Privileged, big hair, white boys with

a pronounced Southern drawl stand

behind the House podium talking

about waste and glut and a bloated

food stamp program.  They say

their vote to slash the program that

feeds vulnerable children, the elderly

and handicapped to about 85% of

the program without mentioning the

85% is totally appropriate.  The only

thing totally outrageous (Would it be

too much to say racist sob, privileged,

big hair, white boys?) is for them to stand

there pontificating while the vulnerable

suffer. The only appropriate thing is for

those privileged, Southern white boys

with the big hair to become part of the

85%. And then just listen to them whine

for the black tit of their nannies. Let

them suck on a dry tit for a while and

see how loud those envious, mostly

impotent, jealous baby boys scream.

For the longest time after his loved one died,

he couldn’t see any colors.  It was as if

life was bereft of good and God.  Then

he remembered seeing things in

color and, in that moment, he

cried the cry of deep

gratitude.  

For ever so long, he couldn’t laugh a real

laugh. Then one day right in

the midst of it, he realized

he was laughing a

genuine laugh.  

He didn’t cry.  

He just

enjoyed

the

laugh. 

Sometimes, he still gets really sad,

but now he still sees the colors

in the midst of his sadness

and he knows he will

laugh a real

laugh

again. 

Just the thought of another really

bad joke sent by e-mail from

the Texas friend who helped

him see the colors

makes him smile

in that very

moment.

And once again he is overwhelmed

with gratitude for bad jokes

and the rich colors

of friendship.

She said the words were said so quietly

that no one else should hear, only the intended….

But there were many at the party who politely

diverted their eyes and with pursed lips pretended

not to have heard the hurtful words spoken in haste

which once out were irretrievable words

to a lover who she thought was no longer chaste,

and realizing that she had been overheard

turned, spun and made it for the door post-haste.

“…God is light and in God is no darkness at all,” I John 1:5b.

“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God

abides in us and God’s love is perfected in us” I John 4:12.

The physicist states that we would not

know that there was pure light if it did

not fall upon an object. Without the

greens and blues and yellows and reds

we would not know that there even is a

source of light that gives birth to the ob-

jects upon which it falls and we only see

the objects because of the lack of other

colors in the spectrum in each object. So

to know the un-see-able light we must see

all the colors and all the colors must come

together in the rainbow and so when we

see the rainbow, that which the light falls

upon spread out across the spectrum of life,

we see all that we are with our own dark-

ness in the splitting of the light and affirm

that there is a light source that we cannot

see but which gives us the radiance that

we are and in seeing that radiance in

ourselves, we see the otherwise un-see-

able in each other. We see God. We see

love for ourselves and for all the other

colors of the rainbow. We can see Jesus.

He has color for us to see. He has dark

brown curly hair and black eyes and olive

skin. In other places he has blond, wavy

hair and piercing blue eyes. And else-

where he wears the multi-colored robe

of Joseph and has black skin. Some say

he wears buffalo hides and moccasins

and while he has little body hair, he has

magnificent flowing black locks. He has

Mary Magdalene’s red lips and His mother

Mary’s green eyes.  He has the bright

wonder in his eye that Jonathon and David

had when they looked at each other. He

has the grey knowing eyes of the Buddha

and the bright laughing white teeth of

Confucius. He is God to us and he says

that we, too, are as gods. He is one of us

so he isn’t pure Un-see-able light, but he

has enough of the light of God in him,

so when we see Jesus, we see through a

window into the heart of God and into

our own hearts.  Jesus loves the little

children, all the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black or white, they

are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the

little children of the world and we know

the Un-see-able Light.

He looked over the balcony

and gazed down at the golden fish.

They glanced up with a hungry

look as if to reveal a sincere wish.

The cute carp puckered their lips

as if to give him a big kiss

if only he would toss them

many fresh fish food sticks.

He did and watched water 

that foamed and boiled.

Then once seductive carp

swam away a little spoiled.

No pun intended, but when

those fish pucker,

he always feels like a golden

fish sucker.

Sonar blasting, pulverizing,

beating through skin to

organs, blunt force

trauma

to our cousins the

Dolphins and Whales and

perhaps something a

little closer.

From where?

Why?

Technological hunting of

primordial sea hunters?

An underwater Bigfoot?

Orcas evolving from wolves?

Bears evolving into Orcas?

Apes evolving into Mermaids?

A Freudian yearning for

the womb’s salt or

erupting volcanoes forcing

ancestors into the sea

forming webbed

fingers and toes

over thousands and thousands

and thousands of years

like Labrador Retrievers

in a much shorter time?

Fish die, spears float and

body bags are carried

away quickly,

surreptitiously,

to places unknown to

those standing by

or watching while filming.

Underwater screams of dying

Dolphins and Whales

followed by complex

shrieks of other creatures.

Hundreds of beached

whales no longer cry

for help; they just rot

in the sand.

They aren’t

talking.

Around the twenty year anniversary of

the death of his wife at forty-nine –

the woman he knew from the

time they were fourteen years of age

and threw hay at each other on a

church youth group hayride

and were married twenty-six years,

he would get weepy especially

when he talked to his kids –

a soon to be forty-five year old man

and forty-year old woman.

Upon hearing their

voices over the phone he would have

to choke back tears. He watched

Pal Joey on Turner Classic

Movies and melted with Bewitched,

Bothered and Bewildered which

his mother used to hum to

a Montavoni recording.  Unlike his

father, he was always a sucker

for a musical. He is

a happily married man who had just

celebrated the eighteenth

wedding anniversary

with his wonderful, widow wife. He

knew he wasn’t getting over

the loss, but he was getting

through it as was his wonderful, widow

wife getting through her own

personal grief in her own

way. Sometimes they talked about it and

sometimes he sings the lyrics or hums the tune

about his wonderful, widow wife:

If they asked me, I could write a book

about the way you walk and whisper and look.

I could write the preface on how we met

so the world would never forget,

and the simple secret of the plot

is just to tell them that I love you a lot.

Then the world discovers as my book ends

how to make two lovers of friends.

He and his elementary school buddies slipped through the broken fence of  the 128^th  and Halsted Street drive-in theater just behind LuArt’s Drive-In famous for their Italian sausage sandwiches. They shoved the slats aside, came in and put them back in place.  They sat on the hard stones in front of the cars in the darkness just beyond the light of the screen.  They watched Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood kissing splendorously on soft lush grass but as he sat on those hard stones, he couldn’t stop thinking of Brigitte Bardot, her pouty lips and perky breasts from last week’s movie.  The boys got some popcorn at the concession stand and when they couldn’t stand the hard stones on their butts any longer they slipped back through the fence, replaced the slats and headed to Jack’s house for the rest of the Friday night pajama party where they would dance to Elvis Presley songs played on Cliff’s cool, little, green, portable 45 rpm record player.

Eavesdropping on

university grads

in the next

National Lakeshore

campground site,

the very best

campground in the

entire state accord-

ing to those

who gathered at the

dump site to fill

up on fresh

water, he heard them

say that some

particular

grad school student

from back in the

day, who was

an absolute genius,

first in his class

fellow

of whom everyone,

including them of

course, was

jealous, just bombed out

on life, two, three

marriages

maybe more. The

National Lakeshore

campers who

didn’t bother with state

parks then turned

their attention

to religion, at which

point, he tuned out

and turned

up the sound on the

IPR Interlochen

classical

music station and

listened to a

particularly

sweet, little piece by

the French Impress-

ionist

Claude Debussy

while sipping a par-

ticularly

dry, light, fruity

little Pinot

Gris

and watching embers 

burn down in

the pit

after he had cleaned out

wet, soggy cigarette

butts,

charred, partially melted

styrofoam cups and

beer cans.

He stood at the commode in his little, egg-shaped RV at a state park in Northern Michigan and recalled walking half a block away from his grandparents’ home in a nice neighborhood on the far South-side of Chicago sixty years ago. He needed to pee and found a bush in that busy neighborhood and hoped no one would notice his eight-year-old back while he faced the bush with his arms arched downward curving toward his fly and his legs separated much like his pose behind the curtain in the camper.  Grams’ and Gramps’ are long gone as is the house in what is now a devastated neighborhood.  He recalled his favorite cousin falling on the front steps of the family church near his grandparents’ house and breaking her arm.  She now lives most of the year in Door County, Wisconsin and is a retired parish nurse.The church is still there; the congregation has changed completely but Jesus’ work of doing justice, proclaiming peace, healing the wounded and walking humbly with God in the old neighborhood continues.