23 years ago

Twenty-three years ago — almost to the day. I think of certain events that transpired in spring while I am trying to meditate in some real and meaningful way on Easter, a day when the message of rebirth and hope is clear to those who listen.

But it is hard for me to listen sometimes, even though deep down in the fallow soil of my soul, the Message and the Word are planted. I long to know that spring will make the seed grow into a sturdy plant reaching up to the sun. Faith and the mustard seed.

Sunshine and birds singing and sweet clover abound everywhere this week at the end of March, normal and timeless, blue skies and hunger for hope. Happiness seeking warmth. The light of day in the tremulous season of birth — and rebirth.

Across the world in the Middle East hope is under seige in the Holy Land. In Palestine and Israel there is fear and dying, and seemingly everlasting enmity. There are chants and mantras imploring the sides to call a cease fire. And a helpless giant keeps pretending it is helpless.

Easter. In suburban back yards and gracious old parks, there are egg hunts and chocolate candy rabbits and pretty Easter baskets lined with trinkets and goodies, bows and ribbons. Smiles of delight adorn young faces on their little treasure hunts. Look, what’s that shiny purple thing hiding in the grass at the base of the tree?

It’s a sunny/cloudy, slightly windy morning, an Easter Sunday morning, and the noble oak tree outside my window is just about fully leafed out and gently tussling with the wind, it’s friend. Dear day, it is already half gone and still I sit and ponder. Writing and pondering, that is. I want to turn off the air-conditoner and throw open the window to this glorious and delightfully mild spring air. But I am glued, inert and momentarily incapable of action, in my chair. Half lost in thought, half awake to realities.

Late March, 1979. The months-long nightmare, the descent to the black pit, is receding, farther and farther back into the darkness from whence it came. The familiar New Orleans streets with their canopy of live oaks, the cracked sidewalks, old and new houses, cinderblock and tidy brick Colonial, a comforting world of equilibrium embraces me as I take long walks on sunny afternoons, past buzzing, blooming ligustrum bushes filled with the sweet scents of childhood. Past azalea bushes in bloom and magnolias and lawn mowers cutting slightly less scented grass. On and on I walk, long walks, to take me to other places. I reach the high earthen levee which corrals the Mississippi River, high with spring flood waters now, higher than the land below that I have just walked on. I clamber to the top of this preposterous levee, maybe 30 feet high and a small mountain in a city that lies below sea level, and I survey the ships plowing through the swirling dark, spring-muddied eddies of that wide and deeply mysterious river spread out before me like an inland sea. I smell the fresh river air. I look down the bend where the large freighters have recently came up from the Gulf of Mexico and distant ports, and I long to be on one of those ships. I dream of distant lands. I sit in the grass and close my eyes and let the unending pain of the previous six months surge away down that same river, joining the flotsam and jetsam, the dirt and pollution and filth that drain away to the sea, there to disperse among the dark blue waters of the Gulf. Gone.

Twenty-three years ago. In spring.