Crooked road to this moment

Say it hereSay it here.

Every so often Brad Zellar posts at Yo Ivanhoe! on The Rake. His thoughts are always a challenging basket of words.

“He knew how to make the heart sing and yodel and howl with joy, could coax from it creaks and croaks and murmurs. He seemed to be able to make it confess its secrets, its hopes and desires, fears and needs. …. In what was left of his own battered heart, however… The heart’s ventriloquist was a solitary and broken man.”

Maybe I enjoy Brad’s work because we both took home the same traffic ticket. I’ve had a few traffic tickets, but I’d thought only I could have garnered such a cruel ticket. The circumstances are identical!

Almost a dream, anyway. The best I can offer: It’s the middle of the night and I’m driving through the completely empty streets of the city and I come to a red light at this intersection. There’s a cop car right there on the opposite side of the intersection, parked along the curb, facing the green light.

I sit there at that red light for what seems like fifteen minutes, and during this time I don’t see another vehicle pass through the intersection. I sit there for a few more minutes until I figure there must be something wrong; the stop light must be broken.

It’s three o’clock in the morning and I have no intention of sitting there until the sun comes up. I finally just run the red light, and the cops immediately pull me over.

Brad says,

I Like My Words In A Crowd, But... what   happens if you giveeach word      a      little      more privacy,             its          own                                     Montana?

You will enjoy this too. It’s my favorite.

In Other Words“, by Brad Zellar

The giving of thanks: lip service is easy, but really feeling it, truly giving it away, expressing it from your heart, that’s more difficult.

Where do you even start?

Any fool with a roof over his head, a car to drive, a job that pays the bills, food in his cupboard and refrigerator, a sense of responsibility, a feeling of belonging, of having a family or a community or a tribe that depends on him and perhaps even loves him; who has a leg to stand on, shoes on his feet, a warm bed, clean underwear, hot water, a toilet that flushes, books to read, music to listen to, a chair to sit on, hands and feet and arms and legs and eyes and ears that still work, a cracked and compassionate heart, a brain that is still capable of manufacturing sense (even if only occasionally) and cooperates, however gracelessly, with his tongue and dispatches words to his fingers; any fool whose fingers can still grip a pen, who still has access to blank sheets or scraps of paper and who continues to feel compelled to say something; anybody, in other words, who has lived a good, long while on the planet and feels things ever stirring in his head and heart, any such person should spend at least half of whatever time he has left in the world saying nothing but thank you.