Waste time. It’s worth it until you get to the meaning.
I remember hearing my own voice as a child on the reel to reel tape recorder my mother used to send my father messages to in Vietnam. My voice sounded, weird. In my head, my voice sounded different and I came to a profound epiphany that my voice and also how I felt wasn’t communicated to others the way I thought.
Thinking will get you just to more thinking.
Just. Then more.
I always wanted to write. To string my words to woo girls in study hall or to just let go of all the awful and wonderful thoughts that made my being grow too big for my body. I figured that words would set me free, disperse the pain and happiness I felt into other people or into the abyss of the unknown world I only imagined. I was right.
My words dispersed, left and went to places I never even thought about. Into technology and into people I never met or wondered of, or loved. The words found home though. They found home in me later and even later in you. I didn’t think it could happen.
I found those words, and me in them. Even though it was painful, I cherished hearing my voice because I didn’t actually have to hear it.. I just read the text like someone else. In reality, I am someone else. I’ve grown and learned and can’t believe these fingers pounded keys of tears to hiccup feelings of before. It’s akin to looking back at my footsteps after high tide.
I have a baby coming. It is growing in my wife’s belly. The charts say it is about two and a half pounds now. I hold her belly in my hand at night and can sometimes feel the baby move. It is my baby. We don’t know the sex of the child yet, but my wife and I have names picked out. Two months from now, it should be done and ready for life.
Meanwhile, I remain. Waiting. I am Thirty Five years old.
I’m writing this because I need words. I need a few words to let go into places mysterious because I can’t hold tight to them any longer. I am any emotion. Full of every and hope.
On Easter Sunday, three days ago, my wife and I tried to get some religion. As almost new parents, we have been testing out different congregations of various beliefs to raise our child and the previous weeks Unitarian test didn’t have “enough, God” for my raised Lutheran wife. So, I suggested my, Catholic Easter. Well, the Catholic church was overwhelmed with part time Catholics in nice clothes so we went to the Methodist Church down the street.
We went in and got our programs on a whimsical spring day full of periwinkle sky and post fight love. We sat in a pew and looked around at all the vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows and whilst we were looking an old man in a gray wool sport coat and a lady in a pink polyester dress walked down the aisle and I made eye contact with the man. I knew him.
Across the street from the Methodist Church is the Walker Art Center where I am a Volunteer Tour Guide. It just so happens that the man I made eye contact with used to be a Gallery Monitor at the museum. A Gallery Monitor is one of those people that remind you not to touch or get to close to the art. His name is Dean.
So, I made eye contact with Dean. I hadn’t seen him in over a year and a half.
Dean is a jovial old retired guy that was always eager to talk, straight forward and true and fine like many old Minnesota folk and the last I heard a year and a half ago, he had a stroke.
He recognized me and his partner, a woman his age asked me if I knew him. I explained that I did and Dean grunted recognition. The moments that followed were surreal on account that the woman excused herself to go to the washroom and I was left leaning over a pew in a Methodist Church I had never been in to communicate with someone who could not speak words.
I pointed to Dawns’s belly and told him we were expecting and he grunted recognition with joy and told me with fingers that he had six kids. He made a wave of his arm toward the ceiling in wonder of the architecture and I understood. Dawn said hello. His friend came back and we sat through service and when it ended, his friend told me that she had been his care giver in Fargo, North Dakota for the past year and that she was in love with him.
My perplexed look must have initiated her to explain. Dean’s wife had died years before and during his rehabilitation, Dean had poked the keys of a keyboard with his left hand to write her love poems.
She told me that it wasn’t kosher to date patients, but Dean had made so much progress and his spirit just, “Won her over.”
She had never heard Dean’s voice.