My Soaring Heart

There are so many things that I haven’t written about. Most things really. I’ve not even begun to scratch the surface. These days I’ve been feeling that more and more of the artifice surrounding me has been falling off, peeling away. I feel like I’ve always been fairly self-aware but lately I feel like I am truly beginning to find myself. I guess it took me a good while to realize I was lost! For example on Friday nights this Autumn I would find myself on Dunns Road in Mercer County driving home from work and listening on the radio to the broadcast of Woodrow Wilson High School’s football games. That is the high school that both of my older sisters went to in Beckley, WV. It’s the school I would have attended had my family remained in WV. It’s the school where my childhood friends had their high school experiences and education. The same man calls the games on the radio that called them when I was a little boy. The Flying Eagles are still playing their home games at Van Meter Stadium in the neighborhood where I grew up. I remember attending every game with my parents because my oldest sister was a cheerleader. I remember my parents’ friends coming over on Friday nights and leaving their car at our house and all of us walking up to the game. I remember falling leaves and laughing. I remember the swarms of bats that would swoop around the enormous stadium lights. I remember playing under the bleachers. I remember shivering in the cold. I remember the halftime shows and walking to the concession stand and running into friends from school on the cinder track that encircled the playing field.

And I sat there in the seat of my truck churning up the mountainside listening to this man bring all of that back to me. And I mused about what my life might have been like had I remained in WV. And the past, my history, my myth skips by in my mind’s eye like a dream. Memories of being young, of being a teenager in Irmo, of being a young adult in Columbia, of being a married student in Vermont, of being a young chef in NM, the rise, the crash, the burn, the adventures, the sadness and joy, the failures and triumphs…

And I see my father’s smiling face as I drive. I hear his laugh. I remember him taking me down to the woods on one of those autumn game nights in Beckley when he presented me with my first gun, a .410 shotgun and feeling his arms wrap around me as we held the gun, pulled back the hammer and fired buckshot into the open field with twilight mountains looking on. I remember him waking me up early one Saturday morning for the first day of squirrel season and sitting in the passenger seat of his Bronco as he navigated the twists and turns of highway 19 towards the Farm. I remember stopping at Ray’s Bait and Tackle and buying shells. I remember sitting on the mountainside at the Farm and scanning the trees for fluffy tailed squirrels. I remember looking at my dad in his hunting gear, a Marlboro dangling from his lips.

In a moment I am there and then I am here. I am that boy and then I am this man. I am by his side looking up at him and then I am here, alone, just another man with his skull rattling with thoughts, images, emotions, memory, tides of electrical current coursing along my optic nerve.

And as lonesome as I get, as solitary as this life is that I’ve chosen for myself my heart still overflows with love, my wounded heart, my cracked and scarred heart, my empathetic heart, my heart aflame, passionate, wondrous, bewildered, never jaded, never cynical, my soaring heart, my grateful heart, my father’s heart, my son’s heart, my brother’s heart, my heart that rests in my chest but often longs to break free the bones, lift away from the flesh, my flying heart, love in the darkness, light and free, unburdened and rising, rising, rising…