Lances In Darkness

Because we didn’t own a car when I was a boy, I was always thrilled to ride in one. The speed of modern transport has never lost its magic for me, and this perpetual appreciation stems from remembering how it feels to walk to or from home when hot and tired while watching cars purr past with their air conditioning and comfortable bench seats.

I used to play a mental game anytime I rode in a car. I would imagine I had a long, long sword, sharper than the stropped razor’s in R.V.’s barber shop, longer than a vaulter’s pole, extending out the passenger side window. And as we would pass along the smooth roads, my sword would be lopping off all the telephone poles. I do not know why telephone poles drew my attention; I never sliced off trees or man-made structures. Always telephone poles. And in my green mind, I would see them toppling to the earth with heavy, creosote-scented thumps, bearing the gouges and divots of the lineman’s cleats, perhaps festooned with the husks of locusts, looking like pork skins, tumbling along the roadsides with the cleanest, most surgical of cuts.

This morning I drove to work in a heavy fog, and as I made my way down the mountain, scanning for deer or other wildlife, the few cars that passed me coming the other way offered me a new game of pretend. In the mist, our collective headlights looked like solid bars of brushed white metal. Like lances. I imagined that my headlights could knock aside or impale or unhorse (uncar?) the other riders, and as my beams swung across theirs, I could almost hear great clangs and clashes. When I reached the bottom of the mountain and turned onto the road to lead me to the town, I felt like smiling, and I was sure that if I had backtracked, I would have encountered several smoking heaps of vehicles scattered between there and my home, the losing parties to the pre-dawn jousting tournament conducted in the cool vaporous air at sixty miles per hour.

I also used to wonder in my forties what it would look like if every step I had ever taken on this earth were suddenly to glow bright orange, like a warning sticker. The groupings and patterns of Orr footprints in so many places, leading off in so many winding trails, on foreign soil, in airplane aisles and ship’s passageways and even on a few chests and abdomens and faces, like some bizarre postmodern art statement about the unpredictable migratory habits of the bad man who hides behind blue eyes.

***

The heat continues, and if the meteorologists are to be believed, it will be here for at least another two weeks. The leaves at our farm are dry and brown and dropping at a steady rate. In the evenings, with the sun slanting down our driveway, it looks like fall, and my calendar says it is the second day of fall, but it does not feel like it. Except when I step outside late at night or early in the morning, as I did this morning. I sniffed the air and caught a tang in it. I looked up through the swirling fog at the hook of bone called the moon and felt the season settling down on me. But when the knowing ones say “Ninety degrees this weekend!”I can only nod to myself. What’s coming is coming.

***

A friend and I have been having a protracted long-distance conversation about religion and life and reality, and I told him that I have come to suspect that good things are too often corrupted and killed merely by being organized. I’m not the first man to notice that pick-up games among children are an extremely rare thing in these times and that kids are over-organized and over-scheduled in sports and creative activities that bring the parents who sign them up for these things to complain about all the driving and time commitments. In this area, the buckle of the Bible Belt, I am astonished to see kids playing organized sports on public fields on Sunday mornings and afternoons. Do these children enjoy what they’re doing, I wonder?

And do these men enjoy themselves? I wonder to myself when I see men eating up precious time in arguing about and discarding friends over points of belief and doctrine that they’re not even willing to die for themselves. It’s a curious thing. And I say that as someone who has pissed away many a precious hour in vehemently trying to persuade someone of something in which I no longer even believe.

***

Yesterday at lunch,while preparing to stretch out and take a nap in the seat, I heard a wing-beating and scrabble in the tree outside my vehicle. One of my crows had alighted on a branch just inches from me, and because of the angle of light and glare, he could not see me. For a delicious 30 seconds or so, I got to watch him as he looked around and watched the world. He looked to be carved from coal, terrible and beautiful, a harbinger, a  prophet, a familiar, a comrade. Finally, he shot off the branch and flew to somewhere beyond my sight, and I settled down to catch a few winks, feeling blessed to have seen this sinless assassin so close to me.

***

In various stretches of holy words, God tells us that if we love Him and follow Him, He will give us the desires of our heart. And every day lately, I have burned up the air between Him and me with the desire to someday understand the purpose of all this, and for my wife and me to be together on the other side of this life. I believe He hears me, and that He enjoys what I ask for. And it seems that my words to him hang like beams of light in a foggy mountain pass.

~ S.K. Orr