What changes us? What makes a real, real difference? What makes the call such a difference-maker, How many of us dread the call? The living on Antarctic-Ice-Tuesday morning call, the one where brokered splinters freezes the connection between you and the caller not unlike Batman having gentle conversation with Mr. Freeze. Frigid moments, numbing moments that can't or most certainly won't be forgotten.
And every person who receives the call seizes like a victim phoned by dread itself, dressed like the Iceman, made up like a Siberian headed to the unknown.
The answer is all. Everyone. Every one. Each person who has received the call, has been given the call, has changed, been changed, suffered the chains of the afflicted. Difference was the moment, the sedative, the juice poured stiffly into the cup of change.
We dread the call like we dread the diagnosis like we dread the cough, the fever, the pathology report, the college grade itself. We dread the answer, even though we wait so very impatiently. We dread the credit report, the answer, the question. We dread the moment, the day, the time. My good and loving God we do. We dread ... and then it's on, and then it's over. Honest to God himself, the call for some changed everything.
Oh, the moment made the difference, and clearly I associate the moment with the cold, but it goes beyond that with tapes and measures and paper piling up on the dirty streets. But there's more to dread than just the call. We dread not being allowed to dread any more. Dang it, we do.
Oh, as we get older, it occurs to me, we dread the truth.
We dread the discovery.
We dread the day, the night, the, the, the time when nothing will ever, ever be the same. And we know it like we know that ol' death and taxes thingamabob. We know it.
We dread the quiet.
We dread foghorns blowing deeply in the dark.
We dread driving cars on rainy street.
We dread honesty, with a dose of dishonesty.
We dread losing, winning for no reason, relationships that don't work, and a few that do.
Dreading begins the freezing process where we stiffen unto incapacity, where the pain begins as if there was always a plan, but the plan squeezed to must, then at some point without knowing it, we leave being us and become, well, someone or something else. And no pushing, shoving, willfulness as hard as Arctic ice on a below-zero Thursday will have an impact. It just won't. It is the second of time in long, lonely lives. The call is the goodbye, and whether or not your were close, that single moment is notched on your personal iPhotos forever and a day.
I got the call on a Monday morning 21 years ago. I got another call on a Tuesday morning after having left the scene to drive home for a while. Mary got the call all those years ago, and she got another yesterday evening. Shanna, the same. Heck, she called me with the associate call. Mrs. Anita's family got the call yesterday ironically enough. There was plenty to pass around yesterday, so we did.
The calls come as often as the blaze of a campfire, with as many teeth as a watchdog dog and as wet as drops on a rainy day Monday. How we deal with the calls tell us a lot. Lynard Skynard dealt with the call by producing music about the call. Buddy Holly dealt with the call by letting the music die. We live and we die with the call in very different ways.
We get the calls, all of us humans, in a drafty and daffy fault, and we shuffle the deck, walk our minds through easy times and try, try, try to let the grace of a loving God slide down us one more time again. Try. Contradict those two harsh lovers, inevitability and inescapably, with a slap of sanity and a side-order of practicality. We try, all the while understanding we don't really have answers to the call or anything else of importance.
I could write about what I knew about him, about how losing him was as inevitable as heat in a Southern Summer. We knew this to be a stone cold fact. I could spring fully loaded with lines of crafty wisdoms and such, writing about what I know to be deep truth, talking about what I have learned from scripture and from school, from life and maybe from death itself. I could write those things, though the script would be a short one, I'm afraid.
But on a long, cold winter's day, with the call still fresh as a wound, I think I'll just let the sun come riding in like a remedy to captivity.
It's all right. It's all right, I'll say to the caller. The smile is returning to the faces, I'll sing to a quickening tune. It seems years since it's been here, but Jude won't make the call worse only better. The pain and suffering remains, but the pain won't. Not always. No.
The call be damned. Maybe we'll see you again some day, Mark.
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