn. I am not allowed to leave the farm or interact with anyone. No church, no school, no friends. Only snippets of conversation with Greta who secreted me books and sometimes pages from a newspaper, a peek of events outside my sequestered solitary existence. My introduction to the three R’s began early in my life, and I continued my education being self taught with Greta’s help always wary of Claus’s discovery. The response I get from other children who purposely come to get a glimpse of me or from a passing stranger are all the same. There seems to be some horrid fascination in looking upon the specter of my presence. In any event my terms of indentured service although not acknowledged were fulfilled. But then what? Where would I possibly go.

Greta would come twice a day with a breakfast of an egg and piece of toast and possibly a piece of meat. At evening it was a small bowl of gruel. Her face was always pointed down to the ground. ‘I am sorry’ she spoke. ‘This is all Claus will allow me to bring’. Sometimes she had bread or an apple hidden in her skirts. It was just enough for a working man to starve on. I learned to forage from the forest and field to stay alive. Sometimes at night I would steal away to Kit’s. We would talk at her window. We were soul mates from youth and she remained faithful, indifferent to the scars. One night I inadvertently put my hand on the window seal and she readily grabbed it pulling me closer and touched my face. I immediately retreated in surprise. No one had ever touched my face since the doctors. ‘Oh, I am so sorry I said. I got to close’. ‘No my love’ she gently spoke. ‘The flame of fire cannot quench the love I have for thee’.

At night, every night I cried ‘Oh Father, give me grace and strength. If I am to live the remainder of my days as a disfigured ogre of everyone’s darkest fantasies, let me still bring glory to your name’. Then one night as I sipped my watery supper the barn door opened and a solitary figure walked in. He appeared as a traveler with a pole and sack over his shoulder. He walked right up to me and looked at me straight in the face with a smile. ‘May I sit’ he asked, and thus began our conversation well into the night. As he spoke words of radiance captured my soul and I began to heal from the inside out. The next morning I awoke refreshed and sat welcoming the first rays of dawn expecting to hear Claus’s stern instructions regarding the day. Was it a dream I thought, this night, the stranger. But as the morning light shown through the cracks of my habitat I glanced at my hands and arms in utter astonishment. My skin was beautiful and perfect. I reflexively reached for my face. I felt no scars, only flawless resplendent skin.

Greta came through the door with her breakfast of meal and I said, ‘Kind Greta, please look at me. Don’t be afraid. Look at me’. Slowly she raised her face and then dropped the tray, screaming in shock and surprise. ‘You’!, she stammered, ‘your face and arms, your skin, there are no more scars’. She stood there sobbing when Claus came tromping through the barn doors demanding to know what was happening when he looked upon my face. Stammering and recoiling he stood astonished. ‘You sir’ I spoke, have used and abused me for these seven years wasting the stipend you received not to provide for your wife or me but on whiskey and wantonness. You will receive the just recompense of your reward. Turning to a trembling Greta I spoke softly. ‘Thankyou for your kindness. I will be gone by days end’.

That night I once again tapped on Kit’s window as she once again responded in kind and loving acceptance. ‘Kit’, I said, get your lantern. Confused she lit and drew it close to the window and looked with astonishment upon my face and countenance sucking in her breath with her hand to her chest, her eyes enlarging, her pupils protracting. Barely able to contain her rapture and joy she turned, set the lantern down, and reached for her bedroom door, lifted her gown and ran out the house, down the porch steps, crashing, and not very quietly I assure you, into my waiting outstretched arms, laughing, sobbing, tears freely flowing, kissing every inch of my handsome face and lips. Years of pent-up desire. loving, and longing were released in a torrent, an ocean of emotion. All those years when she could not touch me, hold me, kiss me vanished under the soft radiant light of a smiling blue moon. It was euphoric. Never had I hoped to experience this elation of love.

This traveler, ‘ce marchand de mise’ricorde’, left me an envelope which I found in the morning. All the years of dark sorrow were recompensed with a generous gift for Kit and I to launch our life. Before leaving I told Greta an account was set up in her name at Clarabelle's Clothiers for new dresses and personal items as a thankyou for all the years of kindness and service. She hugged and hugged me. ‘Life will never be the same without you’ she wept. ‘Now go with God’s speed’.

And so, this continuum we call the community of man, a protracted journey through a tragic place, is a melodrama amplified by our ignorance and complicity. Though birthed of the earth we are only pilgrims, never citizens. You ask, ‘where’s home’? For us it’s not a place or state. It’s not a year or date. Somewhere on our journey we were crafted out of the dust. We may look like you, but we are not like you. Daily you seek to entertain yourself, feeding your addiction to food, sports and entertainment. And your appetite for vanity increases the more aloof you are from the truth, seeking solace for the vacuum of meaning you call your life. You seek refuge in ‘move-ease’ as you immerse yourself in yet another projection of emotional and possibly intellectual musings that move you on some level. Sometimes it beckons to you in layers as the good guy or heroin in your movie sit and watch a movie within a movie, an image within an image, at their home or in a theatre. So you get up from your couch or walk out into the parking lot feeling some level of satisfaction before indulging in your next donut or dixie cup, both round with a hole in the center. You know only what your mind IMAGEns, not what actually is, living with dissociation, dissonance, and depression in a glass house of detached and fragile emotions.

There’s an old saying that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. But the senescent sage, an old road weary cowboy leaning on a fence post with a piece of straw in his mouth says, ‘it mite not hurt ya, but it sure as Hell can kill ya’. Then straightening himself with sparkling eyes dominating a wrinkled face he said, ‘tryin’ to educate most folks is like tryin’ to teach a pig to read……waste of time and jest annoys the heck out of the pig’!