Written with my Thursday night group with the prompts: where did you live? Love, Kennedy to Heathrow, living is a limited-time opportunity, only drowning men can see him, on the way to the funeral, he hadn’t seen her since high school graduation, there are children in the morning, in the midst of all the recklessness, please don’t hit me, now that I don’t have a dad Santa Claus is my god, but now he had a beard that was twice as long, she was fluent in English, sensation, lost at the racetrack
I hadn’t seen Saint Anthony since we graduated high school. “Where did you live all these years?” he asked me.
“I’ve always been a seeker,” I reminded him, “so for a while I lived on a plane from Kennedy to Heathrow. I ate nothing but teriyaki chicken and rice that came on little plastic trays, bags of peanuts, and tiny bottles of vodka. I added orange juice, you know, for the vitamin C.
“Later, I lived on a beach near Big Sur under a lean-to I fashioned out of redwood boughs. I lived with a man who worked as a department store Santa. But it went to his head, all those fatherless boys who treated him like a rock star god. He grew out his beard till it was twice as low as his belt loops, then he bought an electric guitar and went on the road, hitchhiking from coast to coast.
“I lived in the midst of recklessness on the edge of sensation, my face always hot, my hands and feet cold, the air sparkling so I could see only half of the faces of all the children of the morning, drowning in the melted snow river. I was reaching out for Jesus who was walking on the water, but we were losing money at the racetrack, both of us loving a woman fluent in English and Spanish and French and seven dialects from the Ivory coast of Africa.
“Finally I moved into a limo on my way to my Mother’s funeral. I was squeezed in there with my 90-year-old aunt, and a collection of cousins. When we passed the park near our late Grandparents’ house, I told them the story my Mother had told me: there once was a road that ran between the palm trees along the edge of the duck pond. On Saturday nights Grandpa would say, I hear kids speeding through the park again. I’m going to call the police!
But Grandma always said, no, no, don’t do that! It’s Grace and her friends. I hear Grace laughing!
And everybody in the limo laughed because my Mother was tattling on her big sister Grace who was a teenager in the park but was now an old woman in the limo going to her baby sister’s funeral. And I think for a minute and realize, my Mother told the best stories because she was the baby, she was shy and quiet, taking it all in—and she saved it all for me.
“Now,” I told Saint Anthony, “I am the storyteller. I found what I was looking for: not necessarily a happy life, but a good story.”
Saint Anthony pushed back from the table. “Don’t hit me with all this information,” he pleaded. “Remember living is a limited time opportunity. You can reframe your story.”
I rolled my eyes. “How?”
He took my hand. “You are a seeker. Over and over again you have found what you were seeking, but you did not recognize it. You are now, and have always been, a channel for Divine Energy. Love your story. You have come not merely to tell the story, but to love it.”
Photo by Thomas Vogel on Unsplash