Ok……c’mon…….this is supposed to happen next Friday when the Vicodin or Dilaudid is masking the effects of Dr. Andy’s handiwork on a youngster’s squawking shoulder.
3:00 am and there’s no way to get back to sleep…..thoughts flitting across the brain like cars through a toll booth.
The youngster decides to put on a little Zac Brown and see what happens.
My dad left us in 1989 after complications from feisty back surgery. The weekend following his death, a cowboy awoke early (not this early) and walked a half mile to attend seven o’clock Mass. Nearing a small creek in Foxridge, a very clear voice stopped me in my tracks…..three simple words……”USE YOUR GIFTS.”
For the longest time growing up, gifts were those physical attributes that happened on ball fields and courts in Kansas City and Colorado.
These days, those gifts have faded from the radar screen as two thirds of this life has ticked away. Are there other gifts that need to be cultivated in the final third?
We are all asked to ponder this question at some point…..when what we thought defined us recedes like a wave on the ocean.
I wrote the poem below forty-five years after a stormy period in Kansas City.
At first, it seemed like a slap in the face of a father whose emotions got the best of him many times. At the two thirds point of my life, it occurs to me that these words were meant to be penned…..not so much as an indictment but as a recognition that we are so much stronger than we think…..that we can bounce back from everything…..that our intrinsic worth……our humor…..our zest for life…..and our compassion for others……. cannot be throttled by a few scathing words or a surgeon’s scalpel.
We may seem broken at times…..like the world has knocked us to the mat like a left cross to the chin. It’s at those times that Friedrich Nietzsche would whisper to us……..”that which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
So friends…..please be certain that surgery #10 will be a gift in the respect that it will provide time to reflect upon blessings too numerous to count…..that ZEST will be in all caps when I return.
Maybe battered a bit but never broken again.
The Broken Child
Your voice was like thunder
that rocked my room and my world.
It shook my soul and crushed my spirit.
Where it came from doesn’t matter.
You were wrong…
the first time
and the last.
There are no excuses
and I am not to blame.
I will not accept that it was
just your way of letting off steam.
Dad, you were a volcano
erupting near my heart.
It wasn’t smoke and ash
that I feared,
it was the suffocating thought
that tortured my brain…
the thought that there was nothing,
nothing in the world
that I could do,
to make you love the broken child
that was too scared to speak
and too hurt to cry.
** if the power of this poem encourages you or others to choose their words wisely then I say Hallelujah!
What You’re Saying