I'm Grateful

A week ago, I clutched a handful of photographs close to my heart and grieved for what was and will never be. I’m just like that. I carry within my genetic code a melancholy gene.

Not for a moment did I consider that this private act and that soliloquy could ripple through the ether to rouse a bevy of angels-in-waiting. I am reminded, time and again, that my world is peopled by angels. Still, I’m no less surprised each and every time.

I’m not one to question the how’s or why’s of magic or miracles.
I greatly prefer awe to certitude. And I am truly awed by the warm hearts and kind souls who took the time to offer their commentary and personal notes. Better still, I came to find your respective sagas, the recounting of heartaches more fearsome than my own...yet, told with such grace, good humor and optimism. It does a heart good
to know it is not alone. It does a soul good to laugh again.

I am a most fortunate man in that countless strangers have come to my rescue whenever I’ve been lost at sea. I’ll never know why. Is it because a drowning man will grab at any hand (whether offered or not), or is there a collective goodness…a cosmos filled with unwitting guardian angels? I prefer to think it’s the latter.

Blanche DuBois was on to something when she said: “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

So have I, Blanche…so have I.

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Some thirty years ago, when I lay sprawled, a bloody mess, after my first divorce, Sara came to my rescue. She was considerably older and far more accomplished than I. She took one look at my bloodshot, zombie eyes and clucked. Then clucked again, and took me under wing. Well…she did quite a bit more than that. She ravished me.
A good old-fashioned, rollicking, toe-curling ravishment is powerful medicine.

She single-handedly lifted me to my feet and sent me on my way.

* * *

Funny, just the other day, the Poet Princess of Oz asked if I would ever post another poem of mine. “Not likely,” I replied. Offering my doggerel to a poet is akin to offering chicken-scratch to a calligrapher. Here’s living proof, I guess, that I’ve still got a lot more gnothi-seautoning to do…but this poem, decades old, resonates within me once again:

Especially for Sara

Sometimes the boy
Gets down and drunk
And crazy
But warm hearts
Save him from a fall

Sometimes he spends
Nights thinking
His pain will crack the sky
Finds braver hands
Stretched waiting

Boy broods, boy laughs
His pockets full of questions
Emptied at their touch
Boy writes this poem
His way of prayer
For those who make
Him whole again

* * *

Two months ago, I wrote:

“I feel as if I’m some ancient navigator who looks to the heavens to chart his course, only to find all the stars have drowned in the sea.”

It’s been a long night, my friends, a very long, dark and lonely night.
I know that, tonight, when I turn my gaze towards Heaven, I shall see stars…

* * *

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