In a message dated 9/9/06 1:40:45 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Bob Marcacci
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
- Emile M. Cioran
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methinks perchance we are here to play on shakespeare's emply stage.....meingingfully..... david
I W I L L P L A Y I N T H E P A R K
Half a hundred years ago and half a decade more, I learned to be something very special to myself. I learned to express a precious will without undue or overdue willfullness.
My parents saw my older brothers in school and "worried" about what I would do. With their best of intentions--and parents always have best of intentions--showing like some Sunday, Depression Era Grand Finery they decided I needed to be in a thrice weekly half-day kindergarten. I went. I WAS SENT! Or, was I delivered?
I despaired, despaired, despaired. I despaired. I despaired. I despaired. I despaired. I despaired. I despaired, despaired. I despaired and despaired. Whether I was distraught a dozen times over or more will never be known, but we know I was unhappy!
Dante may well have had a sign above the Entry to Hell, saying "Abandon all hope all ye who enter here." Because I could not read I will never know what signs or cosigns the school used nor will I ever know how many hours I endured there. My parents died before I thought of asking this historical item. All I know from that time till this is that I prevailed upon Mom and Dad to "release me." They queried, "What will you do?"
What would I do if I stayed in the school? What would I do if I got out? "What would I do?"
In those days toward the end of The Great Depression, in my uppermiddle class, Episcopal priestly family, I had to have a highly credible reply. I had one reply which I did not have even to premeditate. I had one reply and to this day I believe that God was on my side and I was on His...
I said "I will play in The Park...."
GOD had blessed the Episcopal Church in Sunnyside, Washington, with a Church, Parish Hall and Rectory on the southeast corner of The Town Park.. In a town of 2,300 souls dispersed among 18 congregations, The Episcopalians occupied what in Monopoly I had already recognized as Park Place. The Park itself was the most valuable piece of property in town, to my way of thinking and thus qualified as Boardwalk....
Grace descended upon me like the Dove from Heaven when John met Jesus. I was freed from my not kind-er, not gardened kindergarten. The rest of my book is the fact and fictive story of my pilgrimage through childhood and adolescence and adulthood into my sixties.
Henry David Thoreau was one of my earliest unacquainted friends... Had I been acquainted then with his great message of intent, I would have told my parents, "I am going to The Park to learn what is the purpose of education so that when I come to die I might not lament that I had never lived and learned free of scholastic servitude."
Had I been so "something or other" to have had such a ready reply, I probably would have been sent to The Sunnyside Town Jail for the night to do penanced piety against pig-tail pulling in Sunday School--not on pigs--or against crimes of chewing gum in Church.
As it was, permission to have an extra year of unencumbered childhood was granted and I have had a richer life pilgrimage thereby for all the other years.
The gully, bridges, bushes, trees and flowers, picnic benches and tables, the swimming pool, gas stoves, sinks, birds, bugs, snowflakes and sun, rain and rainbows, clouds and clowning, hobos, imaginary friends, neighbors, townspeople and Mr. T., the cherished town gardener became my teachers and curriculum.
I suppose I was Nature's and Nurture's best and worst student then. Through the glistening clouds of Memory and up and down the lovely lanes of Meandering, I was not the best nor the worst. I won the freedom to be Me.
Once upon a time, long, long ago and far, far away, long, long ago almost to the far edge of Memory I was a kinder garden drop out, ME!
