Monday, March 10, 2014

Living comes in

Many years ago, my father had a trailer, an old working man's home-away-from-home. He bought it and used it like a was a band aid on a bloody wound. It smelled like it was a very large slab of bacon.

How does it feel?
To be on your own?
With no direction home?
A complete unknown?
Like a rolling stone?

My father was in the construction business, an iron worker, when I was in my very early teenage years. I recall him dragging his "home" down the interstate behind his truck like it was a play thing. It wasn't for playing, though. It was home, a beat up old home. He would hook it up, and off he would go. He worked in little towns and he drifted into much larger ones, even banging iron outside of New York City at one point.

At that time of this story, I would guestimate it being 1966, my father was working in Vicksburg, Miss., a tiny town high up on the bluffs of the Mississippi River that had been planted like so much corn. He was helping build houses, putting in the iron rebar in the wet concrete foundations of new houses. Too, he helped build the new bridge across the muddy river that gives the state its name. And at one point that summer, somewhere around that time, he was knocked off that dang bridge, like paper in a 'Sippi summer wind.

Dad has been gone since 1989, dried out from the cancer that ate him like a man chewing on some smoked ribs, and truthfully all I remember of him and his work was how much I would have disliked doing it. From what I recall, it was an unbearably hot occupation, and it would tear you up at times, scraping knuckles bear and turning plenty of your joints wrong way abouts. but he strutted across the iron, high and low, like there was no danger, and no difficulty at all. I thought him crazy, then and now.

I remember his worn musculature, sagging skin and wasted moments, circles of purple stacked up like winter's cord wood. I recall winter's white on his sideburns, age and memory loss coming together like defensive players banging running backs on Friday night football lights, and I remember many of his friends who were living in hotels or (as he was) working out of small trailers like the Beatles were right about there being eight days in a week. Oh, he and his friend would ride into towns on a wobbly Monday morning (or even late Sunday evening) and park those trailers at any number of the small, smelly trailer parks in the old, dirty town before they would race away again on Friday's when their work week was complete -- like a frozen ice tray, strings of completion setting on a fiery goodbye, the workers filing the week in spiritual folders.

Life goes out, living comes in like the tide on a week of work.

 Ezekiel, the prophet writes, "On the day you were born, no one cared about you. Your umbilical cord was not cut, and you were never washed, rubbed with salt, and wrapped in cloth. No one had the slightest interest in you; no one pitied you or cared for you. On the day you were born, you were unwanted, dumped in a field and left to die. But I came by and saw you  there, helplessly kicking about in your own blood. As you lay there, I said, 'live!' And I helped you to thrive like a plant in the field. You grew up and became a beautiful jewel."

There is beauty in life, isn't there?

There is life in beauty.

Life goes out, living comes in.

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