Snippet 1
This blank page has little to tell me, and yet presupposes many things to be told. It’s willing and waiting to hold thoughts, emotions, and spirit. Yet its blankness is daunting, almost a wall that pushes back, back to places swirling in quantum time, without order or structure. I hear voices, repeated words that have leaped fifty years in an instant, voices that have been silenced in death, reminding us they live in our personal time warp.
Today I read the obituary of an old friend, George, a person I had not seen in more than fifty years but who lived large in my cranial closet. His obituary was filled with all the appropriate data: his date and place of his birth, where he taught, when he retired, who survived him, a factual snippet of his life.
It never mentioned the time as teen agers when we gathered in his home to party on a Friday night. His mother had gone to visit her sister for the weekend and left him a note. Being a smart ass teen, he read the note aloud to us. In it she told him what she had left in the refrigerator for him and his dad, reminded him to pick up after himself, and finished the note with the following statement: Now that you have read your note aloud to all your friends and you are all laughing, I forgive you. This incident happened long ago and recalling it never fails to make me smile. Their relationship was filled with love, humor, and honesty. It inspired me.
At another Friday night gathering at George’s house, he gave us each paper and crayons. Unable to find the time to visit with children before the assignment’s due date, he instructed us to pretend we were grade school children and draw pictures for his education course at Montclair State Teacher’s College. I was supposed to be a four year old. While we howled and laughed for several hours, sharing our creative expressions, we laughed harder the following week when George reported that his professor found some of the drawings less than believable and even absurd. How could I forget the arrogance of our teenage years?
Obituaries rarely capture the profound and subtle snippets of a life, those experiences that give new breath to all of us. Who would we be without them? Who would any one of us have been without those Friday nights at George’s home? At the least we are a compendium of experiences in cyclical motion, a centrifuge of sorts, and most obituaries are nothing more than foam on a beer, covering a dense processed liquid below.
In my own cyclical process, I have filled this blank page with a snippet.