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My high school class reunion happened today. We had lunch at some pizza joint that has a meeting room. It seems a little cheap, but this town is barely more than a village. The most exciting thing to do here is go to the Wal-Mart shopping center. There ain't a lot of eating places to choose from to meet around here. After our meal, our high school star football player offered to have a cookout at his home at our next meeting.
Going to this reunion allowed me to do something I've always wanted to do. I got a chance to recite one of my own poems I wrote a long time ago to these people I was young with. Many of them know I've been a homeless bum with a reputation for not being ambitious. My recitation came off pretty well. I only forgot my lines once, but I picked them up again after only a slight delay,
The delay was probably a good thing. They were upset that my flow was momentarily interrupted because it was going so well. The women begged me to finish the poem if I could, and the men actually remained quiet until I finished. It's unusual that the men didn't stop me because of the attention I got from the ladies.
There is a saying in the Gospel of Thomas that somewhat challenged me to find out if my classmates would allow me to speak my piece:
31 Jesus said, "No prophet is welcome on his home turf; doctors don't cure those who know them."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
The trick is that they didn't realize or understand that I was prophesying or healing them by enchantment. Who knows? I might be deluding myself and calling it macaroni. I've done this for a long ti-me and I'm perfectly aware of whether my rhetoric is having the desired affect or not.
It's not any different than a stand-up comedian knowing whether he has lost his audience or whether his performance "killed." I sorta think I got over despite saying #31. The reason why is that I am is actually as much of a stranger to them as they are to me.
We were children and young adults together. Few of us, if any, knew at that age what would become of us as adults. Very few of us, from all visible indicators, knew ourselves through our own experiences until we actually did become adults.
I didn't really understand what I hoped to accomplish by reciting my poem until I got home a while ago. I'm pretty sure I wanted my classmates to think of me as my own person instead of being the son of one of their favorite teachers, my father. Maybe they'll think of me more as a poet than a supplementary extension of their mentor.
Maybe reciting that poem with my usual success here in what passes for my home town can mean that I don't have to stay here anymore. '-)
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
