more than watchmen for the morning

parks and fences.

My early years were patchwork and varying color. Nothing looked the way it was supposed to but somehow it all fit together, and it was good.  Kurt Vonnegut said in his novel Breakfast of Champions that “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” That simple line clearly reflects the memory that I have of those very early days.  There was no sense of loss and no notion of something missing. I was completely and wholly myself, becoming a person, in an environment that seemed completely safe and secure. 

Each day was predominately an exercise of middle-class laughter and skinned knees.  We were on this classic 20th Century street that was just one straight cement path with brick, ranch styled homes lining the way and various oaks and dogwoods populating each manicured lawn. 

At the end of our street was an old park. The place was almost always closed with a chain linked fence securing it from vagrants and various delinquents that would want to use the space for the sorts of things that prompted nervous types to invent fences in the first place. 

Papaw and I would frequently head off with a football to the end of that street and see those gates shut and our park locked off. Each time we would shrug our shoulders and head off to do something else. But I remember this one day, bright in the afternoon, when we found ourselves before that fence that seemed so staggering to my tiny form. I never knew that there was an option. I had thought we really had to turn around and go home. I was just about to head back, but my grandfather said, “Wait a minute.  You know, if we pull back the gate a little bit, I bet you could slip through the space between.” And so I did, and I was through to the other side. I then watched my 60 year old grandfather scale that fence and hop down there with me, our own Narnia right before us. I never knew that there was really an option. I had thought we always had to turn around and go home. 

I was only around the age of 4 or 5 that day we broke into the park. Upon reflecting on it now, I wish I would have had that memory ironed into my consciousness at dawn every morning since. Perhaps it is my very first tangible lesson that I ever learned in life. There seems to be people that go with the flow and are fine with whatever comes by them. I probably spend half my thought-life trying to make myself be that kind of person. I try to insist that I don’t care about that issue, that girl, that disagreement. I want to be cool and detached because those are the people who seem completely at ease with the world as it is. I love the idea of being that kind of person. 

The truth is, I am not that kind of person and I’m slowly becoming more suspicious of those people who claim they are. I have always wondered why I wasn’t detached and what the hell might be wrong with me. It could just be that I was simply and subtly influenced by a grandfather who refused to stay out of the park, who refused to honor a locked gate in the middle of the afternoon, who simply believed that it was not the day to turn back. It wasn’t that he was cool, it was that he knew what he wanted. I can be the person who turns around and heads back, the person who goes with what life gave him, the person who is too afraid to take the risk and throw himself on the line. We can be those people if we want, but we’re not going to have very much fun. That’s the lesson I learned that day, though I didn’t know it until this very moment.