Getting bent

Sunday, June 09, 2013

The rain ends.

Slanted light oozes through the wet leaves in my back yard, and I drift in a dream of green, not sure of where I am or how I got here or if there’s anywhere to get back to if I wanted to get back at all.

The uncle I cared for and helped bury 15 years ago would have turned 80 this week, living longer than anyone ever expected even him.

I guess we live our lives expecting one thing and getting another.

This is the time of season when we get to the point where the days mount up to that day which is longest, and then wind down like an old alarm clock to grow short again – a dreadful thought that I am reaching the age when short days matter, and I get scared.

I’ve always lived my life believing that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only to learn that nothing is so straight as we pretend it is, least of all me as I bend to the invisible forces Mother Nature casts at me, hoping if I learn to bend right I might yet get what I came for.

Once, when I was young, I asked a circus strong man why he bent metal bars with his teeth. Didn’t it hurt?

He said it hurt every time, and sometimes, he just didn’t feel strong enough to do it, regardless what the circus posters said. But he said he had to do it to survive.

We all bend and get bent, I’ve learned since, the secret is not to mind it.