Narrator

                  Sometimes I get so caught up in my own mind that I separate from reality.  I become a third party who doesn’t interact but simply observes.  Maybe that’s the writer in me, I become the narrator, and I make my life a simple story, telling the parts that are light and happy. That way I feel like I can control life, show the parts of the plot that are full of humor, action and romance. Life lessons are easier to take when they’re learnt by somebody else. I can feel the emotions by reading the story, but the pain isn’t as vivid and I can cut it off whenever I wish, simply by snapping the book shut. As long as I’m the narrator I’m safe.

Blessing in Disguise

                  “Maybe it’s cause you’re getting old.” I said it like it was a fact, because it was a fact.  He’d run this farm his whole life, the first eighteen years by his father’s side, the rest of the sixty-two by himself, except for his wife and sons, but his wife was dead and his sons were gone, and he was still holding on, even though he’d earned himself a break.  Every time something on that farm required a repair he got even more angry about it than the time before that.  I was the same way as him, I was a perfectionist who liked everything a certain way and if it was changed, broken, or didn’t run without a catch I got uptight.  I was only seventeen but in my seventeen years I had learned better than he had that it doesn’t always work that way. Things broke down, things weren’t always perfect.  I guess I probably learned that pretty quick because that was the way my life was, if it ran a day without a catch I’d think I was in Heaven.  He was eighty and still holding on to the old farm, even though he had diabetes and a bad hip he thought he could make it run as perfectly as the day he had inherited it, and this time when something went wrong he lost his temper again, this time throwing his hands up in the air and asking the mental to do list he kept, “Why is it getting longer every day, it used to be I had five tasks a day and I could trust that at the end of an honest day’s work they’d be done, and I’d be ready for the next day. But no, everything has to go wrong.  A fence post breaks, so I repair it, but the post pounder I need to repair it is missing a part, and when I go into town to pick up the part it won’t be in until Tuesday, in the meantime my purebred angus heifers are in with the neighbour’s blasted hybrid bull! Why is everything going wrong?!”

                  And I couldn’t keep my opinion in any longer, “Maybe it’s cause you’re getting old.”

                  “Don’t tell me I’m getting old!” He threw down the wrench he was using to do the job of a hammer, a hammer that he had misplaced two days ago and still hadn’t recalled the exact location of. 

                  “What’s with it with you people? Everybody thinks there is something wrong with getting old. Well in my mind there isn’t, least not if you’re a Christian.  If you’re a Christian getting old means getting one day closer to meeting your Maker.  For me? Getting older means one more day towards college, or a new job. And you know what that means? That means new people who vex me and don’t understand me but tell me they know me, and then get after me for what they think they know. It means another day of seeing shit happen in this world that could be changed if everybody in the world knew and believed and loved the Truth.  And the only way that people are going to come to know and believe and love the Truth is if the people who do know the Truth get off their lazy asses and start knowing and believing and loving the Truth themselves.  Which sucks because that means we have to do something more than love ourselves. 

                  “So don’t tell me to not tell you you’re getting old. When I say you’re old I’m saying it with jealousy, I wish I was one day closer to not having to have to get out of bed every morning and face boys talking about which drunk girl they had sex with on the weekend, and then talking about their one virgin buddy who hasn’t given it up yet and is too lazy to get a girl, and wanting to stand up and yell at them that maybe he doesn’t want to give it up, maybe he’s saving it for somebody special. I don’t like the idea of not being able to yell at them that they’re just jealous that they haven’t had the self control to hold onto it, but I couldn’t say that in love, so I don’t say anything at all. And then for the rest of my week, my month even, I wonder if perhaps there was something I could have said in love to make them want to know, believe and love the Truth.”

                  “Getting old is just one less chance of seeing the year when they finally outlaw religious practices of any kind in the name of equality. Getting old is one less chance of seeing the year when water stops being free.  Getting old means you don’t have to watch as Earth rips herself apart trying to maintain a livable environment for humans while we pump her full of toxins.  Getting old is one less day of having to watch humanity rip itself apart.  It’s one less day to watch this world come to a painful and dark end.”

I stopped ranting for a moment to pick up the wrench and put it back in its proper place.  Then I handed him the hammer I had found beside the broken fence post that morning.  I wished it was all I could do to remember where I had placed my hammer, or my reading glasses, cause maybe if I was that absent of mind I wouldn’t have the sanity to dwell on the things that make me want to stay in bed for weeks at a time.

                  “Face it old man, getting old’s a blessing in disguise.”

To Hell With an Eggbasket

             She struggled with the big barn door. Finally it opened.  She balked at the incessant clucking from inside.  Picking up her basket containing a small bed of straw she stepped forward, muttering under her breath, “Help me God. Ease this coming hardship. Life has got to be more than this. Lord save my soul, and my shoes. Cause ugh… everywhere I step there’s chicken poo.”

Murmuration

           Have you ever seen a murmuration of starlings?  A murmuration is a group of starlings and there are times in their lives when they gather into a large murmuration of almost thousands of birds.  As they fly they almost seem to become one being, and the group breathes and moves as a whole.  Life, is like a murmuration. It is a conglomeration of many different small details working together to make a whole. These details flow into each other, much the same way each wave flows into the other with the ocean tides, or much the same way a single starling flows inside the whole.

            How do they do it? It would be hard to say.  It’s the animal instinct, for a large part. Their instinct is just so powerful that they are able to see a signal, the slightest tip of their fellows’ wings and they react immediately.  Humans don’t always rely completely on their instinct, they like to use “reason” and “logic” but our live always seem to be rough and uncoordinated.  Perhaps I will begin to make decisions, not on impulse, but on instinct. I will follow my gut feeling.  That way my life can feel more natural, more fluent, more graceful. 

            Why do the starlings create such wonders? Why do they gather in such numbers every year to perform such a dance? That is the way God created them.  Now I don’t believe God is always speaking to us, but I do believe that there are times in our lives when he gives us a succession of opportunities and suggestions alike. We are supposed to be attuned to his will so that we can react on those opportunities quickly.  The way the starling is attuned to their murmuration, so they may move quick enough to perform their dance of nature. My wish, my hope, my goal is to make my life look like a murmuration. I will be always finely attuned to my circumstances around me, and the will of God, so that I may be able to become part of that fantastic dance.  The fantastic dance that rises and ebbs, with success and failures, defeats and victories.

A video of a starling murmuration:

http://vimeo.com/31158841

The Canadian Way

The Canadian Way

The cold on your butt

The warmth from the heater above.

The smell of fries and coffee

And the taste of licorice as

You chew it nervously.

The rise and fall of the crowd

As the m.v.p. skates by.

The feel of the ice on your face

And energy coming off the players as they

Walk to their change rooms.

It’s the sound of the air horns

For period break, power play, puck in the net.

The oohs and the ahhs of the crowd

The slap of the sticks and the

Thud as one body hits another

The glass shivers under impact.

What is this? Just another Saturday night.

This is Hockey, this is being Canadian.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                  We never really got along. A large part of it was the fact that she stole my man, even though he wasn’t mine in the first place.  But it also went further back than that, it was a personality clash.  No matter how much we glared at each other and directed all our angry feelings towards each other, though, there was always those Friday or Saturday nights.  The two of us would go to his hockey games together, her wearing his jersey and me rolling my eyes because I knew that later on he’d be going on and on about how, after, it’d smell like her vanilla perfume.  The two of us would sit on the far side of the arena where nobody else would sit and we’d watch them all skate onto the ice.  Both of us would always have one eye on Number Nine, all the while pretending like all we saw was his other teammates. Our cover up being the jokes we made about them.

            “Look at that guy, with the long, black hair.”

            “Ooh, he should be a Pantene model!”

            Both of us would genuinely laugh and have a good time.  Then we’d watch as, during the second period, Number Nine would jump off the ice onto his bench.  You could almost imagine the sound of him cussing out his teammates as he threw his stick at the bench in righteous anger.  We turned to each other, night and day, her blue eyes, and my brown eyes, wide, and then we burst out laughing. 

            He never found his anger funny, and I’d never found anybody else who could laugh at it like I did. We watched the rest of the game, laughing hysterically when Number Nine went sprawling on the ice with no one around.  I knew that when we went back to his house to watch a movie, she would sit on the couch in his arms, and I’d go back to resenting her because she had made me the third wheel.  But for right now, in this hockey arena, we had found a common ground. I guess that’s just the Canadian way.