Something Happened to Me

Knock three times and be remembered…

A five-year-old boy walks barefoot in a clear, clean-running stream in suburban Virginia not far from Washington, D.C. The year is 1950. He carries a white enameled tin pail with a red handle, the kind children used to play with at the beach. He’s walking along collecting crayfish, catching them with his bare hands and dropping them in the little bucket. He’s filled with the joy of unspoiled Nature, wholly himself, spontaneous, needing no direction, like the crayfish in the shallow water flowing over sand and shiny pebbles.

Pound me down into the water, brother clown! (He does.) I see the rocks, the trees, the meandering creek.

I hear my mother’s voice calling in the distance for me to come home to the wooden steps of our apartment building, through the screen door into the kitchen, back to “eat your peas” and no returning to the magic world of summer twilight until I do. All alone at the table. Fading cries of children in the punishing darkness. Alone, until the belt.

Standing in the rain at Taos Pueblo, he comes straight for me, three raps on the head. Yesterday on the mesa with a 90-mile view, remembering the boy, an expanding portal opens in my mind’s eye. Today I’m there again, bare feet in wet holy sand. My body shakes with silent, involuntary sobs of recognition. It’s been a long, long time.

Energy. Great, vast, throbbing.

(Put no name to this, just go.)

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