How would God respond to making a mistake? Would planets collide or mountains slide into the sea? Or would the ledger of all life simply remain out kilter until a series of small events forced that ledger back into balance again? It's probably the l...
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March 4th
My dear, I have decided to call you Charon. If the million monkeys can type the complete works of Shakespeare, then (surely) I can come up with a single name. So, as of today, March 4th, I will call you Charon. It may make little sense to anyone, but you are now my anchor in life.
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Before moving on, I have one last question about the monkeys. If gravity was pushing that bus down the hill toward you, would you rather be the person who steps off the curb or be the one who remains on the sidewalk and watches what happens? In other words, would you choose to become the story or be a flashing picture in someone else's story? I ask that question now because my next story will take you to the edge of that sidewalk. You'll be right next to all the whirring traffic. But you can trust me not to hurt you. Really you can. After all, we know each other so much better than we did when we first started talking. Me talking to you and you talking to you. And so, I will begin to share with you the real story of my life. As you listen, you may (from time to time) hear the imagined murmurings of a cat buried beneath a pile of other cats. Or maybe the silly drivel that two brothers share beyond the death of one of them. They are just echos, you know. Just echos of pictures that someone as foolish as me has stitched together to make a story.
So please don't let any of that scare you, Charon. After all, these are just words. And it's people like me who try to make them more than they are. But they are wrong. I am wrong. All along, they are just words. And maybe (almost certainly) the words have lies scattered among them like the pebbles and broken shells in the imagined sidewalk we are standing upon. Just think of it like this, I am the one with the mouth. The words you hear are all mine. If I worry that we are getting too close to the street and the whirring traffic, I can do something mythical-musical-magical. I can just make all stories suddenly disappear because my mouth is still able to lie. Lie about the cats. About the drivel. About the two brothers sharing times after death. Good lies, you see, (the best lies of all, in fact) are the ones that last from beginning to end and never veer off course.
Now, before I begin this next story, I'll ask you to imagine the last ice of winter. In most years, that's March ice. Any later and it's just cold April water. Any earlier and it's thick enough to trap so much dirt and so many seeds that it's barely translucent. It's a milky white curtain that separates cold from colder and beautiful from even more beautiful. It's real, undeniable, uninviting ice.
When I was young, I used to skip stones on a lake near our house, but I always waited until summer for that. The lake had a narrow strip of sand at the water's edge. It sloped gently down and I'd dig my feet into the sand and then send stone after stone across the surface. On those days when you see the last ice of winter, I never thought of skipping stones. But that was my mistake because many people skip stones across ice. The Innuits do it all the time. And even more amazing are the Bedouins. They skip flat stones across sand as effortlessly as the wind stirs the individual grains into a cloud. So, I guess I could have actually skipped a stone across the sand and the water and the ice all with one toss. And if I did it just right, the stone could travel forever (maybe even to the end of the universe) or until it bumped into a tree or a planet or got swallowed by a star. So next time (my dear (dear) Charon), I'll do my best to send a stone that goes on forever. And maybe on that day way in the future when you open your eyes and speak to me for the first time, you'll ask if that stone is still skipping its way through space. I look forward to talking to you then.
But for now, my dear one, I will take you to the edge of the sidewalk with the whirring traffic and I will tell you about my brother Crow. If my life started when one child lived and another died, then it became something completely new when I was with Crow. Every moment was predictable and unexpected at the same time. Crow, you see, was my beautiful, unpredictable month of February. When I was frozen in a world of my sad (sad) thoughts, Crow begged me to March Forth into places I didn't know. Although he never said these words, I'm sure he wanted me to be that stone skipping through the emptiness of space searching for what no one ever finds – searching for the million monkeys.
A long time ago when I was very young, Crow told me that we all become one of God's monkeys when we die. He said those words right out of the blue. He said we don't go to heaven or hell or even evaporate into some meaningless soulless nothingness. We just become monkeys typing away so we can help the universe move ahead. Click click click.
