Notes From A Broken Heart

In silence, I sit and   watch waves with no end        burst forth, as if ululating. I sit and watch and wait          as inexorably they crash  and dash   then break forth   to crash and dash again: never retreating,  always seeking,   frantically searching, seemingly reaching,        groping      t oward          unseen  respite and         unknowable  sources:          Infinity. I sit and watch   and wait. 

  "On the touchy and often misunderstood act of Forgiving" Dear Squabbling Kinfolk,  ( I readily include myself as a blood-engaged grandmother, in ongoing conflict with an adult grandson).  Over decades, I've watched the debilitating effects,  great and small, between and among families corrode, erode, and weaken the DNA (and more) of an ordinary family.  Things that began as mere "specks" when left to ferment have become "beams," or logs that mar our civil interactions.  Honestly, I cannot recall when a minor run-in became a major issue!  Nor can I remember the month, date, or season of the year an initial skirmish reared its head (to mix a metaphor or two) and ended up in a McCoy-Htfield draw. Most incredibly, I wish I could tell you who or when "forgiving" or "forgiveness" entered my personal vocabulary, first as a concept and later as a possibility to be embraced. Surely, a Sunday school teacher introduced me to the notion of

  I marked life's events and circumstances in upper-case letters for years.  Decade after decade. I made no distinction between large or little, unimportant or significant, attention-riveting, or mundane happenstance.  Every little thing deserved equal attention.  Either I did not realize what I was doing or I suffered from a complacent myopia.   It became easier to view EVERYTHING through the lens of imminent or indisputable catastrophe.  Of course, this indecision exhausted me and ultimately excused me from responding to much of anything at all. Really, how could I be expected to carve out the time to address so many events, all of them of major consequence?  Hmm.  In fact, how long could a lightbulb shine without flickering? How long could a question look me in the eye before I blinked?  I lived amid endless questions. How long would inertia masquerade as thoughtful consideration? Certainly not forever, I eventually realized. I'd thought I'd hidden apathy and disengageme

  "You've got to move" Hearing Mother sing what sounded like a mindless ditty as I awakened as a young child meant little to me.  I assumed "you" represented someone she knew.  Perhaps it was one of the multitude of relatives who'd made the great "Route 66" migration from South to North.   In search of elusive freedom, they'd have relocated from Jim Crow laws to more subtle city zoning ordinances and neighborhood covenants.   They migrated from sharecropping to earning a living doing day work, in affluent private homes or as laborers in Chicago's Stockyards. These relatives, however far removed or even friends of friends, would bunk in our apartment which my nuclear family had escaped years before. Or maybe Mother had heard through the grapevine of a husband whose wife finally had suffered enough! His well-rehearsed laments, which were shared in a singsong dirge, described her ultimatum that he had to "Hit the road, Jack, and don't