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Tuesday, October 27, 2020
By the Sword
My father lived by the sword. One could say the odds were stacked against him. One could say that he rose from nothing to be a millionaire. One could say a lot of things about my father. But it will be his oldest son that tells his story. Allen, as his father called him, was born in 1949. He died a horrible death in 1994. I always thought it odd the way the 4 and the 9 became reversed, disorientated like the pieces of metal and plastic that made up his truck did upon smashing into that concrete culvert in the early-morning fog of March.
It was 1950 when his mother, Dora, disappeared into the smoke for the last time after carrying him and his siblings to safety outside their burning cabin must have flashed through his mind during his final moments in trauma, hyperventilating from the loss of blood and air from his caved in chest. The life escaping from his body as his memories played in a loop.
Yet his spirit, the essence of him, lingered around for many years. Within a year or so after his official death, I felt him in the latter stages of a dream, early as the sun was rising just as he did in the morning. I shook myself awake to catch a glimpse of him walking passed where I slept. I saw him clearly.He gave me warning and slammed the door on the way out of the room to let me know that there was no mistake. It was him and he could manipulate the physical world, at least when he felt strongly enough about it.
On many strange occasions, it seems he had manipulated the physical world somehow to keep me from dying, from car accidents that I came out of barely harmed to gun shots that somehow missed me. I don't remember seeing his presence for a long while after the warning and the door slam. However, I felt him all the time, all around me, especially in nature. I don't remember him showing up when I broke my neck, when I woke up with my had in the glove box of a Pontiac Grandam and a paramedic touching me on the shoulder. Since he didn't make an appearance then, I figured his soul had finally moved on.
But when I fell into that basement a few years later, and my head sounded like a .22 magnum bullet being fired when my head hit the floor, and the sixteen-penny nail heads were embedded in my skull, trauma showed up and so did my father. He let me know how badly I had fucked up, doing too many drugs and not sleeping for days, then attempting to set huge trusses on a ladder over an open basement! Not smart! But after my dad's assessment of the situation and advice to fly away with in the helicopter as I was getting shot up with morphine, I regrouped and tried to take a different path after being released from intensive care.
I have followed the way of sword, the way of the gun and the fist, lived by it just as my father did. But I know that the mind always wins. I believe it. He knew the importance of the mind. But I'm not sure he realized, as I do now, that, like Einstein's imagination of the mind, it is more important than the knowledge of the sword.
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Thursday, September 17, 2020
Friday, September 11, 2020
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