well hello again.
i am remembering a time when i was young, the first time i can remember taking a walk in the woods on my own, when we lived in a little nook of spalding county, georgia. this is ancient history for me: i might have been six or seven. reagan era, in politico-historical terms, but do not let me lead you on that i knew anything about that at the time.
walking through our vast three-acre slice of forest, picking wild strawberries, waiting on my mother to come back from shopping. (seems to me i was always waiting for my mother to come back from somewhere, but that’s another topic.) i’d find a tiny little red button of fruit to eat here and there, but not having had much luck, i found more fun in running around kicking up dirt, using a stick to swipe at the cedar fronds, vanquishing what imaginary demons i could muster up, considering i knew very little of evil and even less of what a good and proper response to it should be. i remember looking over at THE DITCH. and thinking, gosh, am i ready for it yet? THE DITCH, of course, being the first great challenge of my life: imagine a rather modest red-clay embankment that started at the roadside edge of our property which swooped down all of ten feet (10 FEET!) to the road below at a forty-five degree angle, at most, and that’s being generous. I had been getting up the nerve for months to take my bike down THE DITCH for weeks, and had spent no little time riding boldly up to the precipice and then losing my nerve at the last second.
it would be at least a year before i crossed that particular rubicon, but it was already on my mind that morning.
it seems to me now that i truly didn’t know how wonderful things were for me back then, but don’t worry, i don’t hold any illusions that if i were to go back to that place, things would add up any differently. the past seems to change the colors of the present, washes out the shadows of fear and regretfulness, and in the end that may be one of the things that makes a man worth the living.
Out of Whole Cloth 