Immigranniversary

On our way back to the car after her piano lessons ...

'You don't like the cold do you daddy?'

'Not really'

30th November 

We walked for an hour to that dingy pub with sawdust on the floor - where above the dull thumping of repetitive percussion fellow immigrants discussed irritable bowel syndrome and axial loading in scaphoid fractures - apparently that's what the NHS wants us for 

On our way back through crunchy frost and that sly black ice - our frozen noses longing for runny days - we talked about the red sauce and the green chilli that comes with Kebabish chicken, three boys who didn't know how to be men, leave alone doctors.

That year, while November grudgingly handed over 9/11 to September, while our collective consciousness became hard wired against swarthy young men with stubbles, we walked on in the snow in ill equipped shoes and heavy jackets. Somehow the cold didn't feel that bad then.

'Daddy, open the car, I'm freezing'

'Of course sweet - sorry I was miles away'

'Silly daddy'

Flipping photons

Achan used to have projection slides - before PowerPoint made it so common place and foolproof.

They had to be made on chart paper, painstakingly proofread and photographed - graphs and all - then developed, clipped and mounted into little hinged cardboard frames, glued in place, numbered and stacked in boxes or slotted into plastic pockets in foldaway sheets.

Before every talk he would practice at home when it was my job to man the little humming battle-green projector - in its mysterious sky blue bag with UNICEF on its side - to drag that cartridge to the left or right whenever he said "next slide please" and also get the right slide in place just in time for his next instruction, with the dot in the top right corner such that when projected,  the magic in that little lens and mirror would flip the photons in the air on their way to the light green wall of our hospital quarters with the exposed wiring and last year's calendar nail holes - the calendar was removed to make space for the image which invariably led to the nail falling out leaving a pit on the wall - and those photons leapfrogged, I am sure with a "whee" and a "woohoo" over the dust motes in the dusk to land right side up on the wall like an army of little spidermen or trapeze artists.

As Achan's talk droned on in the background I was transported into a land where the projector was a little robot camel and we were in a dust storm but this was in outer space and the projector cartridge was my cannon reloading - left first, then right - man all stations as the sirens blare and lock and load - wait for it - fire little robot camel,

 fire

    at 

      will. 

Humanity depends on you.

"Next slide please" said Achan and I was back in my living room as if a secret Google Earth teleporter zoomed in to drop me off from the war in outer space and zoomed out again before he could see anything was amiss.

As I prepare yet another talk in the spare bedroom and two fearless little monkeys climb over me shouting out war cries at the top of their lungs I am reminded of those Sunday evenings when I was part of someone else's hopes and fears - someone I have outgrown in size but never will in stature.

All that matters in the end ...

 ... when my work is done

and my world has slowly folded

in on itself leaving everything

and nothing behind

All that matters in the end ...

when they have flown the nest

and found their own colours

for the sea and a warmer south

All that matters in the end ...

when memories are all but

brief glimpses of a once familiar

landscape caught

in a flash of lightning

All that matters in the end ...

When your hand may not be in mine

When your hand may not be in mine

is that my mind still holds

a single spot of lucid thought

A smile shining from a past

well past

All the rest may be a blur

all my irreverent antics

irrelevant,

but I would still have

 ... all that matters in the end

Freefall

 I think a lot of life is about finding one's own happy medium.

This changes not only from person to person (inter-individual variability to give it a pompous sheen) but also within a person depending on time and place (intra-individual variation).

I read somewhere that if you look at cell turn over in our body, every few years all our cells are replaced and we are a completely different organism. I find this scientifically unsound but nonetheless I think it may well be true for our soul (unscientific as it is to believe in one). It accumulates growth rings and fossilised layers so that one can see what has happened to it over time, but it probably also changes shape and size such that it is unrecognisable from the outside when you stop for a random pitstop on your life's rat race and pick it up for a look, curiously running your battle hardened fingertips over the strangely familiar and yet often alien contours of this thing that resides in you and yet is not you or perhaps is all of you that matters.

And when you do this you feel it's weight - that overused expression which remains a useful descriptor  - the unbearable lightness of being - and this weighs down on you until you figure out what to do with it. Very often what hurts us deeply is something that is hardly visible - that smile which did not form, those fingers that refused to lace in yours with the right measure of temperature and pressure, a whisper in your ear that you waited for in vain - inconsequential really when looked at in the cold light of celestial electromagnetic emissions, but nonetheless still the proverbial last straw that cruelly alighted on the poor beast's spine, breaking it, forcing it to a new plane of existence and down a new unfamiliar dark hole to fall into, drawing yet another growth ring in to the misshapen little lump.

And then one day you decide to slide down the dark hole, scared and yet exhilarated by the sheer unpredictability of your fall from grace - surely this is how that original prodigal son felt as he was cast down from heaven, as he fell at unearthly (and unheavenly I guess) pace seeing the depths of his new dark home rush up in front of him, a part of him might have felt sad and uncared for and unwanted, but surely there was a grain of happiness in him as he looked forward to freedom, however dark and tainted it may be, the terminal velocity buzzing in his ears welcomed him with the whisper he yearned for so long, implored him to find great heights in those new dark depths and he opened his arms accepting the darkness, unknown and scary and reprehensible on first glance and yet strangely filled with that most devious of words - innocently sugar coated on the outside but dipped, soaked in that most enticing of ideas - potential.  For that is what could be, what will be, even what should be - different from the here and the now and so this makes sense as he falls.

For others it is a senseless departure from grace and love and stability and sense, and yet to you it is all of it of course, but also something more - potential, change, chance and who knows, even salvation, for who is to decide that blindness is dark and salvation is light, for it may well be the other way round, who can see through a blind man's eye and how does he separate whiteness from blackness? For these are mere words, hollow, imposed on him by those who will never understand, so he falls happily, freely, wholeheartedly knowing that the world standing by the sideline judging him is wrong in its smug majority...

... on this cooling ball of fire to which we cling selfishly like sticky ugly limpets washed in waves of darkness from all around us, tell me who decides which way is up, tell me who is falling and who is not, for I say to you as you think I fall - Lucifer is ascending and he loves it.