Summer turned off hot that year. For some reason he did not hate it as much as he hated other hot summers.
He noticed things seemed brighter to him that summer. The green grass pushed up by the unpredictable white outs of the winter went brown by the Interstate in May but even the brown preened for him, he thought. The grass stood up in the hot Northwestern wind shooting in over endless miles of prairie, between countless mesas and through a thousand arroyos, leaving the infinite Anglo grassland of Kansas and Nebraska, to spend itself in the spicier Latin topography of Texas.
The wild flowers did not last but they never did. The bluebonnets were disinterested from the beginning. The bluebonnets paid more attention to the Indian Paint Brushes that year, as if the perennial starring role weighed too much on them.
He spent some time thinking about love and hate. He knew the people in the world who hated him. Sometimes he even knew why they hated him, though he thought they did not know.
Love is a less flexible emotion than hate, he thought. The people who hated him needed the elasticity afforded by hate, so that they did not need to reform their own character. They could welcome persons, grow to abhor them, discard the once favored and declare a new beginning, which was really just a return to the first step in the hate-cycle.
Love, inflexible affection, unconditional hope, would not allow such behavior. The haters had to choose the softer emotion, hate, so they could stay the way they were and appeal to their empty conscience.
"The world suffers," he thought that summer, "because it so often a place where the strong are not good and the good are not strong."
He dabbled in humility as the mornings got warmer and the evenings longer. He did his running in the misery of the afternoon, when there was no air to breathe. His only companions were the grasshoppers he stirred up along the way. The sun bore down to light his path, no suggestion of darkness available to confuse his aging eyes, no clouds able to intimate a shadow of turning. He ran, gasping heavily to take in the dusty air and hit the wall before he even started to sweat heavily.
He decided, for then, that humility must be the second cousin of honesty, for it was when he spoke most openly that his audience echoed subdued, thoughtful responses. Their responses included all the human sounds of humility; the fearful sound in a child's heart when he first realizes his parents are not always right, the regretful sound a woman makes when she understands how deeply her momentary rejection wounds her man, the sharp, stabbing sound a man makes when he understands he must be a man now and forever because he is in a place where a child will not do.
All these sounds he heard from his listeners when he spoke to them as honestly as he knew. The inflexibility of love, full of severe mercy, elicited humility, so he decided humility must be related to honesty, at least some, if distantly.
Recent Comments