For a Man, There’s an Order in Life
(Page 2 of 3)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
by James Opie, from Parabola
The left rear axle of my Chevy broke when I was close to Barnesville, so with a hot summer sun overhead, I walked the rest of the way. On the edge of Barnesville a man named Walter, who wanted to be helpful and to have someone to talk to, joined me and we walked all the way to the front porch of John’s family home.
RELATED CONTENT
Lost John didn’t seem at all lost in his hometown. I had never seen him so relaxed. We walked to the town’s auto wrecking yard, which smelled of summer weeds and warm grease. John talked to the owner, who pointed to the corner of the lot. Within 20 minutes, John held the part we needed in his greasy hands.
Then he called a local mechanic, who sent his wife over to pick us up. John didn’t seem to notice how attractive this woman was. It was hard to take my eyes off her—such a remarkable combination of purity and sensuality. At the repair shop, she kissed her husband on the cheek before going into the office. It wasn’t a habitual peck. She kissed him. She stepped away and John thanked her for the ride as she looked back for an instant and waved, walking through the office door.
The mechanic said if everything went as expected, it would take half a day to get my Chevy going again—plus about $90.
Walking with John back to his parents’ home, I asked him if they knew he had taken LSD. He said that he talked with them about everything. They just listened. His father, whom he called Oldie, never, in John’s words, “cast a judgment.”
I mulled this over silently, thinking about my father. As if he could tell what I was thinking about, John stopped walking on the blacktop road and turned to me. “Oldie always says, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ He says, ‘If you want to make an old turd smell, just poke at it a little.’ Jim, if you could let your dad be, he wouldn’t eat on you so.”
When we arrived back at the family home, there on the porch was Oldie himself. John’s father shook my hand, looking into my eyes with kindness. After introductions, John surprised me by going straight into the heart of the dilemma. This must have been part of an ongoing conversation between son and father.
“Dang it, Oldie,” he said. “It’s an infinite conundrum. It stands to reason that the universe is unified. But how? You’ve got all this positive force, all this good over on one side, and all of the negative force, evil or whatever you want to call it, on the other side. Energy, matter, space. Male, female. Everything’s in motion. Attracting, repelling. And time itself, instantaneous, without change, but always moving, and maybe never moving at all. Oldie, there’s got to be a way to resolve all of this, to balance it. There must be! It’s all got to be one!”
Thrusting his hands with outspread fingers into the air, John stamped one of his feet on the floor of the porch in a way that I had seen many times.