(photo credit - John Zumpano)
This was never a suicide note to a suicide, you having reached kensho’s sunny shores—“The world is so necessary”—and me trailing you my half-witted-less-courageous brother. Thank God we’re weenies. As Jane Kenyon wrote: It might have been otherwise. Just this morning we got our asses handed to us at work, the volume of packages to be delivered resembling a tsunami. We finished the job, but I often wonder at what cost? I decided a pick-me-up was in order, so I took the long and winding road home aptly named Blacksnake which before home takes me by Red Light Roastery Coffee House. Along the edge of Blacksnake I saw a single black flip-flop and not a hundred yards farther on the opposite edge a single chunky white tennis shoe the kind dads tend to wear as they get older (not me). No additional context for clues, just these single pieces of footwear standing in the wild. And then, about a mile farther on the white tennis shoe side of Blacksnake, a toilet in from what I could tell decent shape, again no clues as to how or why it sat there. But there it sat. These three things—the stuff of earth—there for the seeing if you have eyes to see. It was sorta hard to miss the toilet. Maybe it was the relief that work was over, maybe it was Billy Joel singing “And So It Goes,” maybe it was the inky melancholy sky above, maybe it was all of that and more, but that lone flip-flop and single tennis shoe and in-decent-shape toilet suddenly rivaled the gifts of the Magi. Of course maybe I’m simply exhausted, but whatever. Yes, Jim, the world is so necessary, and so very grand if we only have the eyes to see. The kind-eyed woman at Red Light knows me as the grey-beard who pops in post-work every other week, soaked with sweat but armed with a debit card and an addiction for Mexican Veracruz beans ground for a drip maker. She doesn’t say “The usual?” But she knows. She does ask, “Receipt?” I wink and smile, “No. Thanks you.” I probably shouldn’t wink at women and by no means do I do that all the time (yet I bet you did every time). But I do have a tendency to wink and smile at the beautiful stuff of earth, whether baristas or a flip-flop or cloudy skies or abandoned toilets on the right hand side of Blacksnake Road, a road which will eventually lead me home. Yes, my fellow weenie, I couldn’t get away if I wanted to. I, too, have decided to stay.