Time is never constant, as this past year will attest.
It seems like only a very short time ago that I was remembering Allen’s birthday and here I am again doing the same. He would have been 52 today. “Six years older than dirt” I called him one year, to which he replied absolutely without hesitation: “Hello, dirt!”
I’ll be 46 in less than three months.
Last year a fractional second of a glimpse of a tilted sidewalk in Charlotte Amalie on a travel show on television sent me reeling, bouncing off of long ago memories like so many walls in a mental maze I was just coming out of.
This year I soar above the confusion with a firm grasp on the whip of the kite and the maze is just a garden of hedges down below and the horizon is Over There and Over There and Over There and from here there is no behind me except to take this little bit of time to remember my Yog, my Allen.
The world is not how he left it. Some things are better and some are far worse. My world became less when he left it but I, merely in continuing on, have added so much, aiming for resplendence even as ugly, profligate smallness and intransigent immaturity found its way in from the outside threatening ruin.
But Jubilee is only for those who aren’t dragged down by the past, but it’s not for those who ignore or avoid it either.
We are who we were and who we are and grow to include who we’ll be and it’s that splendor that defies physics and makes us bigger on the inside than on the outside and allows us to accommodate the joyful sorrows of the past, put to rest the ignoble brutalities which victimized us and tried to steal our souls and keep us open to…well, exactly!
Birthdays bring gifts, but Allen was always a gift to me, even on his own birthday.
Even now.