Week 7 The Fix Christmas It is I
Today is overcast but mostly sunshine and brisk 57 degrees feels like 64 degrees. Figure that the temperature is lower, but the effect temperature feels higher. The Fix! Sitting here silently, the observer reflected inwardly.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath and exhale slowly and imagine I am on the bank of the Dead Sea.
I can smell and taste the saltwater on my lips, and I am watching the kids playing just floating with absolutely no effort. The buoyancy of your body makes you a living flotation device.
I get up and just sit in the water and begin to drift off past the markers. I close my eyes for a few minutes and open them again and the people look like ants.
Now, meditation, deep thought and reminiscing centers in one place and my life become the movie. A single seat for the audience of one. I see my childhood. The reenactment is vague I really can’t remember because I blocked it intentionally it was painful.
I moved on to about eight years old I loved hanging with my grandfather he worked the hell out of me and never paid me a dime. But we shared a two-piece wing snack from KFC and a Dr Pepper. He would give me a wing and a sip of the Dr. Pepper and he would always say “Save the last drink for me.”
Then I switched to fifteen, I fathered a daughter in ninth grade, my life changed, I was never the same. I could not convince my girlfriend to go to summer school. My daughter was born in February. She dropped and never returned, I literally begged her to come back, she never did.
She was devastated, ashamed and couldn’t understand the reality of giving birth to a child at such an early age.
Tuned in to eighteen I met my now wife, we married and for forty-eight years we have two daughters, one son, three granddaughters and four great-granddaughters. The failing vision that was the image of an ant is now a blur.
I panicked and began to swim back to the shore as closely as I got the clearer the vision became. Then I asked myself if only life worked the same way. I could go back and reverse the pain of my first daughters’ life and perhaps she could have had a better opportunity to live a better life. Maybe her life could be less painful and disappointing.
In 2024 she became ill and one day I was sitting with her because I never stopped loving her, my wife knew that the love was not lust but pure and undefiled. That day I told her I have never stopped loving you and she said I know because I never stopped loving you either. We held hands and smiled at each other. She passed three days later.
I funeralized her and did a walk down memory lane and introduced the beautiful, intelligent, charismatic, fun loving fifteen-year-old lady most never met. They only knew the adult. I told the story that she always called me a mother-f*****, and I told them one day I dissected her term of endearment and discovered she was right.
I was the father of her child, and she was her mother. We did have relations, I then realized it wasn’t meant to be demeaning. This was her description of my role. The church couldn’t stop laughing for a moment they forgot they were at a funeral. That’s the way she would have wanted her funeral to be! “THE FIX CHRISTMAN IT IS I”
