Family Couch
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| HEY, MOISHE! - click here - |
I wasn’t displeased about sitting in-between my parents – and I had the
TV-clicker, so pressed it and began to watch. It was a convoluted revenge story
developing, and I knew it. My mind fluttered between whether I was in control,
or if my hand was being forced. We all watched for a few segments of time, and
then I got bored and nervous. I fast-forwarded super-fast to the end. Then the
bullets started flying. The screen we watched became systematically shredded,
with fibers and smoke fluttering like worms in the wind, but still smoking from
ashes flipping from behind.
I suppose I was just angry. It was irrational, considering the love that I’d had. They looked at me in the dream like I was criminally-insane. Mouths hung wide and low with eyes pinned to my lapel, lower than my sight could even see. I mumbled nothing and moved back to the carnage, and stewed—then I woke up. It was good to remember, as I do now, building bridges and zip-lines straight down. All the way to my old-age, teaching... Then I forgot it all.
I remembered how I failed. I missed all the signs. Like a little dog bitten by a snake, I quavered, I flailed. She was under my arm, tucked in and protected. I was proud to be the one she chose, holding me close with reverence and kavod. The others in the room begged to differ. I was not really with her … they said. But, when I looked down, straight down, she began to quiver. I felt her with me but then she pulled back. Pieces went missing as I watched from above. She just plain disappeared. I looked up and the others moved away quickly. It became dark, and I was left with my arm folded in the air, as if the dog was still there.
This happened before, having traveled to Jerusalem. The first night was different, the second more the same. I woke 3 times in the night, the first to the muezzin, the second from church-bells, and the third from a Jewish baby crying; faith, faith, and life—that’s what I heard. I went to the wall, and viewed from within the goings-on and also I saw some birds. They built human-encounter walls there, at the wall, male and female, one to each side, and I wandered between them and wondered what it would feel like. I was separate from what the signs read; I was only a tourist watching from above, towards the world around me, sort-of dead, but also so alive, and wonderfully-insane...
My son called me, he called us all. From atop a mountain next to a lake, my son proposed to his gal. We smiled … all-around, congratulations and mazal-tovs, with sparkling diamonds in the air, with love expanding in all directions. It was a really fun day, in the small family that we have. Soon with God’s help, I’ll have another daughter-in-law, our future, and thus theirs. We have become greater, WE ... have without doubt. To see life unfolding into growth, into stealth, wisdom and wealth, builds the future right now, exactly. My son called me, and we spoke.
On my bike ride I saw no wildlife. It was too late and too many had come before. There wasn’t a porcupine swelling its quills. There weren’t any tortoises; they had all left. Hedgehogs were asleep and the snakes were gone, also. A jackal didn’t jump out, and the deer had all left for the year. Skinks never show faces, unlike lizards and quail. A blind mole-rat would never even know—scarabs and dung-beetles, centipedes with nothing to tow. Ants with their butts poking high, scorpions and bees bumbling to and fro; on my bike ride I saw nothing, but I still rode, I know.
