Harmonizing

One spring day many years ago as a young man I traveled to a faraway land where people say ya’ll to visit my father. He owned a farm but to earn a living he worked in the heating and cooling industry. He had been an employee of a large company in a city some thirty miles from where he lived but since they didn’t pay him in accordance with his experience he decided to start his own business. When I came to visit he was in the process of building a shop to house his new business. I offered my help. He accepted.

I stayed for a number of weeks. The sunshine was warm and gentle and the weather its equal as we made good progress on the building. We used cinder blocks for the walls mixing bags of mortar with water and sand that we dug by hand from a nearby creek bottom and using a gas-powered mixer. We hand poured the cement floors again mixing bags of concrete with water and sand.

He had an old boy helping him who went by the name of Junior. Between the three of us, we did all the work on that building. Because of the summer heat we took frequent breaks from our labors seeking out a sturdy and reliable oak tree for shade. My father and Junior talked about things familiar to them but of which I had no knowledge. So I stayed quiet while I watched Junior roll cigarettes with one hand and take generous slugs of whiskey from a flask he kept in his boot.

My father smoked store-bought cigarettes. When he offered one to Junior he would always decline. Junior said if he got used to smoking store-bought then he would have to pay more than he could afford in order to smoke. I gladly accepted my father’s cigarettes, however.

When Junior offered my father a pull on his flask my father would always turn it down. He said that it was too early to start drinking. If he got used to drinking so early in the day he would never accomplish anything. I gladly accepted Junior’s whiskey, however.

I enjoyed those days. Though I didn’t feel a part of things I felt if given enough time I could harmonize. I liked the laid-back ways of the south, the unhurried sense of time. Though I knew better I found myself wanting to stay.

I had nowhere else to go at the time. I’d been bouncing around the country in an old pickup truck sleeping in the bed while stopping to work every so often when my money ran low. I don’t really know what made me go to visit my father. I suppose I hadn’t seen him for a few years and perhaps I missed him but we had never been what anyone would call close.

As our work progressed toward completion I began to daydream of perhaps staying to help my father with his business. I asked him if he might need an extra hand. But he made it clear that he had all the help he needed in Junior. He told me in no uncertain terms that I did not belong there. So after a couple more days, I left to go back to my wanderings. He offered to pay me for my helping him with his shop. I told him I didn’t do it for money and left it like that. A sickness came over me as I drove away.

I felt insulted by my father’s offer of money but I had no real reason to be affronted. As I mulled this over I realized it wasn’t the offer of recompense that caused my disease—it was rather a distinct sense that he had sought to buy me off after rejecting my presence in his life once again. While I thought our filial bond would prove profitable for the both of us I saw now that he would just as soon abandon our mutual obligations to be shut of me once more.

I felt a bit sorry for myself and my aloneness as I went back to my traveling. During that time I always seemed to be moving on from one town to another. I was always by myself. The road harmonized with my being. The highway went on and on and though I stopped to rest for brief moments the road whispered to me so I would once again set out for unknown destinations.

A few years later I met a girl with a mysterious light that seemed to hover about her as she walked. She lived far away in the cold of the north. She stole my heart. We settled down and started a family, eventually we built our own business. She worked right beside me. When the babies were small we brought them along to watch, as they grew they learned to help.

Time flew.

My father called me out of the blue. I was surprised to hear his voice. We had lost touch over the years we’d been apart. I didn’t realize he had my phone number. When I asked him about it he said my brother had given it to him. My father said he was getting older and he felt that he needed someone to help him with his business. I asked about Junior. He told me how the old boy had gotten the cancer and passed away some time ago. I was genuinely sorry as I liked Junior a great deal.

My father said the business was too much for him. He said he needed me. I thought how much like sweet music those words would have been to my ears in earlier times. Now though, I had become ensnared in the life I had built for myself. I couldn’t leave the business I built.

I wondered silently why he had waited so many years to ask me to join him. I wondered aloud if he had asked my brother to come and help. He said yes. But my brother had turned him down. I felt slighted though I had no reason. Still, knowing that my father had already offered my brother the opportunity he now bestowed upon me made my decision easier.

I explained to him how sorry I was that I couldn’t help. I told him of my family and my own business. He said he understood. He sounded sad as he wondered when we might visit. I said soon but we lived so far from each other I never seemed to find the time.

My father was sick the last five years of his life. Five years is a long time to be sick, long enough that I should have found time to visit him, but I didn’t. Eventually, he had a heart attack while on dialysis. My mother called to say I should come right away as my father didn’t have long to live. When I arrived at the hospital he didn’t know me. His eyes stared at me but I could tell he wasn’t there. I stayed a brief while and then went back home. I knew I could do nothing more.

Not long after I received word my father was dead. It wasn’t unexpected. I felt I had let him down by not going to help him when he called but there was nothing to be done about it. I went to his funeral. My mother was both sad and angry when none of my father’s valued customers came to pay their respects. I looked around the nearly empty chapel wondering how a man could live seventy two years and not have a more proper send-off.

I have never cottoned to the notion of viewing a dead body. To me, it is not a way of remembering the person as they were so much as it is a way of seeing them at their worst, naked and on display for all to see. I’ve told my children if they put me on display like that when I die I will come back to haunt them.

I couldn’t bring myself to go close to where my father lay so still but my children were much braver. They approached the man they never knew with reverence as each gazed at the man in the coffin. They seemed to look from him to me and then back again as if seeking to discover a kind of harmony between us.

My heart ached for my father and his untimely death but more, I knew something precious had been lost. My children had been robbed of a chance to know their grandfather while he lived and not just as a corpse. Knowing the time had long passed to reclaim all our days spent apart didn’t make it easier to accept.

Standing across the room taking sideways glances at my father lying in his coffin I saw myself there. I know there was a moment in my life when I realized that one day I too would die. It must have been a shocking realization, to think that I would not go on forever, to think that I would come to an end. I looked around me and everything I saw was temporal.

I don’t remember that moment although I should think it would be seared into my memory. I guess like everything else the moment blossomed, flourished, and passed away without a trace.

I thought my father’s life would go on forever. I was wrong. We buried him on a little hill so he could sleep in that hard red clay that he loved. When it was over we went home again.

Years passed as is their wont, decades rolled by as quickly as sweet summer days. My young wife grew old, sickened with cancer, and finally died while I held her in my arms. The children left one by one until the house became a ghost of itself. I thought of the springtime of my younger days on the road but I could no longer hear the whispers. I had grown old in but a few minutes. I thought of my father. I wondered if his life had slipped past as quickly as mine.

There was a moment when I realized the mystery would never grow old. It was everlasting. It must have been a startling moment, to think that the mystery would go on even after I passed away, even when the world itself passed away. But I don’t remember the moment at all.

The mystery lasts forever.

But what if I am as wrong about that as I was about my father? Why does the mystery last forever? It is unborn and so it is immortal. These representations we call experience are but shadows of infinity. I call them things. I cannot name what comes before those representations so I call it the mystery.

The mystery is never exhausted. There is no beginning which was not an end. To start from nowhere, to pursue the purposeless path, to dwell in the world without being part of the world, to exercise no thoughtful considerations, these are all ways to unlock the inexhaustible mystery.

Why is the mystery never exhausted? It is unlimited; though we dip into it each moment it is never used up.

Even though I am left behind with the dust of nothing I am ahead of others who press on without me, full of their driving ambitions and bright desires. I am apart from the naming of the world and so I harmonize with the mystery.

By doing nothing I achieve everything.