Episode 92. Little Mac's Memoirs of Now - For I So Love the World
My heart is a crystal globe inside of which a world of miracles occurs, such rowdy miracles sometimes it seems the globe must crack and shatter.
The coming together occurs which is known as becoming a man. He finds himself in foreign places, fighting for what, to the best of his knowledge, he believes in. He watches as friends are exploded. He becomes such an expert himself at disassembling others that in the service he is known as Mac the Knife.
There is a mirror-like effect. He comes home carved up like a turkey in his mind. Then one night he finds himself dancing. The song is the same as his nickname. The woman in his arms turns out to be the one who makes him whole again. The redness of so much blood recedes. When high tide returns, the ocean is only the ocean once more, fresh and pure, and the killer has married a saint.
As their dance keeps on going and slows, with his head nestled against her, against the great bosom of the woman the world knew as Big Bertha, he becomes a school teacher. Out of madness love emerges. A hard-forged love that manifests both as his passionate daughter Delilah and as countless classes of all kinds of students, rich and poor, dumb and brilliant, challenging and meek. He teaches for what is called many years, though it seems like the blink of an eye.
The lost year comes. There is not much to say about this. It is the year something freezes in his mind and he goes skidding across that ice out of control until he ends up far away from anywhere. How Bertie brings him back is in her diaries, he thinks.
This cannot be about the past, you see, for every time I think of her, that time is now. Though one might say that she has flown and I am out on a limb all alone left with only my memories and therefore living in the past, the truth is she is always present. When I remember Bertie she is in my heart right now, so strong it seems the globe must crack and shatter.
Okay, so I am sitting in the backyard in her chair, the one she died in, and I am watching the birds in the yard come and go and wishing I could take wing myself and follow, follow, follow to wherever she went. But how can I? If she is truly in my heart, then that would mean disappearing inside myself, and Bertie would never permit that. She says, "For I so love the world." And I cannot tell which one of us she means because we are not two. Not anymore. So I must love the world too much to disappear inside myself.
I think I have stopped making sense. Time to do something practical. Delilah is packing for herself and my grandson Noah and Cousin Minnie is packing for herself and Sir Barksalot so I need only pack for me. We are going on a family adventure. We are going to a place in the mountains in Alberta where they teach meditation. Delilah heard the man who is the foremost of their teachers, and she is convinced that we all need to go. And I say why not? Somewhere the world is always blossoming. The globe cracks and shatters and the blossom emerges.
Here I am with my hand on the toothpaste. I have to pick it up now and put it in my little toiletries bag. It isn't really that heavy. There shouldn't be any problem.
Let the birds come and go. Let the globe crack and shatter. Let the roses unfold.

22 October 2018
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca