The man hobbled down the snowy,

icy sidewalk with tripod footed cane

in hand. Ready to cross the street to

my car and the waiting Chocolate Lab

in the back seat who looked at me

longingly, I said, “Be careful.” He

said, “You bet.” As he turned to enter

the restaurant, he said, looking

blankly ahead, almost as if on auto-

matic pilot, “I was in a terrible auto

accident.” It’s what you do. You just

blurt it out, keep telling the story over

and over until you get it straight or

right, your right, anywhere, anytime;

why not an icy street to a stranger?

He didn’t say it for me; it was for the

man with the tripod cane, but it’s

what I knew; what I remembered.

It is what I am an expert in. It was

like riding a bike. It all came back

flooding my brain instantly. It was

then I recognized the stooped

figure for the noble prince, the

knight in shining armor, he who

rode the white horse, the one

who ever and always sat next

to Arthur at the round table, the

keeper of the faith, the one cry-

ing in the wilderness, the pacifist

follower of Jesus fighting for the

underdog, fighting for justice.

And then the unexpected, horr-

ific hit him like a car crashing

head on into his headlights leav-

ing him in the shock of the death

grip of utter darkness while wheels

spun in the flashing red lights  with-

out touching pavement. His wife of

nearly sixty years had been killed

in the head on crash. My late

wife had died in twenty-four hours,

twenty-one years ago on a hot,

sunny, summer’s day in Florida of

a cerebral hemorrhage crashing

through her brain. We hugged,

shed tears, and remembering all

those who had been there for me,

I asked him to have lunch just to

talk and perhaps, not perhaps, but

of course, cry in our warm, thick,

comforting late autumn soup.

Serendipity sounds too simple; synchron-

icity? Perhaps providence happened on

a snowy sidewalk on a Saturday in November.

Yesterday, his wife said,

“Darling, you don’t look

a day over sixty-nine.”

Yesterday, he wasn’t, but

today he’s seventy and

his wife said, “Darling,

you don’t look a day

over seventy,” and then

added, “but because you

have now successfully

made it through seven

decades and you have

entered the eighth (Is

that math correct, he

wondered. It just seem-

ed that seventy was bad

enough.), it’s time for

you to stop buying bot-

tom shelf vodka, espec-

ially on such an histor-

ically significant occas-

ion as this.”

The “debris” of war …

like some abandoned airfield,

there the parts lay, leftovers,

and no one knows what to do with them.

Get out the bunting, wave a few flags,

blow the trumpets,

let the brass parade around

with heavy metal chests,

war ribbons bedecked ….

America the Brave,

hats off to the brave soldiers,

and what about those women and men

in those huge buildings

on the other side of town?

Well, let’s hurry on, shall we?

Cleveland, Spring, 1969.

It wasn’t post 9/11; he could

“Walk right in, sit right down

Daddy, let your mind roll on,”

at the Veterans’ Hospital, though

he didn’t sit down. He roamed

floor to floor, ward to ward.

He doesn’t remember rooms.

Twenty-four, a seminarian,

following a different call from

the soldiers who were sent to

avenge the bombing in the

Tonkin Gulf that never happen-

ed; they didn’t know that. He

protested the war in Vietnam,

but not Korea, being too young,

but he saw veterans from that war,

too and a few from WWII, too.

But mostly eighteen and nineteen

year olds who left body parts in

some swamp in Southeast Asia

who sat in wheelchairs or lay in

beds covered in sweat soaked

sheets and blood stains. Scruffy

bearded boys smoking their lungs

out in gunboat gray walled wards with chipped

paint bed frames, aluminum bedpans

and half full portable urinals hanging from

bed frames. Some sat in

wheelchairs staring blankly ahead

waiting for their diaper to be changed,

calling out meekly or screaming

bloody murder for an orderly.

Some sat by windows watching

spring rain, budding trees, grass soon

to need mowing and cars parked by

the curb. Were they thinking about

home, mom, sis, the dog? Maybe

it was best not to think of home, a

place from which they escaped in the first

place; maybe they thought of driving

one of those curbed cars somewhere,

anywhere but where they were or may-

be eventually they would be like the

old men pushing themselves around

or hobbling around wards and floors

for years, men who left body parts

in Korea, France, Germany or may-

be, just maybe, if they were lucky,

real lucky, the place that always and

ever beckons, Rodgers and Hammer-

stein’s Bali Hai just after they kissed

Liat, Bloody Mary’s beautiful

daughter.

Even before he had

hands laid on his head

consecrating him for

ministry, even back to

high school when he

preached the Youth

Sunday sermon and

his pastor said, “You

have the gift, son,”

he wished only to

follow Jesus. All

these years and four

denominations later,

he knows he means

little to nothing to

the institutions, but

he means some-

thing to himself

and, if truth be told,

it is nice to get a

birthday card each

year from the pension

board.

They pulled up to the stoplight

right behind a large truck.

The wife first noticed and

innocently read writing on

the back of the truck,

“Virbrational Deburring.”

The husband, with a sheepish

grin, said, “I think I could write

a poem about that.” The wife

said, “The light has changed.

Just move it along, balding

Baudelaire.”

For poetry, too?

Old white guys are in the way?

And I just started….

“Awful, corrupt, political

machinations”

spoke the 81-year-old

philosopher

of ecology and Buddhist devotee,

remarking on

today

then going on to say,

“Young people look, shrug it off

and go on…,”

not just to play,

but play they

do and live without

dismay.

Thank God for naivety

and

innocence we elders do recall

and so necessary.

May

we hope that

the dark horse of

despair, which will

eventually charge

a future day,

will not stay

but be on its

death-filled

destructive

way. Shew,

horse,

shew.

I have written in meter and rhyme

about You, but metaphors escape mine.

Theologians write not in meter and rhyme

but heap words in seemingly infinite time.

Ah, for Rilke’s metaphors so sublime: dark

forest, shimmering herd piercing thine;

such are not about You, but images so divine,

that convey an intimacy of I and Thou,

transcending time.

I sit and listen to the strings of love

expressing the adoration of the cosmos —

must be notes from those who know God above,

those who fly most freely – the heavenly host.

While the notes and bars and symphonic sections,

do lift me to a place beyond this earth,

it is the intimacy of the Divine that beckons

me to linger for awhile in this place of birth,

for surely, that which beckons me beyond

is the source, the energy, the very fabric

of all things in heaven and earth so fond.

What irony that we think we need to pick

between the two, when the two are really one

shown and known for all in God’s precious Son.