He was four years old . . . barely. Boyish innocence was tightly stitched and held fast to a deep zest for living. He was a mosaic of the threads of a splendid tapestry whose fibers were being woven into a soft spirit that reveled in life. I love Corey. I love him for what he is, and what I see in him that I am not. He is innocence untainted and unsoiled, a young boy that catches the essence of living through windows of the soul yet unsullied by life. Splendidly exuberant, he draws in all the energy of life and expels it freely out to anyone who will embrace its gift. He is both a repository of living and the embodiment simplicity. One without the other would dramatically diminish him, as it would any of us.
“I have seventy cents,” he said. Sitting at a red light, I had no idea as to the nature, purpose or rationale of his comments, arising it seemed from the incessant babbling and spontaneity that frequently marks him. “Dad, I have seventy cents.” Attending to the blur and bustle of the marauding traffic that rushed around me, I attempted to placate him, hoping that he would drift on to something else. “That’s nice,” I replied. He was irritably insistent. My verbal pabulum was blatantly insufficient for him. “Dad, I have seventy cents!” His voice was emphatic. I glanced in my rearview mirror and watched him squirming in his car seat, obviously possessing some agenda of great importance to him that was swallowed up in the supposedly greater agendas that dictated my day. Catching my eyes in the mirror, he held out a clenched fist clutching seventy cents and with sordid determination said, “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
What We Miss
I am occupied, attending to the congestion and myriad events around me. The traffic of my life is made up of frustrating red lights, a rare green one, and irritating yellows that flash across a myriad of my intersections. All of the congestion of commerce and career, the snarls of success and the raucous rhythm of rush hour that I embrace as essential and necessary to achievement.
I am caught in the blindness of believing that living life means winning, being horrified that an opportunity missed is an unredeemable loss that creates a permanent setback and lifetime diminishment. I must master life by gouging and gorging myself on its complexities at every opportunity, without having time to savor the tender exquisiteness of its intricacies. Mine is a hoarding of life, rather than a delicate sampling. In and through it all I miss the minute details in the mayhem, the subtleties that are the very essence of the larger things that I gorge and feed upon. In essence, I miss simplicity. “I have seventy cents Dad!” It was a statement of simplicity, and so I missed it.
Crystal blue eyes and romping blonde hair, his small hands cradled two quarters and two precarious dimes. They were clenched so firmly that his tiny fingers turned shades of red and white; holding them valiantly in front of him with arms outstretched. His face was chiseled with a squared hint of boyish determination, the manifestation of four year old eyes apprehending the core of life and living when I could not see it. His perceived with a crystal clear soul what really mattered when all I saw was an annoying red light and thick traffic. “Dad, I have seventy cents!”
And then I saw it. Quite accidently it caught the barest edge of my mind. Out of the corner of my eye, from the farthest fringes of my life it stirred. The simple intruded upon my chosen world of complexities. A solitary figure sat on the margins of my wild world, passing by me except for a four year old attuned to the wonder of simplicity, hoping that the din surrounding me might ebb just enough to catch a glimpse. I finally saw it.
Scrawled by an unsteady hand across a tattered piece of discarded cardboard, stained and bent were a handful of words. The edges of cardboard were torn, frayed and mutilated, much like the man who held
