Vivid Memory

Today I suddenly remembered something that always upset me when I was a kid.

I used to always fall asleep in the car on the way home from school with my mom & sister. Usually there would be errands to run before getting home and if I was asleep my mom would take Joy and let me sleep. The problem for me was that I would sometimes wake up and find myself alone in the car. I was still quite young at the time (though old enough to be left by myself for a while) and I remember being alone in that car in a large parking lot with no one around. There would be so many stores around that I wouldn't even know where to start looking should I have been brave enough to leave the car. The clock in our car was digital, so I could never check the time. I would have no idea of how long I'd been alone and no idea when or even if (in my mind) they would be back for me.

My first response was always worry, then usually tears. As I got older though, I stopped crying about it, since I knew it wouldn't bring anyone back to me any faster.

Of course now it's not a problem at all. I've learned how to be by myself. Weird though... I wonder why this came back to me so vividly. I can almost feel the hot tears stinging my eyes again.

A Goal In Mind

I've been discontented lately. So many people have things to celebrate: new relationships, engagements, marriages, new jobs, school acceptances, etc. I don't have any of those (not that I want all of them, but still). My graduation is upcoming, but I'm not even sure when that will happen. Though I am looking forward to spring break.. I mean more the kind of thing that people have earned or worked hard for. What have I worked hard for recently? I don't know.. nothing, really. I need a goal: something to run towards.

Hm, what should it be?

Elegy

This fantastic poem by Dylan Thomas came up in the Francis Schaeffer book I'm reading: The God Who Is There. The author's broad argument is to trace the modern way of thinking - what he calls the "line of despair" - down through different areas of culture. Music and literature is one of the last, and in here it finds exemplary expression.

Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
The darkest way, and did not turn away,
A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On the darkest day, Oh, forever may
He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
Above all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
In the muted house, one minute before
Moon, and night, and light. The rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
(An old tormented man three-quarters blind),

I am not too proud to cry that He and he
Will never never go out of my mind.
All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
Even as a baby he had never cried;
Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
Here among the light of the lording sky
An old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should die
On that darkest day. oh, he could hide
The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.

Until I die he will not leave my side.