Soulful Muse

It’s the piece you break off before eating the rest yourself. Is it that tiny piece that temporally satisfies an anxious dog beneath your kitchen table or is it your pathway back home?

It’s those small morsels of bread tossed behind you that mark the leaving of your beginnings and parents behind, but with a careful trail that leads you back home. A morsel of bread. Wheat. Sustenance. The morning smell began your days and its memory-smell lives within you until the end of your days.

If you’re young, it’s time for those morsels to path you toward an unknown future or as memory-morsels to lead you back home if you’re older and unemployed.

Throughout life we can lose our way, our way may lose us, or those we love leave. But it’s those darn morsels that intrigue me. Slung over our heads as she smugly leaves or sadly as an important job leaves me. Those morsels are remainders of a place, a welcoming place, the beginning place; the place called home.

I lost my job and she’s off to college. My tossed morsels are long spoiled and hers are freshly pitched over her shoulder.

For a parent to “let go” of a college-age daughter is second only to her being sent into a war zone – only this time it’s the battle of life. It’s a parent’s last wave at the college’s entrance or perhaps an invisible hug (because “Dad, everyone is watching us!”) – or looking for meaningful work in work’s twilight.

It’s those persistent but never present morsels that bring us both back. Hers in her own time and mine in mine. Mine is the easy one. I know about the morsels and the way back home because I read the “Hansel and Gretel” story. She will live that story without having read it because those morsels don’t disappear – they only lead back to where that morning smell continues to live and is so often taken for granted – home.

Books by Fr. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.
Available at Amazon.com:
“Soulful Musings,” reflections on the Catholic Church and American culture
“Living Faith’s Mysteries,” reflection on the Christian seasons of
Advent, Christmas/Lent, Easter
“Spiritual Wonderings and Wanderings,” reflections on the Catholic Church and American culture

to the other kids when touching a tree or traffic pole. Everyone knows what that means.

Whatever game was being played on a warm summer night had this built-in safety that stopped all the action of the neighborhood kids’ game for that person. “Glue” meant that I’m now protected from all the follies that this night involved.

One hand around the tree or pole took you out of the action as long as your hand was around…”but what if it’s just my pinky finger on the tree or pole?” tempts the young one’s fate. Even pinky is respected by everyone because tree or pole contact remains.

“Release that pinky and see what happens,” I’m sure they were all thinking. If that were the case then the worst two words pronounced to an eight-year-old during game night would be, “You’re It!”

“Glue” was not a time-out as though you hurt your knee or needed a bathroom break. “Glue” was the real thing that stopped all the action for you, until that hand or pinky pulled away.

It’s 70 degrees outside on this April Sunday evening and I experienced once again what “Glue” meant or means. My family had a wonderful evening meal together and driving home fourteen feelings entered my mind (or was it eighteen?) I’m sitting on my front porch with my two cats wildly enjoying this unusually warm Wisconsin weather (there is no “Glue” for cats, by the way) and I’m feeling an eight-year-old’s “Glue” moment.

All that stuff is still there but I feel my pinky touching that tree and it lifted everything to where ever lifted things go. I know those feelings are still there but that young “Glue” feeling was recalled.

I don’t recall how we young people learned or knew about the “Glue” rule but it was a premonition for my life tonight.

Those youthful games did continue. How long can an eight-year-old hold on to something or anything? Tonight, as an aging but still eight-years-old, I somehow can’t leave this “Glue” place. It just feels like the right place to be – right in the middle of something that had a rich, enriching past that’s ended and an unknown, unnamed future.

The April trees are still barren but signs of buds are beginning to show and the moon is hazy but still visible.

I’m only giving up “Glue” because I need to go to the bathroom. (I’m not eight anymore.) But I want to remember that there (was) is a time and a place that knows no age or doubtful circumstance. I yelled it out silently for only me to hear and remember, “Glue.”

Books by Fr. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.
Available at Amazon.com:
“Soulful Musings,” reflections on the Catholic Church and American culture
“Living Faith’s Mysteries,” reflection on the Christian seasons of
Advent, Christmas/Lent, Easter
“Spiritual Wonderings and Wanderings,” reflections on the Catholic Church and American culture

We know there’s an ending as soon as it begins. Midway through we see the end coming. After a play’s intermission we know it’s about to happen because the second act is shorter than the first.

But the first act? Ahhh. Stumblingly and gloriously meeting unknown faces – soon to be friends, allies or “just those other people” who work there. Beginnings also contain surprising expectations that expect our immediate attention.

At your first meeting at that new job, it becomes clear to others that you don’t like meetings so that thought is stored away in their minds’ newly-minted-empty folder called, “The New Guy.”

I have a friend who reads the last page of a book’s first. Weird? Then he reads the entire book. OCD? Perhaps, but as he reads the book he’s now connected to its ending so the unfolding was only a mystery to the writer. At home, I’ll rewind and watch the end of a movie several times to make sure I’ve sewn up the plot’s resolutions as well as the leading man did. “But what about that other thing?” I say to myself when he solves it in one sentence. “I thought that thing was an important part of the movie?” I complain to my cat but the leading man gave me the ending; usually wrapping it up in sixty seconds or less.

“Ending.” There’s an ending because there’s a beginning. God’s creation saw to that. It’s not that God knows our endings but what is created now will soon become a “then.”  (Funeral directors will never say, “Thank you for your business” because they know you’ll return.)

“The End” is followed by what scrolls upwards as you try to read who else was in that movie you’ve just enjoyed. “The End” means the restaurant bill was paid and now it is, “Your place or mine?” “The End” is eighth-grade graduation when how many more years (and how many loans) burden in your future.

“‘The end’ will never come,” says a ninety-year-old with no living or final will. “She looks good to us,” we say to ourselves, “Hell, she looks eighty?” (As though eighty-years-old is young?!) Inside out thoughts, we wonder if she thinks she’ll be the first person to live on Mars.

“It can’t happen to me,” I tell myself because I’m valuable to the company and its philosophical philosophy. “Other folks, maybe, but not me,” when waking up in the morning knowing that my today might be my “ending” day.

“The Party’s Over,” “The fat lady’s sings,” “It’s the bottom of the ninth,” “The clock struck twelve,” “Thank you for coming,” “You’ve been a great audience,” “It became a pumpkin again.”

“Just a minute or two longer?” you say to whoever is above you but he only shows you silence. (I think they teach a class in that.)

It’s the “end,” with only its “befores” in front of you with little thought of its “afters” which then make you an “after.” The “befores” are cherished for a long, long time and the “afters” are now those longer days with no divisions of time.

Death has no ending in our Christian faith. This life was meant as a prelude to something greater and grandeur. Yet what can be more grandeur than still a loving family to hug off to sleep, a fireplace to ponder nothing and everything, a surprised sympathy call from a friend after hearing about your “ending,” or family and friends celebrating Ethel’s 89th year life ending, that empty, stupid chair that your husband loved, that song at your wedding, that moment on vacation when you met someone and laughed the night away but who remains nameless.

Does it all end or does that ending continue to live and breath in a life that’s still breathing. “Even in death, the deceased continue to live,” we all faithfully believe and want to feel.

“The End.”

Those two words are the movie’s way of concluding itself to get people out of the theater to clean up your lost popcorn. The movies that, both in film and real life, I watch again and again are the experiences and encounters of my life that I can relive again and again. And believe me, I do.

“The End.”

Books by Fr. Joe Jagodensky, SDS.
Available at Amazon.com:
“Soulful Musings”
“Living Faith’s Mysteries”
“Spiritual Wonderings and Wanderings”