Risk

26 letters of joy filled tears of wonderment at how shapes can create sounds, morpheme, the traditional meaning of a word, can conjure images, pigments, roughness, memoirs, reservations, and the naggings of what might have been. Then tell me you abhor literature as I have heard from friends and students. No photo, capturing a 100 words that drip insults, insolents, and audacious behaviour come close to the sentiments of the warmth of a Mississippi summer evening sitting on veranda sipping lemonade looking out of cotton fields, white tailed cotton balls on brown popsicle sticks.

Listening to the eyes of a black man that has just been fired for pulling over a governor, asking his superior on the CB what to do and being given full authority to drive him home, tow his car, and let it go and then the next day being fired by a black boss trying to make heat, throw someone else under the bus to get a promotion. Without a thought he was out the next day looking for another job, not a county in the district would hire him regardless of his righteousness.

His voice weighed heavy in his throat as we spoke quietly in the back of a small, very small 12 by 12 foot gas station being staffed by a woman that had worked for 20 years, not by choice yet by necessity at the local factory, to feed her children, feed her life, her spirit, to keep going, even when for the last 3 years she had been promoted to a supervisor without a pay raise. Never mind bringing it up with her superiors, she had several times and each time they asked her if she knew where she worked, whether she could appreciate that she had a job.

Now for the first time, she was asked by some white woman trying to wrap her head around something that was so foreign breathing through gills seemed simpler. Her stature spoke more of who she was as a citizen, a human being, a human that flourished this damned planet and yet she was condemned because of color. I knew if I listened much longer I was going to scream in this tiny compartment in my mind. Get out and deal with your own mess, you got enough of it, why the need to be here and deal with them. The lilt in her voice brought me in like a babe to midnight milk there was little holding me back. I vowed to stay in touch and I made good. She has never left the factory after 2 more attempts to increase her pay or go back to the floor where they wouldn’t allow her to go because she knew too much. I felt her eyes asking probing me what to do, a woman 15 years my senior. I had no right, my place wasn’t there,

Having just entered the Zion Missionary Baptist Church that holds 3000 black folks wondering where the progress has come from the 1960 and crying in my room at the Regency Hotel that his hosting a whopping 4 guest because the crime rate of Jackson is so high no one will stay in the center of town. I never understood how a heart was broken until Jackson. I wondered around in my mind every aspect of life I wanted to be a part of changing, why me, why here. What was my connection and why was I so damned in need of helping these folks that truly wanted nothing to do with a white child of ignorance from the north. Why had the governors of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee crept under my skin shingles on hold as anger seeped like oil in Texas bubbling irrepressibly irresponsibly where it didn’t belong. Hours of listening to their decrepit voices on the radio in my hours, days of driving from state to state, from reminder to reminder of what hasn’t changed. Whatever happened in the north, regardless of the positive effects on the economy they weren’t interested in it. The blacks were simply a commodity that were in the wrong place at the wrong time for what the last 400 years. No wonder they were outraged fighting back breaking shadows nightmares of what 15 generations had experienced.

Presently I reside in Calgary like a caged animal trying to figure out what my purpose on this planet is and how to live out the remaining days. Sure easy enough to go back to the same old, yet what my soul yearns to do is make changes outside of the affluence of my surroundings. Finally decide to walk the talk living out the remainder of the years with those that Jesus would have treated like God’s at this table. The question is how to do it without breaking the decree, breaking my psyche, my family and friends? They don’t deserve my guilt, my intents, my needs, or desires, they deserve the best of what God can conjure up in me. Yet unlike Madison County I can’t stay and do nothing. All the volunteer work here isn’t going to make changes where it is truly needed in areas that don’t speak up, where a voice needs to be written, not spoken.

Balance what is it, when for the first time in my life that I haven’t stopped and accessed my purpose on a metaphorical level. Equilibrium is the measure of a man’s life. Hal and I walked down the street and wondered what if we won, we truly won the lotto, not that we miss the immeasurable and necessary step of buying a ticket, yet what if we won, why aren’t we doing what we would do if we won, right now? Is it money that is truly stopping us, or time. So here is my new year’s resolution.

No, not to lose weight, nor join a gym, those are first world problems, the more you think about it. Why isn’t everyone in the developed world trying to heal this miraculous planet of ours? When did we become so removed from mother earth that plastic inanimate objects fill our void, or synthetic psychotic drug kill the rich. How many millennium have taught us that relationships, connections to another mortal permeates, satiates, all fallacies. Each summer my fingers long for the grit of our backyard mire to teach them how to grow our victuals. Never a season passes that I am not amazed at the wonders that come forth from our garden.

Human spirit is all we have left as a world. Nothing more, nothing less. It is the groove in Stella's that crazes us to do the unthinkable, love the unlovable, and be the unbelievable. Each childhood dream is a reality that screams to be performed. Every adult plunges another opportunity to earn another buck, for that has become a dream, and what we do with it.....memories without touch.

God has taught me to surge without thought, leap without doubt, and fail valiantly. Risk, a four letter word, a board game, an illegal act in the first world saves lives everyday in far off lands where choice isn't an option.