When I was
three or four years old, I’d spend hours each day sitting in a great rusting
metal glider sofa on the screened-in front porch of our house in
Cleveland. I’d rock back and forth,
listening to the squeak of the hinges and watching the light post across the
street disappear and reappear from behind the frame of the screen.
I was
fascinated by the angles and shifting perspective of the window, the line of
the downspouts of the house across the street, the older kids on their bicycles
flashing by, the color of the road matching the roof shingles of the house next
door, the mail slot remaining immobile, except for that one second when the
mailman makes his drop, the low branches of the tree in our front yard moving
in and out of sight as I rocked. I
touched each finger of my hand to my mouth as I rocked, running through the
four fingers on the upswing and the same four fingers on the backswing.
My parents
were a bit concerned about this behavior.
Many years later, when I was in high school, my mother recounted her
concerns to me. She believed, for quite
some time, that I was, to use an archaic term, ‘simple’. And I guess I was, gloriously and without
artifice, simple. It was a great
blessing.
Vestiges of
that behavior remain. I’ve frequently
been called out of my reverie by a friend, or worse, a client who has found me
leaning against a lamp post, my mind completely empty, staring at the opposing
curbs of the street as they converge in the distance, creating order out of the
random arrangement of parked cars, trash bins, parking meters, sign posts, and
swirling paper wrappers, diving birds, rushing cars and ambling
pedestrians. Reasonable explanations do
not come easily to mind in those situations and yet those are the times in
which I feel most decidedly blessed.
I have many
things to be thankful for, but being blessed, if it means anything at all,
cannot be just the collecting of valuable relationships, objects or
attributes. It must be, for me at least,
what Robert Frost describes as the ‘freedom to flash off into wild
connections.’ Or, as he says, ‘that
perfect moment of unbafflement, when no man’s name and no noun’s adjective but
summons out of nowhere like a jinni.’
This may not
be what being blessed means to you, but I know that it doesn’t mean winning the
lottery, having your kid get into Yale, or being a scratch golfer. For me, ‘tis a blessing, ‘tis a gift, to be
simple.