Being asked to sum up your life and give your most profound truth
in one event!
Like saying you are to synopse the Canons
between two successive elevations of the host;
Or to describe Common Law in the interval separating
a Capitalized word and its subsequent period.
How can you explore the West barefooted (even the cities) on five dollars and a medallion;
Learn not one but three professions;
Abstract your-self with powerful substances;
Attend festivals, Mardis Gras, funerals, wakes, feasts;
Have favorite pets die fitfully of unknown causes in your hands;
Pick up a bird freshly killed with your not so new, now tarnished pellet gun;
Escape arsonists, muggers, 'philes, cops, government agents, amorous ducklings (the ugly variety), a large roving shark
and an unseen coughing bear;
Spend nights walking in the western desert, enveloped with terror of giant scorpions, terrible spirits
and god knows what else;
Hike the Appalachian Trail, 40 miles of it, from Clingman's Dome to Fontana Dam, in two days - on a Clark bar, can of sardines, Mordecai wine & French bread
and at the end to eat not only all your own dinner but the rest of what your friend couldn't force down
(including all his strawberry shortcake);
Be chased down one coast of Florida & up the other by a hurricane named Abbey & just when you've found succor
To find that your only HERO, (the Younger Brother of a man you really didn't care about) has been murdered,
And hearing it, & the betraying bigotry, to screw the damn storm & hitch out through Jacksonville, in winds so strong you had to stand against telephone poles to stay on the ground,
And never to finish his book you bought the day before he got hit;
To have these and many more things happen to you including the most secret and unfathomable of all:
the Glimpse, the Drenching, the Drowning
& the Struggle to escape
from a TRUTH too simple to understand
and too universal to articulate
- a truth which resists all attempts to ignore it
and catches you at odd moments,
crushing your ego
with its simplicity
and fading as soon as reason
or consciousness tries to touch it
and yet leaves a trace
which tastes like it cannot be sweetened
by time or distraction;
And then to be asked in a questionnaire -
for a friggin' newsletter! -
"What is your most memorable experience?"
. . .followed by two blank lines:
____________________________________________
____________________________________________
OK, how's this:
"Seeing my fiance walking down the aisle
to become my wife."
Yeah, you must remember this, and it fits the blank.
